As transformações do estatuto da Ciência: o caso da construção da Ciência psicológica no âmbito do sistema prisional.

Abstract

This work, grounded on the Social Studies of Science and of the Foucaltian archaeogenealogy, aims to delineate the concrete implications of the transformations of the concept of science on the psychological practices oriented towards the prison system, highlighting the ways through which its scientific discourse has dealt with the challenge of producing a knowledge that sometimes legitimizes punitive practices and sometimes resists to the punitive logic. It thus aims to investigate how certain forms of knowledge, of power and of subjectivity emerge and are articulated given the epistemological changes in certain sociotechnical realities, as is the case of Psychology, the networks that follow it, lend support to it and compose its effects on the prison system. Following the constitution of a Brazilian science that is always focused on searching for solutions to problems elected as urgent, the present study is interested on the intersections between scientific disciplines – specifically Psychology – and the punitive logic that supports the way through which social conflicts are supposedly resolved in this country. It also addresses the contemporary proposals formulated in order to try to steer psychological practices from an epistemological tradition based on positivism, evolutionism and etiology. It discusses how these new proposals constitute ways to manage interventions based on a liberal matrix. In order to learn the effects of the transformations in the concept of science in the case of prison psychology, the authors opted to carry out discourse analysis based on scientific papers which address psychological techniques applied to prisons, as well as on the statements by the Federal Council of Psychology, as evidenced on several documents written on the subject over the last few years. They have, thus, mapped how the arguments of a new epistemological orientation in Psychology are mobilized to articulate a proposal to resist within an institutional scenario that is extremely normatized and normalizing, which is the case in the prison system.