THE DUALITY OF ATTENTION: A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY ANALYSIS OF CARE AND CONTROL IN THE MEDICALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD

Abstract

In recent decades, attention has ceased to be conceived merely as an isolated neuropsychological function to occupy a strategic position in discourses on productivity, performance, and self-management. In educational and clinical settings, this transformation has been accompanied by a significant expansion of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses and an increase in the consumption of psychostimulants such as methylphenidate. From the perspective of Critical Social Psychology and the theoretical framework of inventive cognition by Virgínia Kastrup and Luciana Caliman, this article analyzes how the duality of attention, understood as the tension between benevolent care and normative control, permeates the processes of diagnosis and medicalization in childhood. This is a qualitative study of a theoretical-conceptual nature, grounded in bibliographic and documentary research. The discussion indicates that institutional preference for cognitivist (or task-oriented) attention tends to restrict inventive attention and to make practices justified as care assume functions of normalization and control. Diagnosis and medication operate as a pharmakon, offering immediate functional relief to school demands, but risking the production of bioidentities that reduce psychological suffering to neurochemical dysfunctions. The study concludes with the need to shift the focus from the individual brain toward attentional ecosystems, restoring the child as a subject of knowledge and promoting forms of reception that do not require biological standardization for social inclusion.