ASYLUM MEMORIES IN THE LITERATURE

MADNESS REPRESENTATIONS AND HISTORY IN LETTERS (THEODORE R/TR), INTIMATE JOURNAL (LIMA BARRETO/LB), NOVEL (ROCHA POMBO, RP) AND POETRY (ÉMILE NELLIGAN/EM)

Abstract

My studies on the representations and sensitivities on the madness of literary texts in the early twentieth century (through the cultural history) back to 1998, when I found in the medical records of the psychiatric hospital São Pedro of Porto Alegre (Brazil), twelve letters written by a mental patient whose had never been sent . As a psychiatrist and historian, I am interested by the idea that "crazy people" has of himself and of his madness. Subsequently, I examined other fictional texts in Brazilian literature (Lima Barreto and Rocha Pombo) and in Quebec (Émile Nelligan) which relate to 'asylum´s writings', where I could observe how writing fiction - which in this context stimulates creativity - is revealed as the source and expression of memory and (re) construction of the identity of individuals in a situation of social exclusion (writers, here). In this article I would like to share, briefly and comparatively, the results of this research, that completes 15 years in its various stages, from the texts of the mentioned writers.