Uma nosologia para os fenômenos sobrenaturais e a construção do cérebro 'possuído' no século XIX

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, supernatural phenomena such as so called trances and possession by spirits received a scientific classification, which includes the numerous diagnoses of the dominant psychiatry. At the end of the nineteenth century we can observe a process of scientific categorization of phenomena considered to have originated in superstition or popular imagination. In this work we show how trances and spiritual possession were studied by Franz Anton Mesmer and his followers when developing the concept of magnetism; by James Braid during the creation of his theory of hypnosis; and by Jean Martin Charcot, which marked the entry of hysteria into nosological classification. Despite the differences between these schools, we identify the use of the brain and cerebral metaphors as the foundation of theories of the mind.

‘Report of the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena’, by William James (1886)

“…French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) wrote that mediumship showed ‘the coexistence at the same time, in the same individual, of two thoughts, two wills, two different actions, one of which is conscious, the other of which he is unaware and which he attributes to invisible beings’ (Taine, 1878: 16). These ideas, in turn, were attempts to explain mediumship in natural ways, part of a nineteenth-century trend to reduce the unusual, the ‘supernatural’, or the spiritual to conventional processes (Gonçalves and Ortega, 2013), something that was clear in attempts to pathologize mediumship and Spiritualism in general (e.g. Burlet, 1863; Hammond, 1876; see also Alvarado and Zingrone, 2012; Le Maléfan, 1999).…”

Joseph Maxwell on mediumistic personifications

“…Then there were the attempts to reduce what many saw as the spiritual or the supernatural to physiological and medical explanations (Alvarado and Zingrone, 2012; Gonçalves and Ortega, 2013). Ecstasy was seen as a ‘neurosis of the nervous centres, mainly the brain’ (Despine, 1868: 598), and there were also various reductions of apparitions (Hibbert, 1824), and mediumship (Marvin, 1874).…”

Camille Flammarion on the powers of the soul;with an introduction byCarlos S

“… 1. On these topics see: Alvarado and Zingrone, 2012; Goldstein, 1987; Gonçalves and Ortega, 2013; Le Maléfan, 1999. …”