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.

Cosimo Schinaia is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of SPI (Italian Psychoanalytic Society) and a full member of IPA (International Psychoanalytical Association), working in private practice in Genoa. He was formerly the director of the Cogoleto Psychiatric Hospital (Genoa) and of the Mental Health Centre of Central Genoa. He has published many scientific papers on psychoanalysis and psychiatry in Italian and international journals and edited books. His books include On Paedophilia (Routledge, 2010), also published in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German, Russian and Greek, Psychoanalysis and Architecture: The Inside and the Outside (Routledge, 2016), also published in Italian, Spanish and French, and Psychoanalysis and Ecology: The Unconscious and the Environment (Routledge, 2022), also published in Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Portuguese.

Series Editor's Foreword by Silvia Flechner Acknowledgements Introduction to the English edition Foreword by Fausto Petrella Introduction to the Italian edition 1 Cogoleto Psychiatric Hospital 2 Thinking Beyond the Asylum 3 Projects and Materials for a Nativity Scene in the Asylum 4 The Nativity 5 Segregation 6 The Square 7 The Doctors' Office 8 Electroshock 9 The Children's Ward 10 Work 11 Death 12 Between Past and Future