O sentimento de culpa das mães no contexto oncológico infantojuvenil: da angústia à possibilidade de desejo

Abstract

In the hospital context, studies related to the effects of illness on the subject’s life are common. However, despite the vast literature exploring psychological aspects and cancer, the theme of maternal guilt is a very small collection. We understand that the outbreak of childhood cancer brings the mark of Real, which points to the impossible to symbolize, to what escapes from the significant chain. In this way, losses in the body, in life and the threat of death denounce the hole exposed by the illness situation and open the way to anguish, before which the subject is summoned to take a stand. In this sense, it was possible to verify that, for some mothers of pediatric cancer patients, the anguish resulting from the encounter with the limits of the disease can open the way to guilt. With the discovery of the unconscious, psychoanalysis allowed us to situate the theme of guilt beyond the field of morality, in its ethical dimension. As an unconscious feeling, guilt has an obscure character that points to its intrinsic relationship with anguish. In face of two clinical cases, we understand the feeling of maternal guilt as a way out of the hole caused by the Real of the disease, a subjective position that seeks to dribble the emergence of anguish. The focus of this work is that, as with anguish, what can overcome the feeling of guilt is desire. However, given the impossibility of accompanying the mourning process of these mothers, the desire that could operate in these cases was the desire of the analyst.