Abstract

RIBEIRO, Patrícia Alves. Mal-estar na psiquiatria: o papel da mulher na instituição psiquiátrica. Rev. Mal-Estar Subj. [online]. 2003, vol.3, n.2, pp. 395-417. ISSN 1518-6148.

This article is about the revolutionary roll played by women, especially the hysterical ones, in mental institutions, considering that the logics capitalism rules these institutions. The liaison between capitalism and science has serious consequences to psychiatry and to our culture.One of the consequences is the attempt to localize psychological suffering in the body, so that it is of concern to the medical knowledgement. Therefore biological psychiatry will be taken in this article as an exemple of the association of science and capitalism in the field of psychiatry. This association has another consequence: any kind of indisposition is taken as illness and there is a corresponding medicine.We do not get sad anymore, we get depressed. According to Jacques Lacan capitalism denies ("Vewerfung") castration. This corresponds to the fading of differences (especially the sexual difference) and to the effect of massing people we feel in our culture. As a result of denying castration we have the fading of the social bonds. Hysteria, this way of relationship formalized by Lacan as a speech, points to castration and does not exist out of the social bonds. Therefore hysteria questions capitalism and may play a revolutionary roll in modern culture. Hysterical women also threaten science with their body, since their symptoms belong to the erotic body, that is, the body as it is built by the investiment of the libid and not to the biological body. Denying ("Verwerfung") castration capitalism also denies the affairs of love. The importance given to the social bonds, erotism and the affairs of love is what hysterical women and "ordinary"women have in common. Freud gives women the status of Eros in the culture and the condition of a "medicine against massing". For those reasons we ask: don't women, especially the hysterical ones, resist to the attempt of treating human beings as mere organisms, desconsidering the erotism involved in their symptoms, that is, the repressed desire, the unconscious? Isn't that why they cause so much trouble in mental institutions where biological psychiatry is used to treat people and the logic of capitalism rules?

Keywords : women; discontents; psychiatry; capitalism; Eros.

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