Person in Art

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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 co-operative 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 perceptions 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.