Therapeutic Discourse and the American Public Philosophy: On American Liberalism's Troubled Relationship with Psychology

I explore the main currents of postwar American liberalism. One, sociological, emerged in response to the danger of mass movements. Articulated primarily by political sociologists and psychologists and ascendant from the mid-fifties till the mid-seventies, it heralded the "end of ideology." It emphasized stability, elitism, positive science and pluralism; it recast normatively sound politics as logrolling and hard bargaining. I argue that these normative features, attractive when considered in isolation, taken together led to a vicious ad hominem style in accounting for views outside the postwar consensus. It used pseudo-scientific literature in labeling populists, Progressives, Taft conservatives, Goldwaterites, the New Left and others "pathological," viz. mentally ill. Hence, "therapeutic discourse." I argue that philosophical liberalism, which reasserts the role of political theory in working out norms and adjudicating disagreement, is a more profitable way of thinking about and defending from critics liberalism. I take the philosopher John Rawls as the tradition's modern representative. This inquiry is important because the themes of sociological liberalism are making a comeback in American public discourse, and with them perhaps the baggage of therapeutic discourse. I present a cautionary tale.

Mobilidades Urbanas - Indovation: A middle-class consumption ethic in India

Em uma conjuntura de expansão urbana, intensificação do consumo, mudança climática e escassez de petróleo, o tema das mobilidades assume inquestionável importância econômica, social e ambiental. O seminário internacional "Mobilidades Urbanas: Alicerces para Pesquisas Transnacionais" volta-se, por um lado, para a fomentação do debate em torno do paradigma das novas mobilidades - envolvendo mobilidade espacial e socioeconômica, entre outras - e de sua aplicabilidade no contexto brasileiro; por outro, para a capacitação de pesquisadores cujas investigações tematizam os processos de mobilidade social e espacial a partir de perspectivas comparativas e transnacionais.

A clínica psicológica e o público LGBT

Tendo como base os estudos recentes sobre as sexualidades e os gêneros e, em especial, os relativos à diversidade sexual, este artigo promove uma discussão ética sobre as vicissitudes da clínica psicológica com a população LGBT (lésbicas, gays, bissexuais, travestis e transexuais). Para tanto, problematizamos a construção sócio-histórica-cultural da homossexualidade e da heterossexualidade, as hierarquias das sexualidades e algumas ações terapêuticas na clínica direcionada ao público não-heterossexual, tendo em vista a Resolução do Conselho Federal de Psicologia nº 1/99 que estabelece normas de atuação para os psicólogos em relação à questão da orientação sexual. Desse modo, matizamos o discurso da clínica usualmente orientada para o trabalho com pessoas heterossexuais, pensando de modo crítico o trabalho desenvolvido com sujeitos que transitam entre a vulnerabilidade e a invisibilidade devido a sua dissidência dos preceitos heteronormativos.

Does discourse matter in the politics of building social pacts on social protection?: international experiences

Includes bibliography

Culture, discourse (self-expression) and social development in the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Culture, discourse (self-expression) and social development in the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Draft project: creole discourse and social development

Presenta el proyecto preliminar sobre la promocion del desarrollo social y el lenguaje criollo en el Caribe. Incluye antecedentes, objetivos, programa de actividades, instituciones regionales participantes, y aspectos institucionales.

Creole discourse and social development

Contiene el informe del proyecto sobre la promoción del desarrollo social y el lenguaje criollo en el Caribe

Reflections on the need for a new discourse on development

This issue of the FAL bulletin reflects on the need to place a new discourse at the centre of the academic, social and political debate, in relation to developing infrastructure services in a sustainable way.

Experiência, infância e cuidado de si: desafios aos atuais saberes e práticas escolares

This paper deals with the problem of experience and its possible languages between school knowledge and practices. Its objective is to find the different possibilities of thinking the experience in the educational praxis, based on the contemporary philosophical categories of event and childhood as well as on the genres of poetic language and testimony. In order to do so, it is reconstructed a genealogy of the transformation of educational praxis into pedagogical art in its relationships with childhood whether as a government goal or as a subject, revealing the domination states that constitute them and pointing out their potential of resistance to the actual one. It is also stated that this event breaks into in the aesthetic dimension of experience and concurs in order to interrupt the order of discourse, making subjects of educational praxis think about it and causing care of oneself to become an ethic attitude put together with an aesthetics of experience. Thus, this research aims at restoring the dignity of experience among school knowledge and practices.

A ideologia dos meios de comunicação social na formação da consciência familiar

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS