Possíveis contribuições do naturalismo de Terrence Deacon ao campo da saúde mental

Abstract

Mental health, at national and international level, is an area currently crossed by theoretical and practical orientations heterogeneous among themselves, and whose relations of political strength configure, as traditionally occurred, a dichotomy in the field between, on the one hand, the professionals adhering to the organic views and, on the other hand, professionals whose defence is by virtue of psychological and social aspects to intervene in human health. In the first stages of this dissertation, in which we seek to support this view that emphasizes subjectivity, we carried out a theoretical review on the importance of culture for mental health and human life. Then, we also review, with authors in the field and mainly from discussions around cognitivism, that there are alternatives in naturalism that, as an option to the constituting dichotomy in the field of mental health, allow a complex and integrated view of the nature-subjectivity relationship. Inserted in this line of research and based on a bibliographic review of the work of Terrence Deacon - neuroscientist and evolutionary biologist focused on the study of language development -, we investigate the theory of a contemporary naturalist who seeks not to eliminate the importance of subjectivity for the understanding of the human. In this anti-eliminativistic ontology about the self, which talks about the physical conditions for the emergence of phenomena such as life and subjectivity, we think that the author allows us to articulate theoretically different disciplinary orientations, from those anchored in biology and physics to those that think about the importance of psychology and social relations. In fact, we consider it to be an interesting resource not only for an understanding of human life as a process that integrates heterogeneous factors among themselves, but also for an interdisciplinary practice in mental health.