A recepção da psicanálise no Brasil: o discurso freudiano e a questão da nacionalidade

Abstract

The arrival of the psychoanalytic discourse in Brazil constituted as a process closely related to the national intelligentsia´s interests in their efforts to enhance a national cultural project that was already being conceived since the late nineteenth century. This context has been marked by a discussion about several projects to the nation that intended to modernize Brazil, leading it to the condition of a civilized country. By identifying the two distinct ways of appropriation through which psychoanalysis arrived in Brazil (medicine hygienist and Brazilian modernist art), this study also indicates the impact and the consequences of these two movements on the beginning of psychoanalytical movement in Brazil. The early diffusion of Freudians theory in the country has not occurred in an unbiased way, instead it was marked by psychiatric and hygienist speech, with its reformist and universalizing reading of psychoanalysis, and modernist speech, with its opposed reading of the current moral codes. If, by one hand, the psychiatric medicine appropriated of Freudians ideas to improve their clinical, diagnostic and nosography practices, on the other hand, intellectuals, artists and thinkers of Brazilian culture have perceived in psychoanalysis an unusual possibility of understanding and discussing nationals issues. If this debate pointed to particular readings about Sigmund Freud made by renowned psychiatrists of that period, it also revealed the reverberation that the contact with psychoanalysis caused in Mário de Andrade, Brazilian writer and Freuds reader. The relation between this modernist artist and psychoanalysis theory are treated in the last part of this study that wants to examine the application of the psychoanalysiss concepts in Mários work, mainly through his inventive translation for Freudians repression. By incorporating psychoanalysis to his studies about national identity, Mário used psychoanalysis concepts, conceiving sequestro (kidnapping), a specific translation that assembles, as I argue, the concepts of repression and sublimation. Through this appropriation of the psychoanalysis foreign discourse, Mário was able not only to interpret Brazils culture through psychoanalysis, but to contribute back to psychoanalysis conceptual development. Through these two distinct ways of Freudians ideas, the present discussion wants to contextualize the reception of these ideas, bringing into play the major personalities, the social groups to which they have committed themselves, the reasons that led them to appropriate the psychoanalytical discourse and finally the translations/betrayals that they undertook to situate psychoanalysis in Brazil.