Limites do cuidado: representações e processos inconscientes sobre a população na porta de entrada de um hospital de emergência

Abstract

This article presents some results from a study aimed at analyzing the limits and possibilities defined by inter-subjective and unconscious processes of solidarity, cooperation, and life care production in health services. A public hospital with an emergency department in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was selected as a case study. The French school of psychosociology, oriented by the psychoanalytical clinical approach, the psychoanalytical theory on inter-subjective and group processes, and work psychodynamics provided the basis for the study's methodological strategies and analysis of the results. The study analyzed health professionals' psychological representations and unconscious processes related to emergency department users and their demands, and their consequences for the health care provided to this clientele. Some particularly important images such as "need" were used as a category that conceals the diversity of demand, in an unconscious process with multiple reductions: from denial of social suffering to denial of the patients' human condition.