ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century, Dr. Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Cavalcanti, a medical doctor, proposed a novel theory to explain mental illness. Originally from Fortaleza, he had moved to the then national capital Rio de Janeiro to study. After earning his degree, he remained there to practice and later entered politics. Bezerra, who had treated mental patients in Rio jails, read Kardec’s writings soon after they were translated into Portuguese and became a convert to his thinking (see Acquarone 1982; Soares 1962). As a leading local advocate of the new doctrine, he adopted Kardec’s belief that mental illness, in the absence of lesions on the brain, was caused by spirits. While some spirits intended to harm their victims, most were simple, decent beings who, on disincarnating, “were confused.” With their material bodies no longer available and functional for them—often already placed in the ground—they sought a second body, attempting to continue living in or through it even though it was already occupied by another incarnate being. Kardec had used the term obsession to refer to the behavioral effects of situations in which two spirits temporarily competed for the use of the same body. Conventional medicine, meanwhile, assuming consistency in the behavior of the individual over time, categorized the situation as mental illness. To treat it, Bezerra proposed that the offending spirit be “rehabilitated,” by which he meant explaining to it that it must go off to the spirit world and prepare for its next incarnation, enabling the “owner” of the body temporarily inhabited by two spirits to return to the status quo ante, or what is medically defined as normalcy. Bezerra called the procedure for removing the obsessing spirit a disobsession (see also Franco 1979).
