O mal que se fez carne e habitou entre nós: psicopatia como ferramenta de criminalização nas decisões do Superior Tribunal de Justiça

Abstract

This monography’s object of analysis are the decisions of the Superior Court of Justice of Brazil (SCJ) that talk about psychopathy, in the criminal sphere. Such decisions are filled with understandings about psychopathy linked to the criminalization of socially vulnerable people, under the opression of the neoliberal capitalist mode of production, in which a pathologization of life is configured through the biopolitical and necropolitical control of the ones considered psychopats, or who are labeled as having traits of psychopathies, this process takes place because they are also identified with the biodeterminist concept of the positivist criminology of the nineteenth century of the born/naturalized criminal. The analysis undertaken here was devoted to realizing what is the psychological knowledge about psychopathy, what type of person is created in this process of categorization and how the practical discourses of magistrates in decisions, in the process of identification of criminalized people with psychopathies: absorb, modify, recreate these processes of categorisation of psychopatia with the criminalization and imprisonment of socially vulnerable people. The methodology developed here is from a bibliographic, deductive, qualitative, exploratory and documentary research type, with the analysis of the discourse of 14 (fourteen) SCJ decisions involving psychopathy, four of them court decisions (1999 – 2022) and ten of them monocratic (2018 – 2022) from all regions of Brazil. The theoretical framework of the analysis is situated, interdisciplinarily, in the field of thought of the marxist-based critical theory/poststructuralist/anticolonial basis, having in Foucault, the main reference for discussion of court decisions with his perception of what is discourse, besides him, also Fanon and Mbembe. We also rely on the epistemological headquarters of thinkers of critical criminology, law, social psychology, cultural historical psychology and psychoanalysis to inform this work. The conclusion is that psychopathy is a concept that has a determining role in the discourse of the court decisions of the SCJ in the criminal field, presenting itself not as mere diagnosis, but as a constitutive part of the violence employed against the people who are subject to the brazilian punitive system