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Outsider Art and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry: The 'Nativity of Fools' at the Cogoleto Psychiatric Hospital

Author(s) : Cosimo Schinaia

Reviews and Endorsements

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 healing process. One leaves it, and the project it is inspired by, with the conviction that serious mental illness requires a transitional space` that encourages relationship and creativity.
Danielle Knafo, PhD, author, The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis