Drawn to the asylum: in search of missing parts(on
the way to a possible conversation)
In his essay “The Mad
as Artists”, Sander Gilman presents the continuum of thought
about art and insanity which has stretched across the twentieth
century (and into the twenty-first), a continuum ranging from the
romantic notion of the madman who by virtue of madness possesses
an exemplary creative vision, to the politically-motivated
extirpation of art and artists whose unconventionality makes them
dangerous to the maintenance of an orderly society. Allen S. Weiss selects several pieces from the exhibition to muse upon “the primal sources” of image and word in the Prinzhorn drawings, and offers connections to specific contemporary examples in both art and popular culture. Finally, Bracha
Lichtenberg Ettinger borrows Lacan’s way of thinking to contrast
the Freudian concept of “the symptom”, as the expression of
defect or damage which is magically its own disavowal, with
Lacan’s notion of “the sinthome”, an entity which in its
embodiment of damage looks at the damage and in looking transcends
it. [An interesting example of a “sinthome” can be found, I
think, in the popular film from a few years ago, The
Full Monty, in which a group of men stripped of their
dignity by chronic joblessness struggle to regain some wholeness
by becoming male
strippers.] In Beyond Reason: Art
and Psychosis, the catalog that accompanies the Prinzhorn
Collection as a whole, there is an essay that provides a detailed
history of the origin and development of the collection. Then, Dr.
Inge Jadi, the psychiatrist who has been the Chief Curator of the
Collection for nearly 20 years faces squarely the problem created
by the aesthetic dimension of the works in the collection.
“There is talk,” she writes, “…of
the refractory element in art; this refers to the fact that
although it is possible to think, talk, and argue about art, art
itself refuses discursivity and social emancipation.
It is made exclusively for its own sake, an existential
gift, bearing knowledge. But
psychiatric institutions and their instrumental activities are
directed at communication. And so works of art created by patients
out of inner necessity, and with no ulterior purpose, are treated
in psychiatric thinking as if they were communication, and
significance is attributed to them.
This fails to take account of the fact that every artistic
activity on a patient’s part is an act that creates meaning as a
way of countering the existence-threatening erosion of meaning by
the psychosis. A work of art is a building-block of its
creator’s specific world, the presentation of a selfhood.
To grasp such entities requires a cognitive ability that
can be developed only through intercourse with art.” Dr. Jadi says further
that “Psychosis itself is indescribable, indivisible, and not
open to analytical understanding”, a statement with which not
all psychoanalysts would agree.
“But,” she continues, “artistic expressions by those
affected, other than mere expressions of defence mechanisms, arise
from the periphery of core psychotic events, and make it possible
for us to come closer to them (p. 31).” This is a statement with
which many of us would agree. And in an interesting
way, Dr. Jadi draws some distinctions about art-as-therapy: “In
the therapeutic context, this is the role of art-centred therapy,
in which art and music therapists draw on their own artistic
experience and are thus in a position to accompany the patient’s
productions actively within the medium, showing sympathy and
professional knowledge of the appropriate formal laws.
No communication takes place here: art does not convey
significance in a mediatory sense. It leads to encounters that
make patients feel understood.
This affords a shelter that enables them to establish a new
order for their world-view, which has collapsed amid the
uncertainties of the psychosis, and thereby stabilize themselves
(p. 31).” I
want to borrow “…and
aware of the terrible suffering
that always accompanies mental illness, we can still
appreciate the works of Prinzhorn’s masters as a new view of
reality, born out of extremes of emotion and experience.
It is impossible to approach these works of art via the
accepted canon of art history, to situate them within artistic
movements or unpick influences and intellectual trends.
The works are presented together, yet the artists could not
have been further from being a cohesive group.
They simply do not fit, yet their influence pervades the
art history of the century. As
is perhaps fitting for an illness which is still so poorly
understood, the works in Prinzhorn’s collection provide more
questions than answers (p. 46).” (stop
cycling through slides --- leave last one on) Now we are done with
hearing why the professionals were there, and what they were there
to find. As I began, I told you that we would look at how the
professionals framed that exhibition.
You may have thought I was using “frame” in the sense
of the “picture-frame” (not an unreasonable assumption)---but
in fact I was thinking of “frame” more in the sense of a
“door-frame.” “Door-frame”
pulls us back to Michael Parsons’ comment on the “socially and
historically constructed” sense of reality.
