The “Years of Lead” and the USP Today: the Transmission of a Trauma

Abstract

Starting from a recent fact in our History, the official cerimony in the Palacio do Planalto for the creation of the Truth Commission – which function is to coordinate the investigations on the political crimes perpetrated during the period of the military dictatorship in our country – a cerimony in which the representative of the families of missing people, the professor Vera Paiva, Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, was impeded to read her speech, the author reflects on the silence of victims of violence and their families, pointing to the disturbances produced by it in the familiar and social memory process. Using concepts from the psychoanalytical field of studies of groups and institutions, particularly the discoveries on the intergenerational transmision of trauma, the author proposes the hypothesis that violent events nowadays in our
university may have as one of their determinants a kind of repetition compulsion (Freud, 1920), the reproduction in act of events that USP lived in the the “years of lead” and could not work through and repair until now.