On May 8th, the Faculty of Medicine at the Federal University of Minas Gerais will host the Symposium “Does this work? The effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the eyes of medical practice.” The meeting is promoted by the IEAT research group, Psychoanalysis and Medicine, coordinated by UFMG professors Antonio Teixeira, from the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences (Fafich), and Henrique Oswaldo da Gama Torres, from the Department of Clinical Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine.

The event will take place in the Noble Room of the Faculty of Medicine at UFMG, from 9 am to 8 pm, on the Health campus, located at Avenida Alfredo Balena, 190, in the Santa Efigênia neighborhood, in Belo Horizonte. The symposium is open to those interested in the topic, upon purchase of tickets through the Sympla platform.

The symposium “Does this work? The effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the eyes of medical practice” proposes a debate on the foundations and criteria of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in dialogue with medicine. Inspired by the perspective of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, the meeting starts from the idea that psychoanalysis arises from the confluence between philosophy and medicine, which mutually challenge each other by transforming knowledge into a pathological question and pathology into a question of knowledge.

Given Freud’s experience of not treating mental suffering at the level of neutral objectivity, psychoanalysis recognizes the patient as a subject, not as an object of investigation. Freud discerns, at the origin of psychic suffering, a truth that manifests itself not as the objective content of a mental disorder, but as a pathology of knowledge. In this context, psychic suffering is understood from a dimension in which truth and desire intertwine, revealing conflicts that cannot be reduced to traditional diagnoses. Unlike conventional medical practices, whose effectiveness is usually measured by the elimination of symptoms, psychoanalysis proposes another way: transforming the symptom into an issue to be worked through by the subject himself. The symposium thus seeks to discuss to what extent this approach can be evaluated, problematizing its effects and its relationship with the parameters of contemporary medicine.

The event is held in partnership with Lab21 (Laboratory of Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century), of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences of UFMG, the Research Center on Anorexia and Bulimia (Niab) of the Hospital das Clínicas of UFMG and the Freud Cidadão Psychic Care Center.