THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS AND PERSPECTIVES ON THE NORMAL AND THE PATHOLOGICAL

• Grant number: 22/08133-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• End date: January 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health
• Principal Investigator: Helton Saragor de Souza
• Grantee: Beatriz Ayko Vieira Nakamura
• Host Institution: Instituto de Saúde e Sociedade (ISS). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Baixada Santista. Santos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The subsequent text analyzes how the conception of Georges Canguilhem, portrayed inhis work "The Normal and the Pathological" and later developed and commented on by othersauthors, is inserted in the constitution of health and life sciences, later, in the discussionof collective health, as well as in the ideas of traditional psychiatry and influences thecritique carried out by the Psychiatric Reform, in addition to relating the contents to the conceptions ofhealth. For this, it is necessary to understand the Positivist logic and its application in Health,as well as the criticism made by the author of it, so that we can understand inclearer way the construction of Canguilhem's thought about the normal and the pathologicaland the authors-commentators later.Having understood, from the criticism made, the Positivist view on Health asbiologizing and therefore limited, one can proceed to the next point of view, the inauguratedby Canguilhem. This is presented as a logic that analyzes the health and illness ofqualitative way, in opposition to the previous one, which did it in a quantitative way, inaugurating,thus, a critical conception of health. Thus, despite not addressing the issue ofMental Health in his work, Canguilhem founds a way to treat users ofmental health services as the protagonists of their treatment, once the personsick person is the only one who is fully aware of the sensations she is experiencing, and it isprecisely this feeling of illness that requires the presence of the health professional,Not the other way around.