SCHIZOPHRENIA, ARCHETYPES, ART, & COMMUNICATION

Psychiatry MMC, 1989

Creativity Research Journal, 2001

In this article, I consider the relation between creativity and the schizophrenia spectrum of personality and mental disorders in the light of differing notions of creativity and the creative process. Prevailing conceptions of creativity in psychology and psychiatry derive from romanticist ideas about the creative imagination; they differ considerably from notions central in modernism and postmodernism. Whereas romanticism views creative inspiration as a highly emotional, Dionysian, or primitive state, modernism and postmodernism emphasize processes involving hyper-self-consciousness and alienation (hyperreflexivity). Although manic-depressive or cyclothymic tendencies seem especially suited to creativity of the romantic sort, schizoid, schizotypal, schizophreniform, and schizophrenic tendencies have more in common with the (in many respects, antiromantic) sensibilities of modernism and postmodernism. I criticize a book by psychologist Jamison (1993), Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, for treating romantic notions of creativity as if they defined creativity in general. I also argue that Jamison's denial or neglect of the creative potential of persons in the schizophrenia spectrum relies on certain diagnostic oversimplifications: an overly broad conception of affective illness and an excessively narrow conception of schizophrenia that ignores the creative potential of the schizophrenia spectrum.

New Ideas in Psychology, 1990

Background: This paper responds to calls for more lived experience research with a vitalist-materialist style of analysis inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. It challenges traditional understandings of art as a therapy associated with medical and psychological perceptions of schizophrenia, which have been found to be reductive. Methods: Using Deleuze and Guattari's relational assemblages, the flows of affect are mapped as bodies and things, ideas and sensations connect and disconnect through the community arts sense-event " Schizy Jam ". Results: Opening a much broader territory for understanding the many ways that art can express, affirm and communicate difference, enables exploration of new ways in which art-makers are activating changes in feeling and thinking about schizophrenia. Conclusions: Art-makers can be supported to connect with others with shared experience to find expression for things that have previously been inexpressible and create a world that is inclusive of them. Acknowledgements:

In the Library of Congress, Psychiatry is classified as a branch of 'internal medicine' suggesting difficulties for the artistic representation of the mentally ill, especially in static media. The usual solution, which goes back to Hogarth, is to reference contextual signifiers; to invoke the stereotypical artifacts associated with insanity: straightjackets, ECT, injections, shackles. But a sane person painted in a straightjacket passes for a loony.

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theorists to interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical, compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophrenia have been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broader understanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry analyses representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. Part one looks at the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Part two examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, the book seeks to explain how a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came to be associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life. Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'.

The Arts in Psychotherapy, 2009

Psychosis occurs when reality testing is severely impaired and is manifested by disorganized behavior and speech. Art and brief therapies may be cost effective and time efficient treatment modalities for psychosis. A study investigating artwork characteristics in bridge drawings was designed to analyze differences between in-patient (n = 34), out-patient (n = 26) and comparison groups (n = 29). Blind judges rated drawings with a rating system developed by synthesizing the Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale (FEATS) and the Diagnostic Drawing Series (DDS) and concepts from the original bridge drawing directive. Statistically significant differences were found for: direction of travel, placement of future, prominence of color, use of monochrome, number of colors used, accuracy of color and use of the colors: yellow, green, blue, purple, and brown. Formal art characteristics can indicate the presence of psychosis in the artist.

One of the oldest debates in psychology concerns the relationship between creativity and madness. The prima facie evidences in the history indicate that creativity often comes with a certain price tag, the price tag being mental disorders or mental illness. The extent of the mental illness in the stipulated scenarios depends on person to person. However, the putative dichotomous coexistence of the two has time and again solicited umpteen numbers of questions and their subsequent studies. Although the concept of mad geniuses is based more on Hollywood movies than on scientific research, there is indeed some evidence of the counterproductive or the undesirable features associated with creativity. Throughout history, numerous artists have been found battling mental illness and leading scientists examining the link between creativity and mental illness. This paper aims to dig into this deeper, by reviewing and analyzing, in a brief manner, the studies that have taken place on the concept and trace back the lives of some of the most eminent artists that have ever existed. EARLY RESEARCHES: According to an early theory given be Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, the cause of 'Genius' was a constitutional defect, a defect that commonly showed itself as insanity, either in the genius or in his family. 1 Working from another direction, another researcher (Jamison), in 1989 took a sample of 47 famous living British Writers and Artists. They were people who had won major awards such as the Booker Prize, or were distinguished members of the Royal Academy of Arts. She found that 38% of them had received treatment for affective disorder (antidepressant, lithium and/or hospitalisation). The 'insanity' theory by Lombrosso was supported by several later studies, however, other studies seemed to be deviated from Lombroso's point of view and supported an

