Unemployment: speech and silencing: a research with clients of a counseling service

Abstract

The aim of this research was to discuss the relation between unemployment and psychic suffering nowadays. This research has qualitative approach and was based on semi-directive interviews. The interviewed people were clients from a Counseling Service (Psychology Institute, USP). The number of interested people to talk about unemployment and their several social backgrounds were both outstanding surprises. In the analyze process of interview, different expressed claims about of the social impossibility to talk about personal experience of unemployment were dethetabled. From these expressions, two aspects in tension were analyzed: the different meanings of unemployment experience, and the effects of a homogeneous ideology over the employment questions. This research shows three hypotheses to problematizing these aspects and to broadening the exercise of a psychology that leads to understand the specific psychosocial experience at fields of the clinic and of the social sychology of work.