Caio Padovan

Caio Padovan is a clinical psychologist with a PhD in Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis (University of Paris). He is assistant editor of the Latin American Journal of Fundamental Psychopathology, in the section "Epistemology of Psychopathology". He is a lecturer and researcher in Brazil at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and the State University of São Paulo (Unesp).

The project

Title: Historical and conceptual study of the categories of affect, feeling, and emotion in the thought of Sigmund Freud

"This project proposes an exploratory, historical-conceptual study on the categories of affect, feeling, and emotion in the thought of Sigmund Freud. The investigation begins from the observation that, although central to psychoanalytic theory, these categories display terminological ambiguities and lack a rigorous historical understanding of their conceptual genesis. The general aim is to investigate the theoretical status of these categories in Freud’s work, examining their origins in nineteenth-century psychology and psychophysiology and exploring some of their resonances in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The research seeks to map the main nineteenth-century theoretical currents that address affective phenomena, particularly the intellectualist positions and the psychophysiological theories that most directly preceded Freud. It analyses the development of these categories in Freudian texts, especially between 1893 and 1915, with special attention to the first theory of neuroses and to the metapsychological writings. The study also aims to examine, secondarily, the critical reception of these ideas in the thought of Jacques Lacan, who problematised the use of the notion of affects in the post-Freudian tradition, as well as the place occupied by contemporary authors such as Mark Solms, who rehabilitates Freud’s thesis in light of recent research in the field of cognitive and affective neuroscience."

Selective Bibliography

• PADOVAN, C. (2025). Représentation et affect dans la première théorie freudienne des névroses. Curitiba: Filosofia de Combate, 553 p.
• PADOVAN, C. (2024). Carl Müller-Braunschweig’s Contributions to the Philosophical Reception of Psychoanalysis in Germany in the 1920s, Critical hermeneutics, 8, pp. 283-303.
• PADOVAN, C. (2023). La critique de Canguilhem au réductionnisme mécaniste du phénomène réflexe: un retour à la thèse de 1955. In : Francisco Verardi Bocca Vinícius Armiliato (Org.). Georges Canguilhem au Brésil : une épistémologie de la vie. Paris: L'Harmattan, pp. 73-126.
• PADOVAN, C. CABANAT, A. (2023). Le concept psychanalytique d’attention : Le dialogue implicite de Freud avec la psychologie expérimentale du XIXe siècle, Critical Hermeneutics, 7, pp. 172-204.
• PADOVAN, C. (2017). The medical-psychiatric origins of the psychoanalytical concept of narcissism, Ágora, 20, pp. 645-655.