Managing 'suffering itself': pedagogy of autonomy and psychiatric experience

In the context of public psychiatry, therapy is often associated with a strategy to educate the patient to develop self control. This process is supposed to eventually contribute to his/her psychosocial rehabilitation. Therapy is a very effective device of subjectivation, a mechanism that leads the individual to organize his life plan. Therapy is a set of processes that results to the formation of the new individuality. In this article, we present the results of the analysis of a corpus of 94 letters exchanged by two forty-year-old men, who, after diagnosis, suffer from bipolar disorder. The result is an extensive perception of mental illness, where life as a whole is considered ill. The management of this life is a hybrid because it is based on the prevailing and historically conducted boundaries of the psychic, the biological and the social. Adapted from the source document.