A inscrição do desejo materno e seus efeitos de invocação sobre o bebê em internação neonatal: um estudo de caso.

Abstract

This thesis, as a study theme, focuses on the links between the individual’s investment in the manifestations of the infants in neonatal hospitalization and possible readings through maternal desire. According to Frej, Torres and Vilar de Melo (2011), there is, in the context of hospitalization, a series of situations concerning the baby’s physiological and functional limitations which tend to mobilize in the parents and professionals a relationship permeated by the urgent situation of the organism. Therefore, the signs of suffering presented by the infants, when not interpreted or not recognized as a manifestation to be deciphered by the one who cares for them, can show a complexity of risks that underlie the process of constitution of the subject. Based upon our academic and work experience in psychoanalysis, we raise the following question: how are the manifestations of the infant hospitalized in neonatal ICU invested and interpreted by the mother and the interdisciplinary team and what are their effects on the process of survival and constitution of the subject? Based on the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, we propose, through a case study, to show how the maternal desire can lead the mother to invest and signify the baby's manifestations, especially the sonorous ones, producing invocation effects that generate the overcoming of certain limits imposed by disease towards new psychological places, when the constitution of the subject enters the scene in the sense of how the infans will enroll in this bond with the Other. Here, then, is the place of the invocatory drive in the clinic with the baby, in the promotion of a space of speech, listening, and possibilities of offering new psychological places that not only that of the urgency of the organism. Our general objective was to analyze how the manifestations of baby Vitória were invested and interpreted by the mother from the maternal desire and its implications in the process of survival and supposition of the baby as the subject. The specifics were: to analyze the investment in the vocalizations and other manifestations of the hospitalized baby by the mother and the interdisciplinary team of the neonatal ICU; to analyze the interpretations given to the vocalizations and other manifestations of the baby in the light of the concept of the invocatory drive; to analyze the implications of investment and interpretations given through circulation of maternal desire in the process of survival and supposition of the baby as a subject. This is a psychoanalytic research performed with the parents of a premature baby, and the interdisciplinary team of a neonatal ICU. The child was observed in the year 2008, at the Lauro Wanderley University Hospital in João Pessoa, PB. As for the methodology, we worked with a clinical case that we encountered during my master's degree and it was selected based upon the questions raised by the history of the referred baby, which led us throughout the development of this thesis. The analysis of the data consisted of the psychoanalytic interlocution between the referred clinical situations and the theoretical questions raised by them. We hope that the results of our study will broaden the perspectives for theoreticalpractical discussion in the psychoanalytic clinic with babies at physical and mental risk, emphasizing the subjective and relational aspects involved in this early stage of life.