SOUSA, Lara Gonçalves de; SILVA, Eduarda Moura; PERES, Rodrigo Sanches. Collective imaginary about old age: study with professionals from a long-term care institution for the elderly. Acta Scientiarum. Human and Social Sciences, v. 47, e72104, 2025.
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Abstract: The collective imaginary, as psychoanalytically conceived, constitutes the core of the positioning of a social group or a portion of its members, in relation to a given phenomenon. The present study aimed to understand the collective imaginary about old age among professionals from a Long-Term Care Institution for the Elderly (ILPI, in the Portuguese acronym). The number of participants was defined by the saturation criterion. Data collection was carried out in person through individual interviews guided by the Thematic Drawing-and-Story Procedure The corpus was subjected to psychoanalytic interpretation in order to capture fields of meaning. The first field of meaning is organized around the belief, shared by several participants, that aging would imply significant changes in mood; however, despite this, elderly people tend to have a tender attitude. The second field of meaning was identified based on the observation that, for many participants, institutionalized elderly people would be characterized by sadness, specifically because they do not accept the condition in which they find themselves. The demarcation of the third field of meaning is due to the fact that several participants appeared to believe that it would be essential to adopt a particularly understanding attitude towards the elderly, because they supposedly no longer had full control of their mental faculties and were experiencing the imminence of death. Therefore, the results obtained reveal that, in the collective imaginary of the participants, ideo-affective premises are mixed, highlighting both positive and negative aspects of old age. It seems reasonable to propose that the quality of geriatric and gerontological care offered by ILPI professionals demands the establishment of a dynamic balance between these aspects, which, in turn, requires constant reflection, including on their own aging process.