O desamparo na atualidade e a resposta pelo ato infracional

Abstract

The term Hilflosigkeit appoints to one’s state or condition of helplessness or abandonment. Throughout the construction of Freud´s Metapsychology, it has been certified that Freud did not consider helplessness as a clearly defined concept, although he presented it as a notion, which is related to other fundamental concepts of his theory. In this study, helplessness is approached from the first moment of an infant´s life to the encounter with culture, highlighting the insufficient element inherent to the human being, so one can have subsidy for the discussion about the helplessness of a young individual who commits a criminal offense. The starting point of helplessness appears in Freud’s theory as the immature psychomotor state of a newborn infant and, in the face of that, alterity is inserted in the infant’s life through care offer. As the newborn is rescued from the place of carelessness by the other, this other becomes the first object of love. This encounter will bring consequences to the infant’s life, such as sexuality and its entire vicissitudes. Helplessness keeps close relation with the arrangements of societies of each era, and denounces the tragic position occupied by the individual in the modern world, which is based in coercion and renunciation of one’s drives. Subjective poverty produced nowadays drastically places the individual into an overwhelming state of helplessness. The adolescent in conflict with the law, as he faces the agonies of reaching adolescence and the suffering originated from its familiar context, might denounce helplessness through criminal offense.