Psicanálise e política: considerações sobre sofrimento psíquico e neoliberalismo

Abstract

This study analyzes the relationship between neoliberalismo — as a rationality that extends beyond the economic sphere and shapes subjectivities — and contemporary manifestations of psychological suffering, with particular emphasis on depression. Drawing on the psychoanalytic frameworks of Freud and Lacan, and engaging critically with authors such as Dardot and Laval (2016) and Safatle et al. (2021), the research examines how neoliberalism redefines modes of existence, operating as a "normative engineering" that impacts libidinal economy, social bonds, and temporal experience. The methodological approach combines an interdisciplinary bibliographic review — exploring foundational works such as “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud, 1969/1930), “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (Lacan, 1998/1945), and “The Seminar, Book X: Anxiety” (Lacan, 2005/1962-1963) — with clinical reflection, focusing on three interconnected dimensions: the analysis of neoliberalism as a manager of suffering; the investigation of psychoanalytic practice in contexts of structural violence; and the historicization of depression as a social symptom. The findings suggest that neoliberalism not only produces new forms of suffering but instrumentalizes them as mechanisms of control. The demand for continuous self-management, coupled with the erosion of symbolic frameworks, generates a temporal split: the subject oscillates between depressive stagnation and an alienating race for productivity —an oscillation anticipated by Lacan in his theory of logical time. Depression thus emerges as a paradigmatic symptom of an era that replaces the listening to desire with the technical management of life. The study concludes that psychoanalysis, by interrogating the political determinations of the unconscious, offers an ethical counterpoint to neoliberal rationality. Its potential lies not in the elimination of the symptom, but in deciphering its enigma—that is, revealing how psychic suffering simultaneously signals resistance to the violence of a system that reduces existence to metrics of performance.