A naturalização dos fenômenos sobrenaturais e a construção do cérebro possuído : um estudo da medicalizaão do transe e da possessão no século XIX

Abstract

This study discusses the way supernatural phenomena were enfolded by science in nineteenth century. The theory of magnetism, created by Mesmer, and its different interpretations by generations of disciples; the theory of hypnosis with hysteria codification, opening the academic censure; and the dissociation theory, created at the end of the nineteenth century, had demonstrated different efforts of finding physicals explanations, which served, in most cases, to establish distances between folk knowledge and elites of professional knowledge. The construction of the possessed brain, in nineteenth century, based on the hysteria nosology of Salpêtrière School, reflected an important social transformation, at that time, in a laicization process of public assistance, and an affirmation of psychiatry as a nascent discipline. Nowadays, the codification of complex mental states as trance, spiritual possession, which inhabit superstitious and popular imagination, receive a nosologic entity status from official diagnostic classification in psychiatry. Brain is mostly the reference used in the hope of supernatural naturalization.