Compreensões fenomenológico-existenciais acerca da experiência suicídio na infância: "E existe?"

Abstract

Suicide in childhood is an invisible phenomenon crossed by several taboos, among them the myth of happy childhood, which sees this phase of life as marked only by joy, dreams, lightness, and free of pain and suffering. In opposition to this understanding, the present master's thesis aims to understand the experience of childhood suicide, from the narratives of children who have expressed suicidal ideation or attempted suicide. Methodologically, this research is anchored in Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology, using as interpretative possibility the Heideggerian Hermeneutic Circle. Based on this, the interpretative moments of the encounters with the children happened through the narrative writing of the encounter with the child and the affect diary produced by the researcher regarding her understandings about the encounters. The diary marks the path that is the method itself and it is to it that the researcher returns to have as support in the writing of the analytical texts. Thus, after the meetings, the analysis of the material recorded began, which involved the researcher's notes and the productions made by the child. In this way, a phenomenological-hermeneutic way of doing research was adopted. The results present excerpts from four meetings with two participating children, ages 10 and 11, referred to here as Hermione and Wendy. In their speeches, the girls revealed stories that brought loneliness as a mark of a time and narratives crossed by violence and conflicts. Facing the inhospitality of a world with many calls around the expected ways of being and the difficulty in finding familiarity and belonging, existence became a burden and death was presented in the weft of meanings as a way to deal with suffering.