In an autobiography titled My formative years, first published in 1900, Joaquim Nabuco exposes in numerous passages an “instability” between Brazil and Europe, which also accounts for the opposition between the particular and the universal, as well as that between feeling and thought. This article aims to analyse various developments of the dilemma, aiming to better understand, on the one hand, different forms of what Nabuco describes in the book and, on the other hand, with the aid of fonts apart from the book, observe how the aforementioned dilemma unfolds in certain moments over the course of the author’s life. In the final section, the reader shall find an interpretation of the theme as a particular case of a broader problem concerning the nexus between subjectivity and mental constructs.