Interview with Maria Helena Souza Patto given to Lygia de Sousa Viégas: The role of psychology professionals in dealing with school complaints

Abstract

In 1997, when I was still a student at the Institute of Psychology of the University of São Paulo, facing the requirement to perform the traditional psycho diagnosis of a child referred by the school to fulfill a mandatory internship in the area of Clinical Psychology, I undertook efforts to avoid fulfilling the task in that format, sharing the criticism that had been developing at IPUSP. To feed the debate, I proposed a work about the performance of psychology professionals facing school complaints, for which reference psychologists were interviewed. One of them was Maria Helena Patto, a retired professor from IPUSP, considered a watershed to school and educational psychology field in Brazil. More than 20 years after, its content is still current, especially considering the national context of the approval of Law about psychology and social assistance services in the basic public education network. In our interview, without romanticism or naivety, we approached the concept of school complaints, ways in which psychology can act in the face of such complaints, the theoretical basis on which they are founded, and the medicalizing risks that run through them. As part of the activities of a post-doctoral internship that aims to analyze the work of Maria Helena Souza Patto, throughout 2021, we met systematically to talk about her trajectory and intellectual production, when we resumed the old interview. Although much has been produced in the area since then, her reflections, woven in the middle of the turn of the millennium, deserve our attention.