Gershon J. Molad (2001) has proposed “the door-frame”
as a way to explain a change of inner orientation in the
psychoanalyst (therapist) who moves from the private space of
talking with an analysand (a patient) into the public space of a
conference, to be talking with another analyst (therapist).
And in a way, many times this is true whenever we (not only
therapists) move from talking privately to present our ideas in
public. Molad looked at the increase in guardedness, in
fearfulness, in conference space, and saw that we analysts and
therapists behave as though the analytic frame contains a door.
Sometimes we are able to talk more openly on one side of
the “door frame,” and, as he says, we use concepts of
“ethics” and “identity” to defend ourselves as we move to
present our case on the other side.
It looks as though passage through that door frame alters,
shifts, or even negates the responsibility to hold our own and the
other’s autobiography, his and our trauma.
That responsibility-to-hold, which is to recognize and
respect our own and the other’s trauma, which is automatically
assumed to be present with a patient, seems to disappear or be
disavowed when we are with other analysts and therapists.
Molad senses that we are
in fear of re-traumatization by the exposure of cracks in our
carefully constructed identity, and this fear renders the
resulting conversation false, and re-traumatizing anyway.
(And then we will move from that inauthentic experience
back into private, clinical space with the patient.
Do you think that there is no consequence for us of that
divided consciousness? [Vida & Molad, 2001, in press]
How much do we acknowledge that we analysts and therapists
forever carry our own traumas? Traumas are part of our human,
indelible autobiography, whether we are therapists or not.)
Molad thinks that the
door frame is an illusion
that we have constructed for our use, to excuse ourselves
from recognizing the defensiveness of our manner of speaking with
one another, which comes solely from the fear of re-traumatization.
It is an illusion that makes a certain kind of mark, he
says, and these are his words, it is “part of a packing-box,
which bounds the arrested development of the analyst (p. 98).”
I am telling you about
this because I think that the way the professionals framed that
exhibition was another kind of illusionary door frame, to convey
an illusion of safety to us, the public, that these works are
about them --- the dead mental patients of the beginning of the
century --- and not about us. If it is about them, then we can
talk about “diagnosis,” and “this illness” and
“psychosis” and “institutionalization,” and
“therapy” and “exploitation” and “is it really
art?” If it is about
them, we can avoid a little longer thinking about why we went to
see it, or about what interests us today. I want to show you some
slides of a piece now by a young Dutch sculptor, Merijn Bolink,
whose work was on exhibition in Bolink found an old
door, constructed of many pieces.
He took it apart piece by piece and then sliced each piece
longitudinally, like a bagel. He then reassembled the door, but in
two separate parts, each part being half (a longitudinal half) of
the door. As you can see the door stands by itself, without a
frame. It is vulnerable, but stable.
This is a remarkable picture of a state I have referred to
previously as “cracked-open.”
We are “cracked-open” when being in touch with our
difficult personal circumstances, past or current, gives us a
rare, undefended permeability to new experiences with others,
including with art. When
we are “cracked-open,” we can find the way in. A “way-in” to this
exhibition could have come with thinking about why we were there,
namely, “why did we come to this exhibition, you, and I?
What was it that drew us?” And today, let us think
together about why we
are here, about why I have come from It is a question that is
there, whether we hear it or not, when we see this watercolor by
Clemens von Oertzen (Viktor Orth). (slide --- Carousel I)
What do we see?
What do we think? What do we feel?
Do we say anything to the person sitting next to us, who
may have accompanied us or who may be a stranger?
Do we say anything to ourselves? Do I say to myself that
this is only about him, the artist, the patient, and say (for
example), Oh, look, there is this blue swath, it looks like water,
is it a river? Is he being “swept along?” Is this about
feeling that he is drowning?
Or do I stop for a while, and feel the immensity of that
heavy blue swerving color, and see what looks like a body swept
along, arm(s) and leg(s) akimbo, perhaps even disconnected, past
an impervious structure on the bank, and think, oh, this feels
like me, this is me, drowning in grief, and unable to get my
bearings? Do I say to
the person sitting next to me, my colleague, or friend, or a
stranger, “you know what? My dear friend just died, and this is
so much what it feels like, being carried along by an undertow of
grief, unhinged in time and space, and nothing makes any sense.”
