ABSTRACT:
The text starts from a research on the history of the minority device in Brazil, that is, the network of knowledge and powers that articulated institutions, professions, discourses, laws and varied educational practices to manufacture the difference between the child and the minor from of the First Republic (1889-1930). For this text, Arthur Ramos’s work “The problem child” (1939) is mobilized in more detail to show and give to read the ways of constituting knowledge about the “disadjusted” child or in a psychic and social situation that would lead him to commit criminal acts such as theft. Based on the theoretical-methodological tools of the genealogy of power and the archeology of knowledge by Michel Foucault, a series of clinical cases recorded in different files from the archives of the Serviço de Ortofrenia e Higiene Mental (SOHM) in Rio de Janeiro is discussed, and the insidious articulations between Education and Psychoanalysis and their ways of constituting knowledge and exercising powers over children's bodies.
Keywords:
history of education; Arthur Ramos; education and psychoanalysis; problem child; childhood