The Outsiders

Abstract

The year 1922 marks an important date in Western culture: in that year Doctor Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geister kranken?translated into English as Artistry of the Mentally III? in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 of the more than five thousand paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from various asylums in and around Heidelberg, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. While psychiatrists before him had oc casionally published paintings and drawings of their patients, ana lyzing them for purposes of psychiatric diagnosis, Prinzhorn found that he could not identify the mental disorders of inmates from the types of images they made. Prinzhorn had first gotten a degree in art history before becoming a psychiatrist; in his study of the works he had collected, he identified six basic drives or urges that give rise to image making: an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols. These six instinctual drives are not concerned with survival and socialization, but with expression and creativity, which are, he concluded, innate to human nature. And they are the very drives at work in professional artists. Prinzhorn gave pre dominant place in his book to ten masters whose works, in expr?s