The clinic that dances: Between Magritte´s cage and the rancho as shelter

Abstract

This text emerges from my own fissures and displacements within clinical practice. Inspired by The Therapist by Magritte— that immobile, caged figure I so often recognized in the corridors of educational and health institutions— I narrate my passage from a psychology that confined my body toward a practice that dances and opens itself to the open air. At the hearth of the rancho and in the postpartum wards, in my private clinical practice and also alongside my students, as a psychologist, apprentice doula, art therapist, and companion in children’s play, I have learned that the clinic does not need to watch over or correct, but to sustain and accompany. The clinic I dance is rooted in Jungian, Winnicottian, feminist, and decolonial threads (Jung, Winnitotte, Lévinas, Rolnik, Lugones, Benjamin), and is kindled in the memory of affections, in the trembling of the body, and in the shared word. I write from experience to affirm that subjectivity is not a rigid structure, but a living weave of movements and resonances, where care becomes both a ethical, political and poetic act, and where the soul finds the rhythm that no manual can contain.