A terapia ocupacional na sociedade capitalista e sua inserção profissional nas políticas sociais no Brasil

Abstract

This paper has as object of study the Occupational Therapy profession in its relations with the work category and the social public politics. The research aimed, in general, to analyze the insertion of the occupational therapist in the social division of work, as a salaried professional, and its relation to the capitalist State. To do so, it was necessary to analyze the foundations of the division of work and the process of wage in the professions within the capitalist society; understanding the foundations of the State and its role in managing social conflicts, through the addition of professionals for executing social politics; as well as reflecting over the process of building and developing of Occupational Therapy as a profession in the context of changing in work and social politics. For the developing of the investigation, bibliographic and documental research were made, having as basis the Marxian and Marxist referential in order to reflect about the object in an ontological perspective. In the literature of Occupational Therapy, it was possible to identify different ways of analyzing and conceiving the historical foundations of the profession, being possible to categorize this production in: endogenist and historical-critical. Aiming to strengthen the historical-critical field, we effort to retake the genesis and development of occupational therapy, in a radically critical perspective, using as basis the work as the founding category of the social being. The study allowed to identify that the insertion of Occupational Therapy in the work social division is configured as result of a historical process, dependent of the forms that the State acts over the expression of the social matter and, consequently, of the configuration of the classes fight and the conformation of the State social politics in the context of the monopolist capitalism. It was possible to notice that in the Brazilian context, the Occupational Therapy has been through a reconfiguration of the professional process, with the addition of new professional attributions and areas, as result of the societal Brazilian changes. In this configuration, the occupational therapist is gradually quitting being an exclusively professional of the physical rehabilitation and the mental health area, and inserting in the public politics area, social assistance and also in the social-juridical field, in the prison system and in social-educative measurements for children and teenagers. This way, we found that it is in course the beginning of a larger range of its functions in the reproduction of the social relations, maintaining, however, the emphasis in the acting over the problems concerned to the occupational dimension of the social subjects.