Embriaguez e males da alma: Entre a mania e a melancolia

Abstract

This article examines the relationships established in the field of medicine of the soul between drunkenness and mental illness. The article shows how the ambivalent attitude toward wine, evident since antiquity and based on psychophysiological dynamics and treatments that appeal to the power of reason and will over the appetites, was replaced during the eighteenth century by the pathologic notion of alcohol abuse. © 2009 Associação Universitária de Pesquisa em Psicopatologia Fundamental/University Association for Research in Fundamental Psychopathology.