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In 2006, the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society (SPPA) and the Department of Education of Porto Alegre (SMED) established a partnership to provide a space to enhance early childhood (0–6 years old) educators’ understanding of child development from a psychoanalytic point of view. A group of twelve psychoanalysts participate in this partnership.
In this model, educators and psychoanalysts, on equal terms, think together in “Conversation Circles” about daily life in education institutions based on their own experiences and knowledge.
Many of these educators live in areas of high social vulnerability in extremely violent environments on the outskirts of Porto Alegre, and face trauma as a consequence of their daily experiences and conditions. The Conversation Circles (CC) offer them the possibility of speaking about and listening to these experiences.
It was in these group meetings, during the warm emotional interactions between educators and psychoanalysts, that we realized that the didactic transmission of our theories about child development was insufficient and even inadequate.
Conversation Circles are spaces of trust where emotional experiences can be transformed into narratives, offering educators the possibility of developing new strategies for coping with vulnerability by building a network of mutual recognition and care. Through a process of witnessing and embracing these anxieties, the Circles can orient them toward different outcomes. To achieve this, we have chosen an active listening methodology.
Active listening encompasses psychoanalysts’ ability to receive within themselves what they hear. Although, at first, they might not understand its full meaning, they can welcome it without theories that would block the perception of any elements of what is actually happening in the Conversation Circle. It is a kind of listening that features the necessary concavity to accommodate processes in which suffering imprints its marks into the subject’s path. This listenin