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0165/2025 - Urban violence and Psycho-Social Suffering in Brazil: A clinical-political discussion of the concept of collective trauma
Violência urbana e sofrimento psicossocial: uma discussão clínico-política em torno da concepção de trauma coletivo

Author:

• Lilian Miranda - Miranda, L - <miranda78.lilian@gmail.com>
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8238-8111

Co-author(s):

• Michael O’Loughlin - O’Loughlin, M - <michaeloloughlinphd@gmail.com>
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9444-6174


Abstract:

The essay presents a clinical-political approach to collective trauma, based on authors who offer an intersubjective reading of psychoanalysis in dialogue with feminist theorists, responsible for the political interpretation of trauma. This material engages with accounts of experiences from victims of urban violence in Brazil. Collective trauma is seen as a disruptive event, for which there are no representational resources. Among its effects is the corrosion of the ties of the sociability of the social group which experienced the trauma, feelings of impotence, fear, and the loss of the spatial and temporal orientation. Generally based on contexts of exclusion and social oppression, collective trauma has been approached from a medicalizing and reductionist perspective, which disregards its structural roots. In contrast, it is proposed that its chronic nature be recognized, requiring a political discussion, from which it is important to legitimize traumatized people as specialists in the experience they have been through. With their protagonism, confronting trauma should involve both political strategies for creating collective mechanisms, emancipation and the struggle for structural changes, as well as clinical ones - especially group-based- of listening and opportunities for the reconstruction and sharing meanings about what has been lived.

Keywords:

Psychological Trauma; Traumas; Interpersonal Relations; Gun violence.

Content:

Urban violence and Psycho-Social Suffering in Brazil: A clinical-political discussion of the concept of collective trauma


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How to

Cite

Miranda, L, O’Loughlin, M. Urban violence and Psycho-Social Suffering in Brazil: A clinical-political discussion of the concept of collective trauma. Cien Saude Colet [periódico na internet] (2025/Jun). [Citado em 05/12/2025]. Está disponível em: http://cienciaesaudecoletiva.com.br/en/articles/urban-violence-and-psychosocial-suffering-in-brazil-a-clinicalpolitical-discussion-of-the-concept-of-collective-trauma/19641



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