Mutações culturais, mutações subjetivas: uma leitura de Charles Melman

Abstract

This study aims to respond to a concern about the expressions used by authors who regard the contemporary psychopathology and subjectivity as new phenomena. It was questioned what differentiates contemporary subjectivity from modern subjectivity and what gives it the status of new. To answer this question, the psychoanalysis in extension was taken as a research strategy with texts. It was engaged a reading-writing of New clinical forms in the beginning of the third millennium, a seminar given by the French psychoanalyst Charles Melman in April 2002. Two editions of the seminar were used: a transcript in Portuguese published in 2003 and a transcript in French published in 2009. The general objective of the reading was to investigate the way in which the cultural mutations proposed by Melman act in the contemporary subjective constitution. The specific objectives were to analyze the arguments that justify the thesis of the existence of a new psychic economy and to problematize the inferences of this discourse in the diagnosis and therapeutics of the present time. The systematic review of the psychiatric tradition from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century allowed us to understand that the epistemology of clinical settings is constructed each time, according to a scientific reference and an economic model. It is agreed that in this way, there are new psychopathologies created to answer market demands. The cultural mutation advocated by Melman still entails a change in the clinical real, expressed through subjective mutations in the Oedipus complex and in the formulas of sexuation. It is believed that this is a complex question and it needs a reflection free from any possibilities of normativity of the Freudian oedipal model.