Evaluation of the Psychic Defenses of the Ego in one Shows Representative of the Jail Population of the State of São Paulo

• Grant number: 09/13775-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2009
• End date: April 30, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Psychiatry
• Principal Investigator: Sérgio Baxter Andreoli
• Grantee: Carolina Mattos Marques
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Crime is an expansion psychosocial phenomenon in Brazil and in the world that shows increasing of the moral breakings and violations levels. However, the recognition of that imprisonment conditions represent factors of risk to physical and psychological heath of the prisoners are renowned in the legislation with the publication of the National Plan of Health in the Penitentiary System. This document, represent the importance of the actions and services for care of the jail populations and emphasizes the necessity of studies with this population, therefore, although the advances in the legislation of the our country, still is devoid of consistent information concerning their real conditions of health. Psychic Defense of ego is defined as a whole of action that the purpose is to reduce any modification susceptible to placed in danger the integrity and the biopsychological constancy of the people (Laplache and Pontalis, 1967). It reflects the dynamic of the interaction by the psychological processes to face the demands of the reality.The existing relations between "I" (self) and the object and between the idea and the affection can be modified by the mechanisms of defense of the ego, aiming at to brighten up the answers of the individual to its impulses (Vaillant, 1994). The Defense Style Questionare (DSQ) was developed by Michael Bond, with the objective to construct an instrument which allowed the empirical study of the psychic defenses of the ego and detect conscious and unconscious manifestations of the person to struggle with the conflicts of the ego (Bond, 1983). The importance of use psychological criterion of evaluation that isn't exclusively restricting the personality traces could be of extreme importance, because they could display factors beyond the binomial personality and crime, but criteria that evaluate the capacity of the citizen to deal with the daily results of the life on this direction to try to trace characteristics that could be associate to the relapse of the crimes.