CARDOZO, M. A. V. Dualidade Pulsional e Doenças Autoimunes: reflexões de vida e morte [Pulsional Duality and Autoimmune Diseases: reflections of life and death], 184 p. Doctoral Thesis – Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Faculdade de Ciências e Letras, Assis (SP), 2022.
Available on: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/238253
Abstract: Autoimmune diseases are those in which the immune system fails, attacking and destroying healthy cells, tissues or organs in the body itself, with causes unknown to many of the more than one hundred of these diseases already identified. There is no cure for such diseases, only treatments that vary in their effectiveness and collateral damage, depending on the pathology, their severity and who gets sick. In this sense, this work aimed to understand the drive manifestations in autoimmune diseases, through the study of people with systemic lupus erythematosus and psoriasis, encompassing two adult participants, each of them with one of the mentioned diseases and both without genetic history of the disease in the family. This qualitative research aimed to investigate aspects of the human psyche that consider the specificity and subjectivity of the individual, but that provide systematization of knowledge about the generality of mental life. To this end, for the execution of this research, it was used The Thematic Drawing-and-Story Procedure, with four Production Units performed by each participant, separately, aiming to investigate essential aspects of their psychic dynamics, such as their defensive resources and elaborative capacity of the ego. Data analysis and systematization occurred through the psychoanalytic theoretical framework, aiming to relate the drive duality and autoimmune diseases. In the production units, it was found precarious representation and symbolization of the participants, as well as great psychic fragility, indicating important divisions. The verbalizations during the Procedure and in the conducted interviews confirm these data and allow us to verify that there were traumatic events with significant ruptures of primordial bonds in the childhood of these participants, which suggest that they have configured the impossibility of maintaining psychic suffering at mental levels, making the communication of this overwhelming pain through the somatic body necessary. Finally, we understand that, in patients with autoimmune diseases, when there are no genetic predecessors in the family or environmental explanations in its triggering, the drive duality manifested itself in the body, characterizing, at the same time, attempts to deal with pain and the search for the end of suffering, having the somatic body and the body of representations acting together, defensively.