Efeito placebo: considerações sobre o efeito de cura na perspectiva do enativismo e da psicologia ecológica

Abstract

Given the enactivist philosophical conception of the circular causal relationship established between body, mind and environment, the scope of this work is to articulate the application of this philosophical conception to an empirical problem. To fulfill this purpose, we chose to examine the placebo effect. The central point that we intend to achieve in this articulation is, using enactivist tools, to explain how changes in the dynamics established between agent and environment can trigger a healing process when direct causal interventions in the organism are absent. Inspired by the mystery that surrounds the subject of the placebo effect, the initial proposal of this dissertation is to delineate an explanation for the appropriate context in which an individual's bodily healing responses occur when these result from a treatment commonly taken as supposedly ineffective. To do so, some enactivist and ecological psychology fundamentals will be developed, including: the autopoietic organization of living organisms and the activity of meaning production, adaptivity, perception, affordances and the field of affordances. Once traced what would be the contours of a appropriate context for the occurrence of the placebo effect, the next objective of this dissertation is to return to the theme of adaptivity to examine the conceptions of pathology and cure in the enactivist perspective and, in the end, propose that a conception of health, fruit of a biofunctional approach, it is the evaluative criterion used to examine the occurrence of the placebo effect.