It is known that formerly the families threw the
crazy boats under the river, as insane loads. These boats received the name of ship of the
crazy. Insane asylums didn't still exist and the society implanted the system of isolating
them through the water. Of city in city they were rejected. During centuries, they spread
insanity, they had a good time the children and they astonished the medieval men's
imagination. On that exact moment, the water was the only and last inhabitable territory.
That, it can be said that the water was always helping of the madness, that water and
madness linked in the past. As thus her can affirm that today the madness is linked to the
highways. The wanderer in its dust ship, this is the poetic image of the modern insanity.
There is who also says that the artists and the crazy are consanguineous brothers, that
schizophrenia and art, delirium and inspiration are fruits of the same pulse.
The best declaration in this sense, was we given by the Catalan painter
Salvador Dalí: "The only difference between me and the crazy, is that I am not
crazy". Several consecrated artists went by insane asylums and many never came back
of there, as sculptress Camille Claudel, whose work was exposed, in 1998, in the main
capitals of the Country. The painter Hieronimus Bosch, considered by many the father of
the surrealism, left several screens whose thematic it was the madness. In the acervo of
the Museum of the Grassland, in Madri, they meet its best works, between them, the picture
"The Extraction of the Stone of the Madness." Bosch had the audacity of painting
the man just as him it is in its interior, while the others limited to the appearances
". There are not registrations that he has had mental disturbances during its
longevity, however, one cannot say the same of another artists.
Vicent van Gogh, the celebrated of everybody, at the present time, it
passed good part of its life if negotiating with medical psychiatrists, that didn't
understand it not even they recognized its genius. Artaud, whose expression originality
located more and more in "states dangerous of being", it felt in the pelt the
psychiatric internment. In Brazil, Arthur Bispo do Rosário is the example more classic of
the blood between schizophrenia and art. Confined in the Psychiatric Hospital Juliano
Moreira, where 50 years of its life it passed, Bishop created an unprecedented work in the
Country and perhaps in the own history of the art. The brilliant artists' list that faced
phases of serious mental disturbances it is vast: Nijinsky, Qorpo Santo, Dostoievsky, and
Baudelaire...
Located in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of the Unconscious is the exact
proof that the insane asylums are replete of geniuses. In the last decades, they lived
names there as Fernando Diniz, Rafael, Carlos, Emygdio and many other. The acervo is
incalculable. Dra created the Museum. Nise da Silveira and it innovated in the treatment
to the crazy. Instead of torturing them with eletrochoques, the cure was looked for
through the art. Jung, that visited the Museum, you would have said to her: "If you
didn't study the mythical themes, you can never understand the painting of its sick
ones". It is that, for Jung, the mythical archetypes are of universal stamp, they
involve the man's reality and it is through where the images of the schizophrenic world
flow when the ego if shatter.
Dra. Nise, for its time, thought, only the occupations that served of
individualized means of expression, they would take to the cure. The art critic Mário
Pedrosa visited the Museum in the decade of forty and it was admired with the quality of
the plastic production. "One of the most powerful functions of the art is the
revelation of the unconscious, and this is so mysterious in the normal as in the abnormal.
The images of the unconscious are just a symbolic language that the psychiatrist has for
should decipher. But nobody impedes that those images and signs are, beyond, harmonious,
seductive, dramatic, alive or beautiful, constituting in itself true works of art".