“Estou no Hospício, Deus”: problematizações sobre a loucura, o hospício e a psiquiatria no diário de Maura Lopes Cançado (Brasil, 1959-60)

Abstract

The writer Maura Lopes Cancado circulated in the world of the psychiatric hospitals between the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. During one of hospitalizations (1959-1960), the third time in the National Psychiatric Center, a hospital complex in Rio de Janeiro, the writer wrote a diary that was later published as the book Hospice is God-Diary I. The bond between the live lived by her and the fiction, which the narrator transited in her diary, creating a unique work from the perspective of academic commentators and literary critics. In the history field of madness and psychiatry, this work offers new possibilities for understanding the configuration of psychiatric care, scientific and therapeutic practices and the various subjects that circulated in the world of Brazilians psychiatric hospitals, in the 1950s, operating a displacement in relation to traditional places of enunciation that are known. In this article, I chose to observe the problematizations of Maura about the institutional daily life and the fact of writing a diary, which oscillate between teaching others and the care of the self. Therefore, I did an enunciative analysis of the narrative, that values the things that were said by her as one of the truths about the psychiatric hospital, medical science and its practices, the mad and the madness.