The psychoanalytic clinic in the 21st century: what human is it about?

Abstract

Based on everyday reports, this work reflects on phenomena that present themselves in the contemporaneity with characteristics of explicit and on the scope of the psychoanalytic clinic, both with respect to the complaints and demands that are presented in diverse forms and with unusual dressing, and with respect to strategies that should be established throughout the analytical process. Concerns about these phenomena provoke questions from psychoanalysts, philosophers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, among others, regarding changes in the contemporary world and the commitment to construct a new clinic that responds to the new symptomatic modes from a new ethics. Considering the dialogue between psychoanalysis and several other fields of knowledge, this theoretical essay establishes a relationship between contemporaneity, psychoanalytic clinic and the notion of human, highlighting the two main meanings of the concept of vulnerability, namely social vulnerability and existential vulnerability, the latter directly related to the condition of helplessness, a first and fundamental condition for the constitution of the speaking being.