Psychoanalytic listening to socially excluded young people

Abstract

Individuals excluded from ‘the social contract’ are subject to a certain irruption of the traumatic, understood as subjective disorganization resulting from the emergence of that which is outside sense and outside signification. Such subjects experience the loss of a discourse of belonging and of being afforded a place in society. The lack of narcissistic gratification, along with the exclusion from group ideals and values, foster a fragmentation of social ties and produce disruptive effects in subjectivity. This paper discusses the possibilities afforded by psychoanalytic listening to subjects who have experienced social exclusion as traumatic: those who suffer extreme poverty and social exclusion within neoliberal economic models. Examples are drawn from clinical work with young people who live on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo and who have had the experience of living in the streets. Rather than attuning to this sort of listening, it is not rare for those in some social agencies and in some forms of psychotherapy to mistake apathy, loneliness and muting for structural characteristics of the subject rather than as the effects of exclusion and the reproduction of a form of social violence. This misrecognition precludes the creation of a symbolic elaboration that could provide a symptomatic shape to that which is experienced as traumatic. This paper argues for the possibility of listening to subjects silenced by exclusion.