Abstract
This article aims to understand the impact of the illness experience on child and adolescent cancer survivors and their families during life transitions and to examine the role that the hospital institution can play during these transitions. A study using a psychoanalytic method was conducted in a public, philanthropic hospital that is considered a reference in pediatric oncology. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 adolescents and their mothers. Analysis of the interviews was based on the psychoanalytic framework of Freud and Lacan and resulted in two reading keys: (1) the effects of the reality on the survivors and their mothers and the effects of undifferentiation in the imaginary register and inhibition to maintain their own project in the future; and (2) the effects of alienation on the subjects and their bodies caused by the idealization of the hospital institution and its biomedical knowledge. Analysis of the interviews revealed problems related to the nature of the bond between the interviewees and the hospital institution. Based on this research, the institution under study was interested in establishing a psychoanalytically oriented transitional clinic to help young people upon discharge from the institution, primarily through their social reintegration.
Keywords:
Psychoanalysis; Pediatric Oncology; Transition; Biomedical knowledge.