Cosimo Schinaia

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.

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 and Psychoanalysis and Ecology are winners of the IPA Climate Award! This book presents the psychoanalyst with the question of how our enormously modified environmental conditions determine our subjective mental changes and vice versa. The gravity of the environmental crisis is amply clear and yet, in the face of such incontrovertible evidence, there is an emotional, more than cognitive, difficulty in comprehending the present reality and its future consequences. In understanding the collective imagination as permeating the individual one and vice versa, this book investigates this relationship of mutual co-determination between the individual traumatic stories told and experienced in the consulting room and the positive or negative environmental attitudes exhibited by patients. The pairing of clinical vignettes with dispatches from the collective imagination sheds light on the confused affective investments and anxieties that propel pathological defenses, such as negation, suppression, intellectualization, displacement, and disavowal. The final chapter concludes with notes on the role of hope in a damaged world and the importance of integrity within the psychoanalytic field and beyond. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, as well as anthropologists, environmentalists, and ecologists.

Cosimo Schinaia and Psychoanalysis and Ecology are winners of the IPA Climate Award! This book presents the psychoanalyst with the question of how our enormously modified environmental conditions determine our subjective mental changes and vice versa. The gravity of the environmental crisis is amply clear and yet, in the face of such incontrovertible evidence, there is an emotional, more than cognitive, difficulty in comprehending the present reality and its future consequences. In understanding the collective imagination as permeating the individual one and vice versa, this book investigates this relationship of mutual co-determination between the individual traumatic stories told and experienced in the consulting room and the positive or negative environmental attitudes exhibited by patients. The pairing of clinical vignettes with dispatches from the collective imagination sheds light on the confused affective investments and anxieties that propel pathological defenses, such as negation, suppression, intellectualization, displacement, and disavowal. The final chapter concludes with notes on the role of hope in a damaged world and the importance of integrity within the psychoanalytic field and beyond. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, as well as anthropologists, environmentalists, and ecologists.

This book deepens the communicative dynamics by which even through the mass media the paedophile has become the plague-spreader. It is an attempt to underline that only an integrative approach can give an appropriate answer to the clinical complexity characterising paedophilic pictures.

This book explores how psychoanalysis and architecture can enhance and increase the chances of mental 'containment', while also fostering exchange between inside and outside. The way in which psychoanalysts take care of mental suffering, and the way in which architects and city planners assess the environment, are grounded in a shared concern with the notion of 'dwelling'. It is a matter of fact that dwelling exists in a complex context comprised of both biological need and symbolic function. Psychoanalysis and architecture can work together in both thinking about and designing not only our homes but also the analyst's consulting rooms and, more generally, our therapy places. However, this is possible only if they renounce the current limited and restrictive model of this interaction, and propose one more that is more in harmony with the questions and situations that clients themselves pose.

This book explores how psychoanalysis and architecture can enhance and increase the chances of mental 'containment', while also fostering exchange between inside and outside. The way in which psychoanalysts take care of mental suffering, and the way in which architects and city planners assess the environment, are grounded in a shared concern with the notion of 'dwelling'. It is a matter of fact that dwelling exists in a complex context comprised of both biological need and symbolic function. Psychoanalysis and architecture can work together in both thinking about and designing not only our homes but also the analyst's consulting rooms and, more generally, our therapy places. However, this is possible only if they renounce the current limited and restrictive model of this interaction, and propose one more that is more in harmony with the questions and situations that clients themselves pose.

This book deepens the communicative dynamics by which even through the mass media the paedophile has become the plague-spreader. It is an attempt to underline that only an integrative approach can give an appropriate answer to the clinical complexity characterising paedophilic pictures.