Book Description:
Through an interdisciplinary multicultural approach, this book explores the role of psychiatric art in facilitating personal empowerment, fostering the healing process, and confronting stigma. Today when we are constantly reminded of the dangers of thinking in exclusive terms, art affords us a model of dialogue in which the other is accepted as an equal conversation partner. Art fosters cooperative communication in which dignity and individuality of a mental health patient may be reaffirmed. At the same time, art allows for critical distance, retrospection, and vast opportunities for individual choice, and thus may be conducive to an improved self-image and self-esteem. The book discusses norm and its transgression as aesthetic categories influencing the understanding of "outsider" and "mainstream" art.
The role of art as a social force that contributes to the way mental health and illness are perceived in a given community is also addressed. Understanding the mechanisms underlying aesthetic preceptions of art helps us understand how psychiatric art can be used to help fight stigma associated with illness. Special attention is given to the semiotics of the portrait, a genre with an especially marked dialogical potential that still lacks a systematic study in the context of psychiatric art. The book is addressed to psychiatrists, other mental health professionals as well as scholars in humanities and social sciences concerned with the issues of creativity and the mind.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
(Hans-Otto Thomashoff and Ekaterina Sukhanova)

Concepts and History of Art Perception
Chapter 1. Self Perception in Art, pp. 1-19
(Hans-Otto Thomashoff)

Chapter 2. The Dialogical Mechanisms of Art, pp. 21-25
(Ekaterina Sukhanova)

Chapter 3. The Subject's Creation through Dynamic Processes, pp. 27-31
(Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein)

Chapter 4. Artistic Models of Psychic Reality Conditions, pp. 33-38
(Walter Seidl)

Chapter 5. 'To Be Cellular' Or How to Portray the Immune System by Choreography, pp. 39-56
(Klaus Spiess)

Chapter 6. The Influence of Culture on Aesthetic Preferences: An Art Therapist's Perspective, pp. 57-69
(Diane Waller)

Connecting Art and Psychiatry
Chapter 7. The History of Ethics for Art Therapy and the Use of Patient-Produced Art, pp. 73-78
(Carlos Carbonell)

Chapter 8. Ethical Issues Concerning the Creative Works of People with an Experience of Mental Illness, pp. 79-91
(Eugen Koh)

Chapter 9. The Use of Art to Fight Stigma in Mental Illness, pp. 93-103
(Alexander Kopytin)

Chapter 10. Kristof's Portraits of Lost Objects, pp. 105-111
(Vlasta Meden Klavora)

Chapter 11. The Benefits of Art and Art Therapy with Prison Inmates, pp. 113-126
(David E. Gussak)

An Artist's Perspective
Chapter 12. Artists Without Quotation Marks, pp. 129-132
(Tracy Reinhardt interviewed by Ekaterina Sukhanova)

Artworks
About the Contributors
Index