Between the universal and the singular: ethnography of knowledge production and forms of subjectivations in Lacanian institutions of psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article analyzes the controversies within the field of mental health between, on the one hand, physicalistic approaches, which emphasize the brain’s function, and, on the other, psychological approaches, based on the subjective aspects, producing a tension between universal and singular theories and techniques in the production of knowledge and forms of subjectivation between one pole and another. Based on an ethnographic research carried out in Lacanian institutions of psychoanalysis, I describe and analyze not only ruptures, but mainly, continuities in the form of knowledge production and technologies of psi practices. The objective is to problematize how Lacanian psychoanalysts, even claiming to be critical of scientific medicine, reproduce the same universalist and normative structure of forms of subjectivation present in the therapeutic frameworks of mental disorders.