The dream as a royal road for the apprehension of suffering policies in contemporary Brazil to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The new coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is the biggest public health challenge that Brazil faces in decades. In addition to concerns about physical health, the pandemic has caused numerous experiences of mental suffering. Impressed by the subjective impacts of the pandemic in the country, I started thinking about how psychoanalysis could understand the current ways of suffering and how suffering is managed politically in this period. From a previous research experience with dreams collected during the pandemic, I formulated the hypothesis that the specific modes of suffering of this period could be verified in the field of dreams. Therefore, my objective with this project is to investigate the dream as a privileged way to apprehend contemporary suffering policies. To do that, it is intended, at first, to identify the dream as a space in between public and private life. In a second stage, it is projected to circumscribe the context of the emergence of COVID-19 in the country, identifying the main modes of suffering reports in this period. Then, in a third stage, I intended to examine how dreams articulate narratives of suffering, demands for recognition and transformation and circuits of affections. Finally, it is necessary to delimit how the grammar of suffering extracted from the set of dreams configures a policy of suffering, as a strategy for handling the unbenhagen and producing a social bond proper to this historical period. Thus, I want to contribute both to the psychoanalytic clinic, with the apprehension of contemporary modes of suffering, as well as to the psychoanalytic theory about the relationship between the field of dreams and the modes of social management of suffering, in a transversality between clinic and politics.