O PONTO DE DESCIDA: O FALSO SELF EM AMOR, DE CLARICE LISPECTOR

Abstract

The aim of this theoretical study is to understand, through the psychoanalytic framework, how the psychic illness is narrated in the short story Amor, present in the book Lacos de familia, published in 1960 by Clarice Lispector. In methodological terms, psychoanalysis was used as an interpretive reference, mainly based on the concept of false self developed by the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. The false self, in the protagonist Ana, reveals itself as a skillful psychic functioning to defend her from exposure to the true self, removing her spontaneous gesture and her own contact with her desires. In Ana, the revelation brought about by the tram’s descent point, in which she is forced to abandon what she had built with a view to her self-preservation, is what triggers in the character the possibility of a new existence, more authentic and more real.