CANABARRO, Rita de Cássia dos Santos    ALVES, Márcia Barcellos. Uma pílula para (não) viver. []. , 9, 3, pp.839-866. ISSN 1518-6148.

This paper brings a comprehension about what pass by the increasing search for psychotropic drugs, verified nowadays, in western societies. Psychoactive substances are used by humans since the beginning of mankind history. Utilized for different purposes, these substances had an increment in the fifties with the production of psychotropic drugs. Ever since, legalized medicaments, which are capable to modify our senses, earned popularity in occidental societies and it sounds like social medicalization phenomena. Our aim in this paper is to appreciate one of the psychoactive drugs roles over people's lives, in other words, the anesthetic effect on desire. Add to that, we search to report some alterations faced by science and western societies in the lasts centuries that seems to have a relationship with the phenomena. The psychoanalytic literature is reviewed and we analyze sociologists and psychoanalysts works. Albeit recent studies are being made, this subject is recent and deserves new research.

: psychotropic drugs; contemporaneity; psychoanalysis; subject; anesthetize.

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