Outsider Art and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry

Outsider Art and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry is a study of psychiatric institutes and psychiatric violence as seen through art created by the inhabitants of a psychiatric hospital.Cosimo Schinaia explores the history of the Cogoleto Psychiatric Hospital, now abandoned, and how its architecture and ideology influenced treatment of the patients who lived there. At the book’s core is an in-depth historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical study of the ‘Nativity of Fools’, a large art installation constructed from 1980 to 1984 by patients, nurses and psychiatrists, representing their everyday lives in the asylum. Schinaia’s understanding of the scenes considers questions of nostalgia, isolation, privacy and freedom, and reflects on the risks of institutionalised segregation. The book proposes original psychoanalytic reflections on the subject of the obsolescence of psychiatric hospitals and treating mental suffering without institutionalising people.This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and nurses as well as readers interested in outsider art, Arte Povera, and the history of psychiatric institutions and contemporary psychiatry.

‘This book by Cosimo Schinaia is an important testimony of the passion and creativity of many Italian health-care workers and culturally minded people who fought to go beyond the ideal of the asylum. In it, he describes a season of great participation in which psychiatric hospitals became places of creative, emotional, and relational inventions before being dismantled and transformed into regional facilities near patients and their families. The Nativity Scene of Cogoleto is testament to a new start for the cure and care of mental disease. It highlights institutional psychoanalysis’ crucial contribution to a revolution aiming at restoring dignity to health-care workers and patients alike.’Franco De Masi, Italian Psychoanalytic Society‘The construction and form of a hospital’s Nativity crèche is the leitmotif through which Cosimo Schinaia brilliantly informs us of the history of Italian psychiatry as well as its representations in architecture. Unpacking the spirit and materials of this Nativity scene allows Schinaia to deepen our appreciation of the historical and personal forces that have led us to keep our physical and emotional distance from those so different. Nazi camps are never far from his mind while he also creates a space for a work-based treatment that at long last allows for dignity and self-respect. Readers of this work will be more deeply informed about the interface between mind, spirit, and our surroundings.’Harvey Schwartz, American Psychoanalytic Association‘This book on the under-represented area of outsider art is a gift to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and art historians. Cosimo Schinaia does an in-depth, scholarly analysis of the figures in a nativity scene created by staff and patients in a now-closed psychiatric hospital. These figures represent the pathos of the lives and suffering of the inmates. For Schinaia, architecture can facilitate or impede healing. He addresses this subject at length with respect to this hospital. He is a clear, outspoken critic of the violence to be found in psychiatric hospitals in Italy, where he works.’Janice S. Lieberman, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research‘A unique and edifying book, Outsider Art and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, serves up an intriguing and comprehensive discussion of the history, architecture, functions, and violence of psychiatric institutions. Cosimo Schinaia uses the Cogoleto nativity scene to examine the intricacies of institutional psychiatry. Patients, nurses, and doctors collectively transform their mental anguish and frustration into a symbolic scene that tells the story of their lived experiences, reflecting human, Christ-like, suffering as well as the irony of redemption. What makes this book particularly important for mental health care practitioners is how it clarifies the function of external aspects of treatment spaces in the he

Cosimo Schinaia is a psychoanalyst in private practice based in Genoa, Italy. He is former director of the Cogoleto Psychiatric Hospital, training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and a full member of IPA. His books include On Paedophilia, Psychoanalysis and Architecture: The Inside and the Outside and Psychoanalysis and Ecology: The Unconscious and the Environment (all Routledge).