Sigmund Freud in the tropics. The first psychoanalytic dissertation in the Portuguese-speaking world (1914)

BOOK REVIEW

Sigmund Freud in the tropics. The first psychoanalytic dissertation in the Portuguese-speaking world (1914)

Peter Theiss-Abendroth

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

^{Address correspondence to}

Autor: Hannes Stubbe

Germany: Shaker Verlag; 2011. ISBN 978-3-8440-0174-7

An important centenary in this country's intellectual history is about to be commemorated: in 2014, the scholarly discourse on psychoanalysis in Brazil will turn 100 years old. It was in 1914 when Genserico Aragão de Souza Pinto from the state of Ceará received his doctorate by the Faculty of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro for his dissertation Da psiconalise (A sexualidade nas nevroses) and thus inaugurated the field for the reception of psychoanalysis in the decades to come. After a long period when this document was not available, the German Hannes Stubbe, professor for anthropological psychology at the University of Cologne, Germany, and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, traced it in the faculty's archives and published it as a 129-pages reprint. Hannes Stubbe is an outstanding expert on Brazil and has for many years held various professorships in Rio and São Paulo as well as in Mozambique and in China. He released his discovery in Germany and equipped it with a thorough commentary explaining both the Brazilian and the European context to the reader.

Thereby it becomes obvious how much Pinto is indebted to his supervisors, in particular to Antônio Austregésilo Rodrigues Lima who five years later published his own paper Sexualidade e psiconeurosis, but also to the famous Juliano Moreira, denoting him as a psicoanalista in his acknowledgements. Moreira had established a tie to German-speaking psychiatry at the beginning of the century when travelling through Germany for several years. There he had also met Emil Kraepelin whose classification system for mental diseases he publicized upon his return to Brazil. It seems remarkable that even back in 1899, i.e. before his journey, Juliano Moreira had lectured on psychoanalysis at the Faculty of Medicine in Bahia. Pinto too proves well informed and quite familiar with numerous, yet not all of Freud's works existing back then. Apparently he had some basic knowledge of the German tongue which enabled him to at least partially overcome the barrier between Romanic and Germanic languages called the "Latin wall" by Hannes Stubbe. For a number of central psychoanalytic terms Pinto makes first suggestions for their translation into Portuguese. Moreover he adequately classifies elements of Freud's doctrine as relying upon his teachers Charcot and Breuer. He does not mention a single Brazilian paper but is all in all notably familiar with the contemporary German and French discourses albeit apparently having adapted some of Freud's works as reviewed by French colleagues.

Pinto's dissertation comprises nine theoretical chapters, a preface, and an appendix with five exemplary case reports. He focusses on the comprehension of neurosis and perversions within the framework of drive theory as available in those days. The merits of his pioneer work are by no way diminished by the comment that his theoretical conception does not refer to the patient's inner experiences or phantasies, not to speak of oedipal phantasies. The core of psychoanalysis, the dynamic unconscious, was apparently unknown to Pinto and his teachers. So he perceives psychoanalysis essentially as a type of sexual medicine dealing with masturbation and other manifestations of dissatisfactory sexuality. In his case reports he furnishes interesting insights into his clinical work that aims at helping provide to his mostly female patients a more satisfactory sex life.

From a German point of view it is one quality in particular that arouses admiration for Pinto and his instructors: their capacity to merge the psychiatric with the psychoanalytic discourse on an academic level. Such an interdisciplinary dialogue is yet to come in Germany and took a long time to get started in other countries like France, the UK, the USA or Scandinavia. So the presented volume combines various pioneer achievements: of the doctoral candidate Pinto, of his academic environment, and last but not least of the editor and commentator Hannes Stubbe. Hopefully the "Latin wall" will not hamper its reception in Brazil.

Received: 11/5/2012

Accepted: 11/15/2012

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  07 May 2013
• Date of issue
  2013