Grupo Mix: um campo de linguagem para a circulação da heterogeneidade

Abstract

Pinto, F. S. C. N. (2009). Group Mix: a language field for the movement of heterogeneity. Dissertacao de Mestrado, Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo. This dissertation is an exploratory study of a proposal for therapeutic group work. The studied group joins children who face obstacles and vicissitudes in the process of subjective constitution alongside children in different discursive positions. Currently, the group is composed by children who live in a shelter, autistic children, and psychotic children. The group proposes to constitute links or to extend their social bonds through activities that rely on culturally shared codes and through the support of transference, by adults, of the processes experienced by children. The group also offers the possibility that children respond from different places of the usual ones, places that cause estrangement and the possibility of displacement. The group is thus a language field that enables and facilitates the movement of heterogeneity, provides possible combinations, and legitimates diversity. Children who live in shelters are generally considered poor, abandoned and divested, but in our group they frequently occupy a place of holding a right to know. Guided by the symbolic body of the Law, they deal with the vicissitudes of childhood in a neurotic way, and so they do not shut off the relationship with the other: they “know” about the fault. Autistic and psychotic children are invited to occupy places of childhood, to play and to make connections with other children, and they seem to hear what their small counterparts have to say in a different way of how they listen to adults. Our initial hypothesis was that the experience of these changes of allocated and occupied seats might offer them incursions in unprecedented positions and an expansion of the social movements of these children. In order to examine this hypothesis, we followed and recorded movements of the children in the Group Mix for a period of two years. The analysis of the records localized moments in which incursions revealed an expansion of their social movements. The meetings of the group have brought benefits for both the autistic and psychotic children and for the neurotic.