Abstract
Augusto dos Anjos, from Paraíba, Brazil, occupies a singular place in Brazilian literature, defying alignment with any one literary style. His poetry is marked by anguished verse, by existential dimensions and a vocabulary replete with scientific terms. His work is of great interest to neuropsychiatry, not just for the abundance of related terms, but also because it reflects conceptions from neuroscience at the turn of the twentieth century. This study focuses on his literary output from a dual perspective: by identifying how his poetry reflects the organicist tendency in psychiatry at the time, as generally personified in the figure of Emil Kraepelin, and by exploring the ideological content of the work, like the Darwinist perspective and the tension between dualism and materialistic monism.
Keywords
Augusto dos Anjos (1884-1914); neuropsychiatry; Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926)