Os conceitos de criança anormal, criança-problema e criança excepcional em produções brasileiras: contribuições da história da psicologia para a educação especial

Abstract

The field of Special Education has established relationships with Psychology, Psychiatry and Medicine, which began in the early days and continue to this day. The focus of action of these areas of knowledge fell on several diagnostic categories that were transformed over time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the category “abnormal child” stands out. Seeking to understand what possible contributions from the field of Psychology to the historical construction of this concept, which is articulated with others such as difficult child to educate, problem child and exceptional child, this research investigated and discussed the use of these terms in Brazil, from the works by important Brazilian authors. Without disregarding the relevance and relationship with other fields, the research is based on the History of Psychology and was carried out from the analysis of primary and secondary sources, with emphasis on Manuals of Introduction to Psychology and Pedagogical Magazines that circulated at the time. , seeking to highlight and discuss the roots of the terms, the different classifications and characteristics of children, the types of diagnoses, the methods for treating and educating, as well as the disuse of concepts. The analysis was carried out from the History of Concepts, whose premise used by Koselleck, considers, on the one hand, the existence of a constant tension between society and its change, on the other hand, the linguistic processing and elaboration situated in a historical time. The results show that the originally European concept of an abnormal child was already circulating in Brazil in the early 1920s and had the medical conception of disability as its basis. In the following decade, the concept of problem child emerged to classify intermediate cases, that is, to classify those children who, despite not having any pathology, were unable to adapt to school, rules or society. In this same period, Helena Antipoff contributed to the concept of exceptional child replacing the concept of abnormal child in official documents and, consequently, in the naming used in other publications. Therefore, this study revealed that in the 1930s, the three concepts (abnormal child, problem child and exceptional child) were used simultaneously