Entre leis e classificações patológicas: espiritismo nos prontuários psiquiátricos do Hospital de Alienados em Pernambuco.

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyse how spiritist mediumship permeated the psychiatric activity of Penambuco practiced at Hospital de Alienados until the end of 1930s. In order to achieve this purpose, we sought to make a historical report of spiritism and verify how Recife accommodated the asylum, a normative device for madness; to understand the overlap among psychiatry, spiritism and legislation in the post-republic period; to understand how the psychopathological classification process catalogued mediumistic phenomena; and to analyse the psychiatric records from Hospital de Alienados of patients involved with spiritism. In order to do so, Michel Foucault is resorted theoretically on the normalization, and consequently exclusion of those considered abnormal, in this case, the spiritists, in addition to SCOTON (2007), GUARNIERI (2001), GONÇALVES (2010), NASCIMENTO (2014), SOARES (2010), all scholars of Sciences of Religion and GIUMBELLI (1997), CAMPOS, (2001), and SÁ (2001), among others who studied kardecism and “low spiritism”. Hence, the adopted methodology was the qualitative discourse analysis, in which the psychopathological classification of modern psychiatry addressed mediumistic manifestations and framed them in symptomatic processes and clinical diagnosis. Therefore, it was carried out a weighing in the archives of Pernambuco, the readings of works related to the theme, and the photography of these sources. Another addressed point was how Brazilian post-republic legislation dealt with issues related to religion, with the normalization of the mental institution, and determined the profile of madness. The primary source which anchors this study comprised periodicals from Pernambuco, such as A Província and Diário de Pernambuco, as well as psychiatric records of Hospital de Alienados between the years 1920 and 1930. Among the results which were found there is the elaboration of an “informal” anamnesis by psychiatrists from Pernambuco, which asked the patient about their experience in spiritualism, and then placed this religion as neuropathological “symptom”; we also verified that the diagnosis “episodic delirium (Spiritism)” was already used in the asylum sin 1932, diverging from previous studies, which argued that this diagnosis was presented nationally in 1936; in addition to this items, we noticed that spiritist patients were not hospitalized after a nervous breakdown, as it was the case with the others, instead they were calm at the first entry, which leads us to understand that the cause of their conduction to psychiatric treatment was due to “symptoms” resulting from mediumship, such as audio-visual hallucinations or being a medium. In this scenario, religious characteristics related to spiritist mediumship were treated as symptomatic processes, and consequently spiritualism was attributed as a diagnosis, diverging from the international and adopted neuropathological classification at that time. The spiritism from Pernambuco was marginalized, using the mental public health policy as a justification, in which spiritist madness was associated with a type of moral degeneration.