Irina Terekhova

Thèse en cours sous la direction de Vincent Barras, IHM

Faculté des Lettres , Université de Lausanne

Résumé

Over the course of time that psychiatry exists, it was recognized that delusional ideas and hallucinations like no other clinical entities are a mirror of the historical epoch and the social environment. During the period of fin-de-siècle alongside with the public's apparent interest in mysticism, a departure from reality and withdrawal into itself, art became a series of free experiments in the construction of a new libertarian order. Artists suffered a collective preoccupation with decay, suffering and death. New techniques, which were simultaneously self-expressive and socially disruptive parade themselves one after the other. At this historical moment, art was cleared of a function of providing illusions to prettify life and became ugly in a true Dyonisian Nietzschean way, who envisioned ugliness as a process of artistic liberation.Modern art sought essential meaning of revolution in liberation of a subjectivity, seething with revolt and spontaneous creativity. The same creative forces of given period gave rise to the development of new philosophical thought introducing processism in philosophy (Whitehead «process and reality», Wittgenstein «Tractatus logico-philosophicus», Max «Analisys of feelings», Schopenhauer «World as Will and Representation»), laid the foundation for a rise of psychiatry (Emil Kraepelin , Eugen Beuler, Carl Jung) and the birth of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud) with its fashion for private asylums and general aspiration for interpretation of dreams. Asylums in-vouge, «I’iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere» discussed in intellectual circles and mentally ill observations being showcased to public in summary prerequisited popularization of mentally ill aesthetics and stirred up a mass fascination with products of schizophrenic mind, art (Hanz Prinzhorn Collection of the L'art brut) and patients themselves. Body and soul of a human being were both dissected in becoming common autopsy practice from one side and in the cabinets of psychoanalysts from the other...