And then, what will that
person say, or do? Will he turn away physically, made
uncomfortable by such an inappropriately personal remark? Will he
turn away emotionally, changing the subject, or saying something
dismissive, or diminishing? Perhaps
he has his own personal grief that I have just intruded upon and
he still needs to be alone with it. But if he says, “Yes, that
is so, it brings to mind my own experience, when my father died,
or when the house burned down, or what it has felt like since
September 11th…” then there is a meeting.
It is an unlikely meeting perhaps, a meeting that lasts for
a moment, the moment of that exchange of personal stories, if ever
so brief, or a meeting that opens out into a longer, deeper
relation, one that existed before or will exist after, but it is a
meeting nonetheless. Something
has happened. Something
has happened in this instant that makes me more real to myself,
and makes another more real to me, “another” being both the
artist (the maker of the work) and the person with whom I have
spoken. I have found a “missing part.” I am bigger on the inside to
myself. I take up more room. I
am alive. It is this, this
supposedly hypothetical encounter, that is the real subject of
this talk. I invite
you to accompany me as I move in to a broader and deeper, and more
personal way to think about this.
I wonder if, in this shared experience, in this commonality
of being together in the same space, we can find some possibility
of meeting each other,
to make this meeting (ours with the works I am showing you, ours
with this lecture, ours with one another), in Bracha Lichtenberg
Ettinger’s language, more of a sinthome than a symptom
--- more of an experience that exists in difficulty and
therefore transcends it. There is a real
difficulty now embedded in the unfolding autobiography of this
lecture, a real “missing part,” unwittingly contributed by me,
when I discovered later in the day that I arrived in Israel that I
had not brought all the slides with me, that I had left the slides
of the “open door” in my desk at home. It was necessary for my
husband in And there is yet another
“missing part” now attached to this lecture, and it is about I realize at this
moment, with a smile, that the very nature of what I am saying ---
that a conversation in which “communication” (the transfer of
information) is less the goal than for both of us to feel
understood --- begins to sound rather like what the words of Inge
Jadi and of Caroline Douglas described as “art-therapy”. (In
thinking about the art-therapist who brings experience and
knowledge into contact with the patient who would feel understood,
neither Inge Jadi nor Caroline Douglas considered what it might be
like for the therapist. Neither considered that coming into
contact with the intimate world of the so-called patient could
allow the therapist, also, to feel “understood,” and that that
might matter.) I’ve been talking to
you now for some minutes (it may seem longer). Who else am I, anyway? In fact my autobiography has been smeared all
over what I’ve saying, but you can’t begin to know that unless
you knew me before, or --- also --- unless I tell you. First of all, you should
know that my husband and I have collected contemporary art since
1972. We didn’t think of it as “collecting” --- it was just
that there were these pieces we came upon that we knew we didn’t
want to live without. We
didn’t think much about what it was we were doing for quite a
while, but at a certain point we started to notice that most of
the works we were drawn to were made with some sense of personal
necessity, conscious or unconscious, intentional or not, by the
artists. Eventually,
we admitted that the works we were drawn to felt like pieces of
ourselves, that they revealed to us pieces of ourselves that we
hadn’t known about before. Needless
to say, not all these works were pretty and nice. Finally, we came
to understand that, taken all together, the works we had collected
were tantamount to a portrait of us, a self portrait, if you
privilege the acts of collecting and selecting as something
creative in itself. This
is an experience of art that is at the opposite end of the
continuum from art therapy; it is using someone’s else’s art
(or artistic production) as a kind of therapy, if by “therapy”
we are continuing to mean “that which allows us to reach a
deeper self-understanding.” Two things happened from
this. First is that, decades ago, as a developing psychoanalyst, I
realized that what I was learning about myself (and others) from
art was not what I was learning in my psychoanalytic training. The
lessons from art were either different, or contradictory. These
differences pointed to aspects of my training about which I had
long been secretly doubtful. It
took me a long time, though, to risk talking openly about this,
which I started to do in 1995, in a lecture titled “Life
Lessons: What One Psychoanalyst Learned From Contemporary Art,”
a lecture I have now given numerous times, to both psychoanalytic
and art-oriented audiences. People usually laugh when I say this,
but it is not a joke that the secret, real title of that lecture
is “ Everything I learned about psychoanalysis that matters I
learned from contemporary art.”
