Stylus (Rio de Janeiro)
ISSN 1676-157X
RODRIGUEZ, Leonardo S.. A response based on evidence. []. , 26, pp.67-72. ISSN 1676-157X.
The ideology of "evidence-based" practice, a derivative of an economically-driven, tendentious application of the discourse of science and technology, has managed to exclude psychoanalysis from publicly-funded mental health programs and services and to undermine the cultural status of psychoanalysis among the general public: this has been happening in a good number of countries for some time now. It would be futile to respond to this severe depreciation of psychoanalysis in the terms dictated by such ideology. It is more fertile to offer our fellow citizens the evidence provided without ulterior motives by our experience. As Freud indicated nearly a century ago in his definition of psychoanalysis, our experience concerns human phenomena and events that no other discipline, scientific or not, is capable of investigating properly, let alone dealing with it with any degree of efficacy. The analytic response has thus become a cultural asset that may well be employed to understand and treat the institutional and social effects of the malaise of our civilization, and not only a method of treatment for the individuals who come for our assistance. Yet it is through the analysis of the intimate suffering of individual speaking beings that the psychoanalytic experience throws light upon the discontents of our societies, as a rule masked by the seductive forms of jouissance that technological advances facilitate.
: Analytic discourse; Clinical efficacy; Evidence-based practice; Freud's creation; Lacanian psychoanalysis.