Augusto Cury

In 2026, Augusto Cury joined the Avante party and officially launched his presidential candidacy for that year's elections, with former Federal Deputy for Minas Gerais Júlio Delgado as his running mate.

Biography and career

Augusto Jorge Cury was born in Colina, in the state of São Paulo, on October 2, 1958, the son of farmer and lawyer Salomão Jorge Cury, a former city councilman in Colina, and Ana Regina Brait Cury. In a profile published by Trip magazine in 2010, Cury recounted that he grew up in a family of relatively modest means, with five siblings; his father worked as a lawyer, while his mother was a homemaker. The same profile described academic difficulties he faced during part of his childhood and adolescence.

He enrolled in the medical program at the Faculty of Medicine of São José do Rio Preto. In interviews, he has stated that he faced a period of psychological distress during his undergraduate studies—an experience he later connected to his interest in examining emotions and thought patterns. He graduated in Medicine in 1984 and subsequently practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy. In an interview published by the Regional Council of Medicine of the State of São Paulo in 2018, he stated that he had not regularly engaged in clinical practice for approximately a decade, dedicating himself instead primarily to literary production, lectures, and educational projects.

Over decades of psychiatric practice, Cury developed his Multifocal Intelligence framework, eventually making his literary debut in the late 1990s with Multifocal Intelligence after facing numerous editorial rejections. His commercial success escalated steadily: from 11 million copies in 2010 to 27 million in Brazil alone by 2016, and surpassing 30 million by 2017, when Forbes named him the country's top-selling author of the century, with over 50 books published in more than 70 countries. His works have been issued by Planeta (which incorporated the Academia imprint for his titles in 2006), Sextante, and HarperCollins. When Paulo Coelho publicly challenged him to verify his sales figures, Cury declined, remarking that competing for rankings reflects a society unduly fixated on fame.

Multifocal Intelligence Theory

Cury's Multifocal Intelligence Theory proposes that thought results not only from conscious will, but also from automatic mechanisms of memory and emotion, with the self exercising a normative function to manage these processes—a function which, in his practical books, takes the form of the D.C.D. technique ("Doubt, Criticize, and Determine"). Although his works enjoy vast circulation, the theory lacks established scientific recognition; in 2026, psychiatrists interviewed by Folha de S.Paulo stated they were unaware of any validation for the model and did not employ it in clinical practice. Cury rebutted the criticisms, arguing that his concepts have been applied in educational contexts and that his theory's development outside traditional psychiatric currents does not justify its dismissal, though critics point to the absence of publications in peer-reviewed journals and replicable methodology.