As terapias alternativas no âmbito da psicologia : conflito e dilemas

Abstract

Using as a reading and investigation frame of reference the ideas proposed by Bruno Latour, this research aims primarily at observing the porosity between religion/spirituality and therapeutics that confers argumentative and conflicting and/or dilemma-like underpinnings on the relationship between psychology and alternative therapies. This is the major focus. The “alternative” changes status when submitted to the scrutiny of science. But before that, it has already been widely employed by society, which renders it not so “alternative” anymore. There is a movement I call “opening” and “closing” that attributes to not yet legitimated therapies the quality of being recognized in process, as in the case of psychology itself. This relationship, as many psychologists enforce it by adhering to “other therapies”, has been urging the Federal and several Regional Psychology Councils to define a regulating policy which is either more consistent or more flexible. In order to ponder over this issue, I investigate the psychologist in action, deploying interviews that allow me to pursue the networks that his/her counseling creates, manifest in their reports. The proposal is to arrive at a so-called “ethnography of speech” about psychotherapeutic counseling. Besides, I bring a chapter which deals especially with the process of institutionalization of acupunture in Brazil, and with its insertion in the ‘psy-domain’.