The canvas of a schizophrenic: Art as a subjective story

Abstract

From a psychoanalytic perspective, in psychosis that which not found a place in the symbolic network returns in the real and has effects of overflow and fragmentation on the imaginary, which can lead the subject to the gradual disintegration of his ego. Our work outlines a psychoanalytic reading of the pictorial work of the schizophrenic artist Louis Wain in which this disintegration can be seen reflected in the artist's works, which show anthropomorphized cats, with which he identified himself, a reference to his self-image. Art is configured as a know-how with emptiness, with the tears of the real. The work of art contains a message about the subject that escapes the word but is captured on the canvas as something that can be readable, as an enigma on the subject that can offer a possible interpretation from psychoanalysis.