Another
thing that happened is that I began to be invited to talk more
directly to art audiences from this strange perspective of the
psychoanalyst who has been taught by art. It was in 1998 that, as
I already mentioned, I first spoke about the artist Yayoi Kusama
who lives voluntarily on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital in In
1999, when I spoke about the work of the artist Charles Ray, I
gave a condensed version of my basic premises, which I have gone
on to modify slightly: 1.
The creative capacity is inborn (although its
relative strength or quantity or quality varies widely from person
to person. Not everyone is “an” artist, yet we could say that
each of us is “the” artist, in the sense of “creator,” of
our own life). 2.
This creative capacity undergoes its own
(autonomous) development as it is tested and made use of, over a
lifetime. People are often unaware that they are using that
creative capacity in responding to life exigencies. 3.
Harsh circumstances both personal and historical can
squelch, deform, or destroy that creative capacity; conversely,
favorable circumstances may encourage it to thrive.
Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between
circumstances that are “harsh” and circumstances that are
“favorable.” 4.
So-called “madness” does not generate creative
activity, nor is creativity a consequence of it.
5.
The artist has an unusually sensitive and/or
unusually open perceptual
apparatus and will experience a different quantity and quality of
suffering than a person in the middle of the bell-shaped curve. 6.
I view art fundamentally as the artist’s effort
first to articulate and then to communicate what he (or she, of
course) experiences and perceives, intellectually as well as
visually. Here I am using the word “communicate” differently
than did Dr. Inge Jadi and Caroline Douglas.
I am using it specifically to indicate a dialogue, a
conversation which is initiated by the artist and which will go on
inside the viewer, with the viewer’s idea of the artist, perhaps
with others in the viewer’s circle, and most hopefully, with
himself. (Originally, trying to be modest in my claim, I had
written this that I view much contemporary
art as the artist’s effort to articulate and communicate his
experience and perception, but more and more I’m thinking that
this is true of art-making activity in general.) As a psychoanalyst and as one whose life has been changed by these intense encounters with other people’s art, my perspective is not based on identifying pathology ---and with the word “pathology” I am pointing to the simplistic dichotomy of “sick” and “healthy.” Instead I look to art and the artist’s experiences and devices to inform a larger understanding of the human condition, mine, and yours. Understanding the human condition evolves into talking further about that which is not there, the missing part of what is ourselves. As my husband and I discovered, one way to search for “the missing part” is to use art (or artistic production), one’s own (or another’s), as an agent of discovery. “Conversation” is another. But the big problem of the missing part(s) is that awareness of it makes us anxious, very anxious. What is “the missing part?” “The missing part” is the part, or parts, of us, that go into hiding, or disappear, or seem to be dead in response to some kind of trauma, or intense unmasterable difficulty. The trauma, the “what” of what happened, is our history, our autobiography. When we meet one another, in “external-social reality” (Molad, 2001), we try to act as though our history never happened. We construct an identity of a small selection of bits of ourselves, trying to keep hidden the injured parts, and hoping that the other will accept the constructed identity at face value, and not to think less of us for our inexorable vulnerabilities. The other does the same. It is a two-dimensional way of relating, the ordinary, socially-correct way of relating , and it can look quite beautiful, and it works, up to a point. (without comment, show slide of Molad’s painting, "V. Conversation, talk, lecture, therapy, discourse: 1. Surface of things” --- Carousel I) The “point” is that
we are after all three-dimensional beings even though we may walk
around, and converse, as though there are only two.
I think we are rather like icebergs, with so much submerged
below the surface. Bumping up against the submerged parts is
inevitable. This bumping-up touches, bruises, re-injures the
already-injured parts. We
react in strange, hurtful, or withdrawing ways, a trouble and a
consternation, and the other may do the same. With real friends,
we find some ways to repair, to bridge, perhaps even to go on
growing, to use one another’s helpful responses to resume our
development, in a three- rather than a two-dimensional way. With
family, we sometimes can do the same, but family icebergs tend to
be bigger, older, stretching back for generations, the injuries
can be greater and more frightening to deal with, more of a
life-and-death matter, so that sometimes there is repair and
growth but more commonly there is a sealing-over, making-do and
getting-by with one another. And
then, of course, our enemies will always find ways to exploit, to
make use of for their own purposes, our vulnerabilities. Here is another picture
(slide of Molad’s second painting: "V. Conversation, talk,
lecture, therapy, discourse: 2. The things [partial structure]”
--- Carousel I), which moves beyond the initial two-dimensional
representation to show you how this works, that demonstrates the
relation between the two- and the three-dimensionalities, and the
possibilities for interaction: making possible “the meeting of
external-conventional conversation and internal dialogue (Molad
& Vida, 082800).” (slide of Molad’s second painting:
"V. Conversation, talk, lecture, therapy, discourse: 2. The
things [partial structure]") “A long time ago,”
wrote Gershon Molad, whose paintings these are, “I was less
imaginative and thought, by mistake, that there is a possible
conversation between Therapist, Patient, and Another-person,
supervisor, another therapist/analyst, any A, what they call the
other third, one that makes---or wishe[s,] as an enabling factor
---the conversation [to keep] going (or … kills it).
