Outsider Art: From the Margins to the Market Place, by David Maclagan (2009), Reaktion Books Ltd, London

The initial attraction of psychotic art was for the psychiatrists who were eager to penetrate the seemingly closed world of dementia praecox (the pre-First World War version of what we now call schizophrenia). It was not just behavioural anomalies that led to such a diagnosis: there was also the apparent failure to communicate thoughts and feelings, or else their expression in strange and distorted form. Such patients typically appeared to be locked in a world of their own and cut off from external reality, so that their drawings or paintings seemed to offer a way of ‘getting a picture’ of their inner mental processes. The wish to get inside someone else’s head via the images they have made is not particular to psychiatry: it is part of a whole complex of recurring collective fantasies about art and the imagination. Suffice it to say for the moment that the assumption that psychotic art was compulsive or unconscious in its creation, and that it was associated with powerful hallucinations or delusions, often of a markedly visual nature, made it seem plausible that it directly mirrored a patient’s mental processes.

            But an additional reason for early psychiatric interest in psychotic art was a more strictly diagnostic one: if distortions in the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of language could be treated as symptomatic indications of underlying thought disorder, then surely there were equivalent rules governing the ‘proper’ use of the formal language of art, in particular the representation of the human body, that could serve the same purpose. Such assumptions are still the basis for many current psychiatric ‘projective’ tests (for example, the ‘Draw A Person’ test). Likewise, distortions apparent in their depiction of the human body were, and still are, seen from a strictly symptomatic perspective, ignoring both the clumsiness of the untrained and the possibility of play or irony. Most notoriously, an undated selection of Louis Wain’s cat images is frequently to be found in psychiatric textbooks illustrating the gradual disruption of representation, supposedly symptomatic of corresponding distortions of perception.  

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