Abstract

MACEDO, Alice Costa  and  BAIRRAO, José Francisco Miguel Henriques. Beyond laughter: social commitment and psychoanalytic listening in a circus school. Rev. SPAGESP [online]. 2010, vol.11, n.2, pp.32-40. ISSN 1677-2970.

Eleven years ago the Circus School 'Só Riso' was founded by a resident of a working class neighborhood in Ribeirão Preto. With a demand on learning difficulties, the circus founder’s granddaughter was treated by a volunteer psychologist. The treatment proved to be a standard for numerous issues related to the circus family. Therefore, assuming that disseminated signifiers reach many people (not only isolated empirical subjects), this paper presents a clinical listening to meanings that affect an entire family through an individual treatment based on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Thus, interpretations and elaborations of the child during his drawings and jokes showed the understanding that, if the paternal figure is degraded, the family becomes symbolically helpless. Without doors (or legs) there are no possible escapes, there is no possibility of transit. On account of it, the subject becomes paralyzed, unable to displace signifiers. That is why the attempt done with the child consisted on the repositioning of subjective roles; on the rehabilitation of symbolical "legs". In other words, it consisted on the relocation of the subject towards his own desire by building the walls and doors that define spaces of being (both inside and outside, public and private, self and other).

Keywords : Circus; Psychoanalysis; Social psychology.

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