Alienação mental e raça : a psicopatologia comparada dos negros e mestiços brasileiros na obra de Raimundo Nina Rodrigues

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2003

RESUMO

This thesis focuses on a specific aspect of the History of Psychiatry in Brazil, encompassing the period of its initial establishment as an autonomous medical discipline. It describes medical theories related to the concepts of race, mestization, degeneration and mental alienation. It is important to stand out that during the the second half of the XIX century the debate on the Brazilian nationality was associated to medical concerns on the supposed harmful consequences of miscegenation for Brazilians future. Although the terms race and mestization were deeply associated to Brazil s image since the Colonial Period, they had reached a new status in the Iate XIX century. One could say that in the last quarter of the 1800 s Brazil was defined by its races. The problem of the black and the mestizo reached a scientific status only after the abolition of slavery, when it was examined from the perspective of the degeneration theory and climaticlracial determinisms. Brazilian thinkers were then forced to face new theories coming from overseas, and obligated to discuss further the future of a mestizo people in a tropical climate. This study explores the work of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906), a professor of legal Medicine at the Bahia Medicine Faculty that defended the existence of idiosincrasies in black and mestizo Brazilians regarding criminal imputability and psycopathology. Nina Rodrigues texts can be divided in four major categories of interest: (i) Tropical Medicine and Public Sanitary Organization; (ii) legal Medicine and Forensic Psychiatry; (iii) studies of Comparative Psycopathology; and (iv) ethnography of African people in Bahia state. The results presented herein emphasizes the studies of Comparative Psycopathology. The analysis was built on Nina Rodrigues expressive scientific production, published in Brazilian and European journals. In order to examine a theoretical counterpart to Nina Rodrigues, regarding his argument of a negative effect of miscegenation on the physical and mental characteristics of Brazilians, the work of another important founder of Brazilian Psychiatry, Juliano Moreira (1873-1933), was also considered. Note that the expression mental alienation is used through the thesis with the same meanings it had to doctor and to common sense in the Brazilian Iate XIX century: a condition of individuais whose aberrant behaviors were socially troublesome, or that were regarded as dangerous for themselves or other, and in which it was possible to recognize some feature dissonant from rationality, the madness, at last. In other hand, the word race is composed of a particular set of meanings: a race is a section of humanity, biologically defined, whose members are identified by their physical aspect, that are supposed to be related to specific moral and intellectual attributes. In this context, hierarchy, progress and race were non-dissociable words. In tracing the intellectual trajectory of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and Juliano Moreira it was made evident that, despite their divergences, both re-worked originally the theories coming from European countries, and both were marked by an epistemological position that valorized knowledge obtained from scientific researches carried out in the Brazilian context.

ASSUNTO(S)

psiquiatria comparada psiquiatria - brasil - historia

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