“Não sou só uma, sou várias outras áreas da minha vida”: Considerações sobre Neoliberalismo, Medicalização e Formação em Psicologia no Ensino Superior Privado

Abstract

This research sought to understand how a Psychology student from a Private Higher Education Institution in the city of Uberlândia understood and/or experienced the phenomenon of Medicalization in her education, considering the contradictions of the neoliberal project of individual and education. Medicalization is a phenomenon that individualizes historical and social issues, which implies the establishment of ideal standards of how to be and live and, consequently, hides human diversity and multi determination. In the current context, the perspective chosen as ideal is constituted by neoliberal thinking, which conceives existence through a business logic. Thus, medicalization is a tool for maintaining the bourgeois moral order and enters the field of Psychology in the production of explanations and interventions for adjustment and/or exclusion. Therefore, training in Psychology, permeated by this neoliberal logic, can reproduce medicalizing perspectives, which occurs in an exacerbated manner in private higher education institutions. This is a case study that was carried out using an online survey form and a semi-structured interview. The analysis of the information was carried out through the meaning cores, in dialogue with Cultural-Historical Psychology. We were able to understand the contradictions present in a schooling marked by neoliberal logic. Furthermore, the most diverse training fields that were covered by the student's training were revealed, which went beyond the classroom. Finally, we analyze how the concept of medicalization is an important instrument in organizing thought and analyzing reality, but it does not only come into existence when we become aware of it. Thus, even though she did not study medicalization, medicalizing and demedicalizing elements appeared in the student's narratives about graduation and life.