Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

This research consists of an ethno-psychoanalytic approach, which seeks to analyze the system of subjective and cultural meanings, that determinantes the experience of aging in elders of Isla Caballo, Gulf of Nicoya. The approach is proposed from the psychoanalytic theory of social critical, in order to make an inquiry about the forms of interaction, to analyze the construction of corporality in elders, and to identify the meanings attributed to aging as determinants of the subjectivity of the elderly people. In this theoretical methodology, I propose qualitative techniques, framed in ethnographic methodologies as well as psychoanalytic techniques and community social psychology. I especially use ethno-psychoanalytic conversations and participant observation because of all the possibilities that facilitate free association and immersion in culture. As a result, these approaches allow a recognition of the subjective, cultural, political, and economic aspects that influence the experience of aging in a historically vulnerable area, but that has managed to develop its own processes to live this stage in a dignified and active way.