Entre as perdas e a angústia: o real da clínica oncológica com crianças e adolescentes

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of questions arising from the analytical practice with children and adolescents undergoing cancer treatment. Faced with the monitoring of each case, it was possible to perceive a relationship that eventually manifests itself: the relationship between cancer, the losses in the body caused by the illness and its treatment, and the possibility of the appearance of angst. Successive losses place subjects in the face of the impossible, of what cannot be described, however, in addition to all the devastation, children and adolescents manage to create ways to deal with losses, to reinvent themselves. Given this, in order to understand what is at stake in body losses and what enabled children and adolescents to create such exits, this research started from the theoretical deepening of the relationship between body, loss and angst, through the works of Freud, from the teaching of Lacan and his commentators. Then, a theoretical path was initiated that started in the constitution of the self and the body, in order to demonstrate that a loss in the body is also a loss of psychic anchoring, reaching then what is present in the face of the loss that shakes the image corporal: the object a. The loss was theoretically articulated from the object a with the possibility of angst manifestation, and, based on the analysis of four fragments of cases followed by the researcher, it was possible to relate them to mourning, which emerged as a fundamental process in the oncology clinic. It was the mourning work that made it possible for children and adolescents to go through the potentially distressing losses and to continue on a desiring path. In the trajectory of the research, when we look at what cancer opens up to real, we enter into the real of the clinic and its effects on the analyst, and, in view of that, in something that allowed the bet on the subjects and the support of a work in the face of the real that imposes itself: the analyst's desire.