Basic Sanitation in Favor of Humans? Health Psychology under the “Ontological Turn”

Abstract

The Health Psychology under “ontological turn” is what we propose here. Based on a case study, more precisely on the affective alliances broken in public sanitation policies in the interior of Bahia, Brazil, we will seek to instigate the imagination of health psychologists towards a new psychology of health. Concepts such as “human development”, “human social progress”, “health for all”, “quality of life” and “human well-being”, which define the basic sanitation public policies, will be reviewed in their anthropocentric aspect. The intention is to outline another guideline for the field of Psychology and Health. As a methodological approach, we conducted exploratory research with 8 (eight) interviewees, 5 (five) managers, and 3 (three) operators, all residents of the area, and inserted into a basic sanitation program, in a municipality in the southwest of Bahia. The interviews took place on March 30, 2023. Therefore, we will start from a criticism centered on the well-being of the citizen to the detriment of the physical/ecological/cosmological environment. Thus, we evaluated ourselves the need for a radical alterity between humans, and non-humans and that reverberates in social ties and natural (psychoaffective) contracts in the inflection of projects, products, and new guidelines based on this new sensitivity/sociability.