Abstract:
In this article, through a qualitative research involving observations and interviews, I analyze two “support groups” in the city of Rio de Janeiro assisting people who had a severe near contact with death, directly or indirectly. From a pragmatic sociological approach, I propose a specific model of reconnecting past and future for people in mourning and aiming to resume their biographical narratives beyond the experience of victimization. Hence, I explore how the support groups seek to “desingularize” personal experiences of near contact with death, promote the exchange of “emotional energies” (through empathy) and resignify “painful souvenirs” in order to show the future as a possible temporality for those assisted. I show how an intimate power of action can be reconstructed in order to effectuate a definition of situation not linked to extreme experiences but aiming to recover the agentic potency over their own lives.
Keywords:
Support groups; Future; Empathy; Memory; Pragmatic sociology