Os ásperos tempos da psicologia: do fechamento de espaços institucionais à luta revolucionária durante a ditadura empresarial-militar

Abstract

The main objective of this dissertation was to understand how a fraction of psychologists and psychology students in Brazil were in clandestine and revolutionary organizations to confront the corporate-military dictatorship between the years of 1964 and 1976. For such, we considered that the process of professional institutionalization in the country had a new impulse with the University Reform imposed by the military generals. Thereat, there was an enlargement of institutional spaces for the development of psychology, concomitantly with the dictatorial resurgence. Saturated with multiple contradictions, this process culminated in the persecution and physical elimination of opponents, which extended into psychological institutions. Based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of historical-dialectical materialism, we rescue the trajectories of part of the subjects who pursued their political positions at the time, based on representative cases. We used different research techniques. Initially, we made a bibliographical review of the theme. Then, we went into primary source analysis. We inventoried databases that had document sets that helped in the historical reconstruction of the subjects in our research. We also conducted interviews with individuals who participated in this process. In the end, we concluded that the process of institutionalizing psychology during the military government had an inseparable connection with the terrain that provided its development. While a fraction of psychology opened itself to collaboration with the regime, conquering institutional positions, another fraction was persecuted and was apart from these spaces. Due to the entrenchment of state terrorism, the debugging and elimination of psychologists and students were one of the structuring characteristics of the country's institutionalization process that formatted psychology during the years considered here.