A morte na linha de frente: a experiência de médicos durante a pandemia da Covid-19

Abstract

Death occupied a prominent place during the pandemic of COVID-19, which began in 2020. The increasing numbers of losses caused by the disease summoned each person to approach the possibility of his own finitude. We started from the idea of death itself, from the Freudian discourse, as something impossible to represent, to question whether the pandemic context would be likely to cause effects on the discourse about death, especially for health professionals who experience various losses in their daily lives. Thus, the research aimed to investigate death in the experience of frontline doctors during the pandemic from the Freudian psychoanalytic referential. To this end, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 medical professionals who worked in the front line of a public hospital in Alagoas. The analysis of the interview transcripts was based on Bardin's proposal, with psychoanalysis as the guiding theoretical body for the semantic content analysis. The interviewees pointed out that the pandemic showed a rupture in the ideal of medicine, and the limitations imposed by the absence of knowledge caused frustration. The imminence of death in the experience of the doctors appeared as a failure, as something to be denied, circumvented; and as a source of suffering. Death in medical training has its function, but it is insufficient, because the incessant attempt to get around finitude makes it even more evident that there is something that escapes the subject. The pandemic provoked effects for the doctors in this study by bringing death to the forefront and questioning the place that the encounter with finitude has in their lives.