A dor e o trauma na metapsicologia de Freud

Abstract

Freud’s metapsychology presents general hypothesis regarding the functioning of the psychic apparatus of individuals. His texts are often neglected in the study of Freud’s work to the detriment of the cultural and clinical ones, contributing to the occurrence of difficulties in comprehending the metapsychological theory. In the text The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) we find the first Freudian thesis about the psychic apparatus and the first elaborations of concepts on experience of satisfaction, experience of pain, inhibition and repetition mechanisms. These undergo a review in the texts that follow the so-called “turn” of the 1920s. The main goal of this work is to analyze the concept of “pain” and “trauma”, and their effects upon psychic development, according to the Freudian metapsychological theory. We intend to retrace Freud’s path regarding such concepts, pointing towards resuming, after 1920, of the experience of pain as “founding” of the psyche and therefore questioning the idea of a theory based exclusively on sexuality and fantasy. We aim to show that there is a repositioning of the concepts of “pain” and “trauma” as structuring of the functioning of the psychic apparatus and of the theory of neurosis. It is an epistemological work that utilized as methodology the epistemology of psychoanalysis which aims to endow a speech that intends to be scientific the status of a text and that it conduct an internal reading of it, examining its own contours and the articulation of the thesis among themselves. Freud’s texts submitted to analysis are The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Ego and Id (1923), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).