TACHIBANA, M.; AYOUCH, T. C.; BEAUNE, D.; AIELLO-VAISBERG, T. M. J. The collective imaginary of French psychology students regarding the mental patient. Proceedings of the X Apoiar Conference – The Laboratory of Mental Health and Social Clinical Psychology: 20 Years – The Journey and the Future, p. 292–305. São Paulo: Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, 2012.
Abstract: The specialized literature on teaching Psychopathology highlights the complexity of training future professionals, as it requires not only the transmission of theoretical content but also the fostering of the development of clinical sensitivity. Thus, to produce scientific knowledge that supports the training of psychologists, we conducted a psychoanalytic investigation into the collective imaginary of French Psychology students regarding the mental health patient. To this end, a collective interview was held with 17 final-year undergraduate students in a classroom setting. To facilitate emotional communication, we employed a mediating-dialogic tool, the Thematic Drawing-and-Story Procedure [D-E (T)], through which students were invited to individually draw “a person considered mad” and to create a story about the drawn figure. After the encounter, the researchers drafted a transferential narrative about the clinical event, which, when considered alongside the enabled the interpretative production of affective-emotional or unconscious relational meaning fields. From the fields “Isolated”, “Incurable”, “Disturbing” and “Narcissistic” we observed that, in the studied imaginary, the “mad” individual, perceived as incurable, must be institutionalized, either because they feel the need to withdraw or because they provoke anxiety in others. We conclude that the students’ imaginary is anchored in a discriminatory asylum-based logic, necessitating a Psychopathology curriculum that promotes the transformation of these fields to enable the overcoming of this conservative stance.