Entre o testemunhar e o elaborar da ditadura militar brasileira: considerações com base na teoria crítica e psicanálise

Abstract

The objective of this text was to discuss the concepts of memory, elaboration and storytelling/ testimony based on Critical Theory of Society and Psychoanalysis, in order to bring light on some aspects involved in irrational social phenomena in Brazilian contemporaneity, such as the anti-democratic acts that have occurred in recent years in Brazil. We start from some writings of Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno as sources of discussion. A fictional short story was also used in order to demonstrate the potency of storytelling and testimony through a production of oneself in a dialectical relationship with the listeners, in which we tried to demonstrate, as an example, the existence of a sociopolitical dimension in the suffering expressed singularly in the subjects. Based on the discussion of these concepts, we came to the understanding that the demand for the repetition of a military intervention in Brazil is socially present, because the past has never been re-elaborated from the point of view of the oppressed, as well as the storytelling and the testimonies have never occupied a nodal role in the Brazilian historical course. We aimed to problematize the psychosocial effects of the enactment of the amnesty in the creation of the social memory of the dictatorship, because it created barriers – institutional and cultural – to the judgment of the crimes against humanity committed by this regime, causing a silencing that reverberates as a "social symptom", which can be seen in movements of a fascist nature in contemporary Brazil.