Paper short abstract:

I explore relations between immunostimulating therapies to treat autoimmunity and of the 'parts therapy' to treat psychological wounds. My aim is to identify and understand movements (performative, institutional, and psycho-organic) for one's journey of self-regeneration through these therapies.

Paper long abstract:

Autoimmunity and psychological wounds are often characterized as a battle against oneself: autoimmunity as the reduction of one's immune system's capacity to recognize own and strange cells (the 'self' from 'non-self'), while in many ways psychological wounds are seen as implying self-sabotage. The 'disease' is a part of the person itself (its immune system and/or a neurosis) and, hence, it is classified as chronic by established biomedicine and psychology. However, in opposition to conventional approaches, immunostimulant therapies and Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS/parts-therapy) see these parts of the person as the key to tackle their suffering and seek to recommit them to the individual. Given that, I aim to identify and understand movements (e.g. performative, institutional, and psycho-organic) for one's journey of self-regeneration through these therapies.

Comparatively, I discuss how the collaboration between physicians, in Brazil, and psychotherapists, in USA and Germany, and their respective patients to promote immunostimulants and IFS imply changing processes of established immunological and psychological socialities. Likewise, I consider studies that have pointed out causal relations between emotional abuse during childhood, psychological wounds and autoimmunity. Inspired by somatic approaches, health professionals are perceiving these conditions less as predisposed by genetic dysfunctions than as part of intergenerational stories that unfold cyclically. That points to the construction of the person as a process that embodies and reinvents multiple elements of the entwined 'healthy' and 'toxic' environments through and between which one moves and grows (family, education system, neighbourhood, etc.).