Brian Gabriel entre acolhimentos, medidas socioeducativas e desamparo: o que pode a escuta psicanalítica frente às passagens institucionais?

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the narrative produced by an adolescent placed under a closed socio-educational measure, with a history of family abandonment and prior institutional care. Specifically, it seeks to understand the function of psychoanalytic listening within the socio-educational context, considering the construction of testimony as a form of reception and intervention that enables the emergence of new discursive namings and the reconstruction of the adolescent’s subjective history as they move through processes of institutionalization. Methodologically, a clinical case was constructed using the interpretative method of psychoanalysis, valuing the subject’s singularity and the unconscious as the matrix of analysis. The case was developed from psychological sessions, interviews, personal accounts, and institutional documents (Individual Action Plans – PIAs, reports from the Guardianship Council, CREAS, and CAPSi), always privileging the narratives of Brian Gabriel, a fictitious name for a 16-year-old adolescent. This adolescent’s trajectory reveals the tension between protection and accountability, in which systems reinforce institutional silencing and impose labels that exacerbate the challenges of care. The analysis uncovered the fragmentation of institutional discourses that labeled the adolescent as problematic, mad, or criminal—stigmas that censored his voice and outlined his affective helplessness. Escapes and infractional acts emerged as attempts at communication in the face of emotional voids and lack of listening, suggesting a search for social inscription. Sustained psychoanalytic listening throughout the sessions sought to foster the construction of a political-clinical testimony: Brian endeavored to find his own discursive names for his pain and to challenge institutional categorizations. The study encountered interruptions, sabotage, and various resistances that thwarted the continuity of sessions and limited the itinerant clinical apparatus. Finally, this work underscores the imperative need to deepen research and intervention in socio-educational and care contexts. It is urgent to develop and implement more robust and continuous clinical-political frameworks that transcend medicalizing and punitive logics and that effectively guarantee listening and the support of relational bonds for these youths. By insisting on the field/place/condition of the witness, psychoanalysis offers a horizon in which—even in the face of institutional “no”—the subject’s voice can at last resonate.