Psychoanalytic approaches for understanding and managing hospital pain: A qualitative analysis of a Colombian hospital case study

This article intends to understand how the social representations of healthcare professionals, in a hospital context, shape their ways of approaching and reacting to pain. These representations create an organizational culture with unconscious tendencies and countertransferential appraisals. The authors examine the signifiers that name pain by using semi-structured interviews with key participants and a field diary. Biomedical thinking and the organizational culture mindset tend to dominate. To approach pain understanding and management in a hospital setting where tensions are clear, transference and the organization-in-the-mind concept offer a different way of conceiving medical practices from a psychoanalytic perspective.