| dc.description.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. | eng |