Witte de With Review, 2014

If James Tilly Matthews can be cited as the very first historical case of schizophrenia, it's owing to the fact that his madness was embedded in an unprecedented stratification of scientific, political, and technological layers that led to the meticulous recording of his symptoms and the careful archiving of his correspondence, until, decades after his death, these elements made the clinical identification and the 'epistemological conviction' of his condition possible. The image attached to this text, made by Matthews' own hands, depicts the object of his hallucinations, an 'influencing machine' that he called the Air Loom. Its secret and shadowy mechanism, its analogy with contemporary scientific events, and its hyperbolical connection with political events of the time, incite interpretation to focus on its hazy edges, to understand its workings in light of the order of knowledge that shaped its context of apparition: it opens a space for the projection of a vertical gaze onto the constitution of the rationalist boundaries that animated the enlightened 'space of Reason'. Indeed, the layers in which Matthews's schizophrenia were inscribed pertain to the divides, limits, and borders by which Western modernity has worked at stabilizing its structure of production and the representation of truth. The Air Loom, with its alliance of Euclidean geometry and paranoia, of obscure chemistry and conspiracy, of mechanics and psychiatry, of repressed science and politics, seems to provide a distorting mirror to scientific modernity, to inhabit a paradoxical space in which epistemic divides are all at once put to work, torn apart more sharply, and relaunched further. The Air Loom, understood as a world-making image that exteriorizes the interiority of a subject (however delusional), can thus be said to navigate a modern border, a frontier between an object of scientific attention (madness) and the technology by which this attention produces factual truth (the clinic): the boundary that both pulls apart and connects objectivity and schizophrenia.

Art and Mental Illness: Myths, Stereotypes and Realities, 2007

Alongside these developments are changes in consumer group attitudes to the display of art produced by people who experience mental illness. Consumer groups have reached the conclusion that such displays must respect the whole person and not focus exclusively on the relationship between the artwork and the mental illness of the creator. Consumers and consumer representatives have begun to argue that art should not be discussed through the use of diagnostic categories as such discussions have the potential to demean the creator by reducing them to a function of their illness.To take a prominent but little-known example, the widow of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner sued her late husband's analyst in 1977 for exhibiting drawings produced by Pollock during therapy under the heading 'Psychoanalytic Drawings'. As she argued at the time:

Beyond These Walls, 2013

Despite its disappearance from the diagnostic manuals and the consulting room, hysteria has had a recent cultural resurgence as films, books, and papers update its meaning for our society, marked by dissent, struggle and uncertainty. Its migration into new, more medically manageable conditions (including dissociation, conversion, or post-traumatic stress disorder) highlights the common elements to all forms of hysteria: a struggle with gender, a manifestation of symptoms in the body, and the asking of a question-Che vuoi, or, 'What do you want from me?' We put forward the idea that hysteria is a process, a state of mind, rather than a condition, and that its relationship to femininity and the body-following Juliet Mitchell's argument-is the reason it has disappeared from the medical vocabulary. Yet, this state captures something inherently human, ambivalent and conflicted. It names, defines and understands something elusive. Our chapter will question hysteria as madness in relation to an epistemology that, according to Christopher Bollas, is depraved. 1 Even though it seems to be a state impairing the mind's judgment as the body takes over, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed the production of knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses. 2 The hysteric knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not. We will argue that hysteria as madness relates to the visionary aspect of the state, to the fact that hysterics articulate and know in the body, that which does not want to be known. In order to safeguard a symbolic universe, hysterics are labeled mad, possessed, delusional, or simply as acting out their symptoms. The outcome of this struggle is visual and performative, so we will draw on visual examples-from our production, and that of others. These implicate the body and the gaze, therefore, a witness, creating a space for discourse.

www.fPaS.at, 2020

In this lecture I will make an attempt to explicate the extent that Melanie Klein has opened the semiotization of psychoanalysis, which "sign structure" imagos or schemata have (namely a "stagnant" or "stagnating" one) and nevertheless how these take a role for or in mature sign systems (in the sense of Charles Sanders Peirce). Here an interesting tendency becomes apparent: While so-called "character disorders" are characterized by the fact that schemata become somewhat of a "bracket" that "encompasses" mature characters, schemata in schizophrenia and delusional disorders "infiltrate" into the (mature) signs and occupy index or icon positions. The mentioned "branches", "diagrams" etc. refer to the German version of this lecture, which is available under https://app.thebrain.com/brains/e6e0d2e3-8333-40fc-89bd-e1b1ff6e9bbb/thoughts/d1ddc329-34ee-40d9-aa21-d880ebbf08d4/notes Since these references are not relevant for an overall understanding of the lecture, a translation and transformation of those parts to which reference was made is not realized yet. German-speaking readers should nevertheless have the opportunity to follow these references. Klein's "semiotization" of psychoanalysis 1 Melanie Klein's reflections on human beings and the development of thinking and experience begins with the-newly born-child and the mother's breast. The latter is of such relevance because these essential moments, such as food intake and the "(sucking) encounter" are linked to the breast. 2 The little person's first relationship to the world unfolds accordingly around the breast-and will be a "projective-identifying" one. The breast is not only a source of food: precisely because it is, it can also, in its absence, become a source of hunger and thus of "the bad". It thus becomes a place from which the baby gets something, but to which it can also "outsource" its own negative emotion-of a kind of "attribution" in which the own emotion is projectively identified with its trigger. 3 This reference and the relationship that goes with it, according to Klein, is deposited in the person as an "imago", i.e. as a kind of "emotional image", which is activated later in life, for example, when someone reminds one of the mother: a projective-identifying reference with all its qualities is then established to this person. 4 It is interesting that Klein has thus theoretically applied the essential components of a semiotics or sign theory: The imago is a sign with which someone-repeating his own, childlike-emotional interpretation practice-interprets and refers to an object with a certain (projective-identifying) reference. 5 Thus a "rudimentary semiotics" is designed around which Klein's and Bion's psychoanalysis develops further and further, but also gradually moves further away from the discussion about the unconscious.

Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, 2013

The therapist used art as a process medium while working with a non-communicative client. The client felt comfortable drawing and the drawings were then used in therapy. Art was a safe intervention in this diagnosed case of schizophrenia.