Intervening the Future: Genomics, Psychoanalysis, and the Chronotopes of Healing in Brazil

The Clinic of the Human Genome in Sao Paulo included a team of psychoanalysts into their multidisciplinary network of specialists to treat patients diagnosed with neuromuscular dystrophies. Neuromuscular dystrophies progressively affect the body and thus render visible the temporality inscribed in degenerative conditions. The Clinic offers a possible treatment framed in mobilizing time, and more specifically, ‘the future’ as a site for experience, experimentation and hope: genomic-medical interventions allow patients to ‘gain time’ in the hopes of the development of better (experimental) pharmaceutical products, whereas biomedical technologies of prediction draw a clearer landscape on the patient’s prognosis and life expectancy. That way, genomics becomes a ‘science of the future’ by embodying the technoscientific promises of post-neoliberal Brazil, as much as it mobilizes an endogenous therapeutic repertoire oriented at telling and intervening on the patients’ fate. Meanwhile, psychoanalysts orient treatment to open an imaginable future foreclosed by life expectancy prognoses, patterned forms of bioethical resignation, idiosyncratic imaginaries of compassion, and the imperative of self-care. Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2023-2024, this presentation analyzes the inscription of different forms of futurities through the healing practices deployed at the Clinic. At a place embodying futurity, what is at stake are the different futures that overlap and compete: the fatalistic future of degenerative dystrophies, the necessary futures of the biomedical imperative, or the contingent future of psychoanalysis.

Rogelio Scott-Insua is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Cornell University. He is a medical anthropologist working at the intersections of mental health, science & technology studies, and sociocultural epidemiology. His scholarship focuses on the trans/formations of mental health systems, healthcare reform, scientific controversies, and the geopolitics of science in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil and Peru.