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The article analyzes psychology within the Brazilian Mental Hygiene League, an institution founded in 1923 for the adaptation of individuals and to shape the "universal morals of tomorrow." Among other purposes, the league worked to adapt psychological tests and studies on child development in an attempt to assess mental function and establish standards. As an element that helped broaden the power of psychiatry, psychology was involved in two dimensions of disciplinary power: individual bodies and the social body. In this way, psychology also encountered the possibility that it could be vulgarized, as well as contradictions arising from the position of knowledge and techniques in this area.

This article presents the findings of a research study on the construction of a psy scientific field in Argentina during the inter-war period, with a focus on subnational spaces. After 1920, the mental hygiene movement, in its different disciplinary manifestations, became notable in the public sphere, in university education and - belatedly - in healthcare policies, in an expansion that led to the creation of an autonomous field with its own logic. I argue that the creation of this "psy field" - while it was as yet inexistent - was largely due to the strength of sociability networks that facilitated the management of resources and institutional spaces of power, making it possible for the field to become independent and established.

Based on a combination of clinical and pedagogical experience in occupational therapy, which interlinks artistic practices and therapeutic processes, we carried out a historical study designed to investigate how the fields of mental health and art became interrelated in Brazil between the mid 19th and 20th centuries. The methods used for this research, which is underpinned by the thinking of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, were cartography and archeology. We used archeology to investigate the historical discourses and events, seeking out the forces behind them. Through cartography we sought to map out some lines which, emerging from each of these fields in relation to the other, intersect to form different patterns in the area under study.

The article explores the creation of institutions for managing madness and the 'mad' under the First Republic. By focusing specifically on the state of Espírito Santo, it analyzes how the government designed policies for dealing with the mad and asks whether this particular state's experience can validate hypotheses defended for the nation as a whole. The study also aims to demonstrate the complex relations between madness, society, medicine, and the State. A main discussion point is the process by which medicine was transformed into hegemonic knowledge and practice used to justify and validate government guardianship of the mad.

This article presents a brief history of the Brazilian psychiatry reform from the 1980's and 1990's to April 2001, when the Mental Health Law was finally signed. The author discusses the basic concepts that characterize the present condition of the reform as opposed to those of previous initiatives. He also presents a general view of the preceding events to the present process; the concepts and values that characterize the Brazilian reform; the first experiments in São Paulo; the legislative initiative with an analysis of the new law; the different public policies in relation to mental health during the period analyzed with a copy of the Ministry of Health Ordinances 224/92 and 106/2000; the present condition of the de-institutionalization process in the country and the restructuring of the assistance system in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro.

Created in the early 1920s, at a moment when the country's psychiatric field was embracing the preventive outlook, the Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental included within its members the elite of Brazilian psychiatry, along with a number of physicians and intellectuals. The article discusses the institution's proposals for intervention among children. The league ended up incorporating into its theoretical arsenal the basic themes of mental hygiene and eugenics as part of its general goal of collaborating in Brazil's process of "racial sanitation". With this objective in mind, and viewing the child as a "pre-citizen" who is a "fundamental part within the man of the future", league members included the children's issue in their projects and saw an imperative need for mental health care from early ages on.

This investigation of discourse production in Brazil's field of hygienic psychiatry between the years of 1925 and 1934 explores the relations between psychism and human labor, endeavoring to more precisely define the field's boundaries. We have chosen to designate the knowledge and practices which result from the intersection of these two areas as Labor and mental hygiene. My analytical procedure associated elements of Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" and "genealogy of power" (Foucault, 1995; 1990; 1987), while the Brazilian Mental Hygiene Archives served as the resarch source. The latter documents subsidized analysis of the Brazilian Mental Hygiene League's discourses on relations between labor and mental hygiene. Each one of the texts was analyzed with regard to the dimensions of object, concept, enunciation and theory. The study also explores how the authors and agents of this discourse viewed the social reproduction of the industrial labor force and the status quo.