“Minha palavra vale um tiro, eu tenho muita munição”: a troca de cartas como dispositivo clínico com adolescentes privados de liberdade

Abstract

This research is based on the reverberations of the researcher's experience in the encountering of her listening process with the written words of university students extensionists and incarcerated adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. The imposition of social distancing has had a drastic impact on the world. The deprivation of liberty inherently intensifies conditions of vulnerability and exclusion, while also silencing. In light of this scenario, a group of extensionists students from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) proposed to the adolescents at a Socio-Educational Care Center, located in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul state, to exchange letters as a way to continue the activities that were interrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, guided by ethical and methodological benchmarks from psychoanalysis research, this dissertation sought to analyze the letter exchange process and understand it as a clinical device with incarcerated adolescents. We engaged in listeningflânerie and reading-listening to enter the realms of experience and compose the constructions presented in this dissertation. The exchanged correspondences between extensionists and adolescents between May 2020 and May 2022, the minutes of group meetings, and the researcher's experiential diary served as instruments for analyzing the device. In the experience of the letters, it was observed that the letters provided space for the recording of textual fragments, drawings, poems, and songs, through which the adolescents expressed and elaborated on their conflicts and daily feelings regarding both the pandemic and their life trajectories. The reading of the letters by the extensionists sharpened their ears to alternative ways of listening to what was encrypted within them, and moreover, there was a constant summoning of the presence of the extensionists by the adolescents, thus approaching a clinical listening experience. The journey through different spaces demonstrated that the identification of the device occurred retrospectively by the group, which, while seeking ways to archive the letters, also sought ways to narrate and sing the lived experiences. The principle of the letter exchange device emerged as a response from the group to the demands of social distancing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the urgent need to create spaces for the circulation of words for adolescents undergoing socio educational measures of confinement. We understand that the establishment of the device was based on an invitation to speak, the positioning of the desire to listen, the creation of empty spaces, and the establishment of transferential relationships. By delving into the reverberations of the letter exchange device in the correspondence between an extensionist and an adolescent, it can be observed that it subverted the institutional logic of silencing, countering the forgetting and erasure of the adolescents' life trajectories marked by violence, deprivation, and exclusion. Furthermore, the device allowed adolescents to retell their stories and produced shifts from action to words.