A debilidade mental: diagnóstico e tratamento

Abstract

This paper discusses the diagnosis and treatment of handicap in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The handicap had other names throughout history, such as idiocy, bearing the mark of a psychic handicap of congenital and degenerative origin and associated with psychosis in some moments. These names were given from the field of knowledge and action that are embedded in each moment of history, considering the diagnosis and treatment in each. It arises as an area of research and conceptualization in psychiatry in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century becomes a more precise concept in psychiatry with treatment in educational psychology. In psychoanalysis, the handicap falls from the study field of intellectual inhibition. Freud's interest in the manifestations of childhood and the theory of instinct were decisive for the understanding of intellectual inhibition, removing the psychic handicap from the organic statute that therefore will be able to analytical treatment. Melanie Klein, a follower of Freud, will be devoted to the subject of intellectual inhibition, but is Maud Mannoni that will bring important contributions to the field of handicap itself. From her, but with some theoretical modifications, Lacan puts importants guiding points to understand and treat the handicaps. Lacanian formulations and especially the subject that is constituted through language, are decisive for the handicap that can be understood as phenomenon capable of analytic treatment and that can manifest in three structures: neurosis, psychosis and perversion