Pensando com Lucien Sève: a personalidade na periferia do capitalismo

Abstract

Lucien Sève is a French Marxist philosopher who stood out, above all, for his studies on the relationship between personality theory and Marxism. Despite the importance of his work, Sève is still a little-studied author in Brazil. This paper aimed to study his best-known work, Marxism and the Theory of Personality, published in 1969. Our aim was to analyze the relevance of his ideas and categories in our day and the possible contributions that his thinking could have for thinking about the relationship between psychology and Marxism in Brazil. The main results found indicate that, despite the limitations of his work, Sève's theory of personality, by articulating social theory and theory of the individual, provides important contributions for thinking about a Marxist psychology in Brazil that is deeply linked to the tradition of studies of national reality. In this way, it paves the way for the development of studies on the formation of individuals in the conditions of Brazilian reality, that is, in the conditions of the periphery of capitalism. From this perspective, we seek to establish some points of contact between the study of the individual, based on Sève, and the study of types in literary criticism, based on G. Lukács and R. Schwarz. In short, Sève's ideas open the way for a study of society that allows us to understand the individual and, in turn, a study of the individual that allows us to understand certain aspects of our society.