The clinical practice with difficult patients in the collective imaginary of psychology students

Abstract

The conducts that occur in the context of intersubjectivity are arranged from unconscious psychological fields which influence individual and collective practices. Therefore, it becomes important to consider the collective imagination of psychology students as this may interfere about the exercise of their clinical practice. The aim of this study was to investigate the collective imaginary of psychology students about the clinical practice with patients considered difficult in the analytic setting. Based on the psychoanalytic method, this research utilized the Procedure of Drawings-Stories with Theme in group interview, for the purpose of discuss on the vicissitudes of contemporary clinical work with these patients. In the present study, participated eight undergraduates of the eighth semester of a psychology course.The resulting material of the interview constituted by drawings-stories and the narrative was psychoanalytically analyzed, in the light of the Multiple Fields Theory proposed by Herrmann and in dialogue with the winnicottian thought, allowing to apprehend the follows fields of affective-emotional meaning: “Insecurity”, “Perfect Therapist”, “Mutuality”, “Experience”, “Negation of Madness” and “Madness as tal”. In general the imaginary manifestations of psychology students constitute the analytic relationship with the difficult patients by mobilizing feelings of insecurity, distress, anxiety, incapacity and helplessness.