Abstract:
The main purpose of this article is to present testimonial exercise as a powerful method of ethico-political teaching, by reporting of a teaching experience in a psychology undergraduate course in Rio Grande do Sul. We proposed a course called “What remains of dictatorship: clinical-political studies of violence” to study the traumatic effects of violence, the role of testimony as a possibility of transmission and working-through, and the implications of these themes for the work of psychologists in Brazil. We begin our account by describing made the notions of trauma and testimony can be incorporated as teaching tools. We thus locate the origin and importance of these concepts for the fields of psychoanalysis, literature and history; also proposing a way of using them as pedagogical tools. After that, we narrate some episodes that led to the emergence of a “crisis” in the classroom. We discuss this crisis as a sum of factors, highlighting it as an inherent process of the teaching experience and justifying, therefore, that all testimonial education must go through a crisis. Finally, we summarize the main aspects that characterize testimonial teaching, as we understand it, and analyze why it is a powerful tool in the education of psychologists in the current social and political conjuncture.
Keywords:
Testimony; Education; Civil-military Dictatorship; Psychoanalysis