Notas de um bastardo do Ocidente: tensões entre a psicanálise, o problema negro e a literatura

Abstract

With this work, I seek to investigate the possible contributions of the literary works of Lima Barreto (1881-1922) and James Baldwin (1924-1987) to theorization and contemporary psychoanalytic praxis, taking as a basis the interface between psychoanalysis, literature and the critique of culture. My hypothesis is that, in their work, we find the possibility of a dialogue with the problematics of our time, focusing on these writer’s considerations about colonialism and its legacies. Therefore, the research is supported by the current debates about the vicissitudes of the processes of identification and subjective constitution in our context, in view of their intrinsic relationship with the “black problem” [le problème noir], a term used by Frantz Fanon in order to describe the incidence of colonialism in psychic life and, also, in the culture. I approach this theme from a perspective of black men, recognizing the need to think about this portion of our population that arrives at the clinic, whose lived experience reveals the continuum between the already declared centers of focus for this investigation — the social pole and psychic pole. Thus, this work is a qualitative research that follows, as a proposal for the methodological path, the contributions of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics regarding the analysis of fictional and historical narratives (triple Mimesis), as well as what is questionable in its approach to current discussions, having psychoanalysis as its theoretical anchor and its dialogue with the field of literary productions.