The racialized clinic:

reflections of racialized psychologists on clinical practice.

Abstract

This essay aims to problematize clinical practice in psychology based on the experiences of racialized psychologists, challenging the myth of neutrality that has historically underpinned psychological practice in Brazil. Anchored in a critical and situated perspective, the text starts from the understanding that clinical practice is traversed by relations of race, territory, and power, constituting itself as a political and ethical space. Based on the concept of racialized clinical practice, the authors propose a reflection that articulates lived experience, memory, and professional involvement as legitimate modes of knowledge production, especially in the face of the epistemicidal processes that have silenced Black, Indigenous, and marginalized knowledge. The essay engages with authors who problematize the coloniality of knowledge and being, emphasizing that the psychic suffering of racialized subjects cannot be understood in isolation from the historical, structural, and symbolic violence that permeates their existences. Throughout the text, the limits of a clinic founded on universalizing and medicalizing models are discussed, as well as the need to depathologize experiences marked by racism, exclusion, and collective grief. "Escrevivência" (a term coined by the author, roughly translating to "writing from lived experience") is mobilized as a political and methodological gesture that allows for rewriting from racialized clinical practice as a space of implicated listening, collective care, and re-enchantment of life. By refusing a conclusive closure, the article affirms racialized clinical practice as a practice in permanent construction, calling on psychology to broaden its epistemologies, its referential frameworks, and its modes of training, in order to sustain a clinical practice committed to the life, memory, and continuity of historically marginalized peoples.