Or is A a sign for Another possible dialogue…” ( Molad
& Vida, 090300 ) That “other third,” that “Another
person,” is who we long for when we, the icebergs, enter into
one another’s territory. When viewed at the surface level, it is
a something (or someone)-in-between, to make some space for the
underneath parts not to bang in to each other, and possibly, even,
to be discovered, to be allowed to un-submerge. This second painting shows the move from two- to three-dimensional conversation, with the operation of “the other third.” A conversation, any conversation, is fundamentally three-dimensional, but so often it is treated as though there are only two. Where this connects to the matter at hand is a use of art as the “other third,” on the way to wishing, or making, or killing a conversation in which our own development can resume. There is danger, here, and the danger is embodied in the painting by a seemingly “misplaced” line, a “mistake,” depicting a conversation that started and then had to turn back, to stop. Molad refers to this as “the nature of a conversation, born out of mistakes, [and] failures.” In search of safety and protection, we want to deny mistakes, fearful of the negation, the refusal that is always there between us, a potential, in any conversation. “The double-repeated structure, a measure of strength, contains [and holds] the ‘mistake.’” It is the conversation interrupted, un-received, refused, and when it happens, “the perspective changes, and it is not clear any more whose position it is, and if possible at all (Molad & Vida, 090300).” These two paintings of
Molad’s, particularly the one with the “mistake,” offer a
way to look at, or think about, the works in the Prinzhorn
exhibition, works made by those whose lives turned upside-down in
extreme ways, who had their submerged portions up-ended, exposed
and stranded, and bumping-up is all they were able to do, and it
was something from which they (and others) seemingly needed to be
protected, so they were in the asylum. Perhaps contemporary
explanations of psychosis would hold that solely within the minds
of these patients were generated the negations, were the
repudiations of dimensionality. Nevertheless, these works of
theirs (which Prinzhorn was careful to call “artistic
productions” rather than “art”) can be part of a dialogue,
perhaps not, as it turned out, with people in their surroundings,
if we can believe the accounts of their incarceration, but with
us. We are the ghostly
completion of the third dimension for them, and perhaps they can
be, for us. (And if the three-dimensionality of our conversation
is thwarted, is only negated and refused, then a part of us,
perhaps even a very large part of us, is driven to the asylum as
well.) So far, this by-way-of-explanation is talking about a T, a P, and an A as though they are three separate people. But really, as we think some more about this, it becomes clear that the T, the P, and the A are also all parts of ourselves, parts of our one-self. In some respects they characterize the iceberg, and they are different ways of relating closer to the surface, mediating between the levels as we talk to ourselves. “Each of us is many
persons.” Each of
these “inmates,” stripped by illness and circumstance of
everyday identity and attributes (except as noted in old,
archived, patient records), nevertheless had sufficient “self”
persisting (surviving) to make these works. These are works made
by “what” is left, by “who” is left.
It is a story basically similar to that of Dr. William
Chester Minor, who during his decades as an inmate in Broadmoor
Asylum for the Insane was nevertheless one of the most important
contributors to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
In a recent best-selling book ( “Each of us is many persons.” Each of us, a T, a P, and an A, puts one or more parts into conversation with one another, whose T, or P, or A may or may not be readily distinguished. I want to say some more about this matter of being many persons because leaving it with the inmates of the asylum may suggest that I think that “many persons” refers to the sick and the well, that I am talking about sick parts and well parts. This is the point at which two basic ideas meet, the idea of “missing parts” and the idea of “many persons,” and discover that they are twins. Each lends a larger understanding to the other. I will call on Fernando Pessoa to help me out, to be an “A.” Fernando Pessoa
(1888-1935), writes Alfred Mac Adam, “is “His
secret…is written in his name: Pessoa means person in Portuguese
and comes from persona, the mask worn by Roman actors.
