Entre "esperas": a experiência emocional de mães de crianças autistas

Abstract

In the last two years, people have been faced with drastic changes in their routines, due to social isolation, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the various social groups whose lives were traversed by domestic confinement, in the present research, we aimed to investigate the emotional experience of mothers of autistic children, during the pandemic moment. The research had seven participants, mothers of autistic children who attend an institution specialized in autism in the city of Uberlândia. Through the psychoanalytic method, individual psychological interviews were carried out, in the remote modality, mediated by the presentation of an interactive narrative, with the objective to faciliate the association of the participants on the research topic. From each interview, a transference narrative was written by the interviewer, and the set of transference narratives and the outcomes of the interactive narratives were analyzed according to the Theory of Fileds. Soon, two fields were identified entitled “They expect me to do/be everything” and “Waiting for the new normal”. The first discusses the social pressure on mothers, which ends up accentuating the feeling of helplessness inside and outside their homes. The second concerns the (lack of) hope of these women that something will come between them and their children, in this context of double confinement. We conclude that, even with the relaxation of social isolation measures, the female body remains in relative domestic confinement, demanding the attentive and sensitive regard of the psychological community.