Mask, character from fiction, no one: Pessoa.
His story could be reduced to the passage between the
unreality of his daily life and the reality of his fictions (p.
vii).” Earlier we heard the
professionals telling us that one must have a self in order to
make art. But Fernando Pessoa’s creative mission was the
repudiation of being a self. Perhaps his multilingual,
bi-continental early life gives a small amount of autobiographical
justification for this extreme position, but it doesn’t explain
it. Fernando Pessoa
refused to be some “one” in order to be no one; it was in a
sense to protect being no one, that he became “some one(s).”
And in so doing, he illuminated something universal that we
are scarcely ever able to notice, and if we do notice, it is even
more difficult to bear. Fernando Pessoa maintained a distance from
life that at one and the same time held life in the most intimate
of embraces (another sinthome, perhaps). For example, “I am a keeper of
herds,” he wrote as the unlettered mystic, “Alberto Caeiro.” The
herd is my thoughts And
my thoughts are all sensations. I
think with my eyes and my ears And
with my hands and feet And
with my nose and mouth. To
think a flower is to see it and smell it And
to eat a piece of fruit is to know its meaning. That’s
why when on a hot day I
grieve for having enjoyed it so much, I
stretch out on the grass, And
I close my hot eyes, I
feel my whole body sprawled on reality, I
know the truth and I am happy.
(trans. Alfred Mac Adam) From THIS OLD ANGUISH
(“Alvaro de Campos”) But no: always this in-betweenness, This almost, This it might be that… This. I’m an inmate in an
asylum without an asylum. I’m consciously crazy, I’m a lucid lunatic, I’m alien to
everything and equal to all: I’m sleeping while
awake with dreams that are madness Because they’re not
dreams…
I’M BEGINNING TO KNOW
MYSELF. I DON’T
EXIST (“Alvaro de Campos”) I’m the gap between
what I’d like to be and what others have made me, Or half of this gap,
since there’s also life… That’s me.
Period. Turn off the light, shut
the door, and get rid of the slipper noise in the hallway. Leave me alone in my
room with the vast peace of myself. It’s a shoddy
universe. “I’m having one of
those days in which I never had a future,” he wrote, in a letter
over his own name, to a friend who would soon commit suicide.
“There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of
anguish. The other
bank of the river, because it is the other bank, is never the bank
we are standing on: that is the intimate reason for all my
suffering. There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single
one goes where life is not painful; nor is there any port of call
where it is possible to forget (p.
xxv, trans. A. Mac Adam).”
THIS
SPECIES OF MADNESS (“Fernando Pessoa”) Which isn’t just
cleverness And which shines in the
darkness Of my muddled
intelligence There is always, in the
city, Either clear or cloudy
skies, But in me I don’t know
what there is. I’M SORRY I DON’T
RESPOND (“Fernando Pessoa”) But it isn’t, after
all, my fault That I don’t
correspond To the other you loved
in me. To me I’m who I think
I am, But others see me
differently And are equally
mistaken. But leave me alone, in
peace! If I don’t want to
find myself, Should I want others to
find me? In Pessoa’s prose
diary, The Book of Disquiet, originally written under yet another
heteronym, Bernardo Soares, we read, “ In these disconnected
impressions, which I deliberately leave disconnected, I shall
narrate my autobiography in an indifferent sort of way, without
facts; my history without life (p. 6).”
These Prinzhorn drawings, disconnected from their makers,
are the narrations of autobiographies indifferently presented,
without history, but with a strange, persistent life. And here we
are, together in this room, I disconnected from you, you
from me and perhaps from one another, and to a certain extent we
may be disconnected from ourselves. Yet here we are, in spite of
disconnection, perhaps even in defiance of disconnection. Are we
searching for ourselves in one part of this story and another?
Can we locate some part of the story in us?
Can we see one another here, too?
|
Between 1918 and 1921 the German art historian and psychiatrist
Dr. Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), assembled a collection of some
5000 works, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, objects, and
collages made by the patients of psychiatric institutions in
Europe over the preceding forty years.