‘A riveting tale, brilliantly told' Philippe Sands The little-known story of Hitler’s war on modern art and the mentally ill.

How is madness experienced, treated, and represented? How might art think around – and beyond – psychiatric definitions of illness and wellbeing? Madness, Art, and Society engages with artistic practices from theatre and live art to graphic fiction, charting a multiplicity of ways of thinking critically with, rather than about, non-normative psychological experience. It is organised into two parts: ‘Structures: psychiatrists, institutions, treatments’, illuminates the environments, figures and primary models of psychiatric care, reconsidering their history and contemporary manifestations through case studies including David Edgar’s Mary Barnes and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Experiences: realities, bodies, moods’, promblematises diagnostic categories and proposes more radically open models of thinking in relation to experiences of madness, touching upon works such as Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places, and Things. Reading its case studies as a counter-discourse to orthodox psychiatry, Madness, Art, and Society seeks a more nuanced understanding of the plurality of madness in society, and in so doing, offers an outstanding resource for students and scholars alike.

Recently interest has surged in what Jean Dubuffet called Art Brut, “raw art” produced by persons operating outside cultural norms, reflecting inner need rather than any “official” artistic attitude. Of the known practitioners of Art Brut, one of the most gifted was the Swiss peasant Adolf Wölfli. From 1895, when he was thirty-one, until his death in 1930, Wölfli was incarcerated in Waldau hospital, severely afflicted with rage and depression. Supplied with colored pencils and paper by his primary physician, Walter Morgenthaler, he began to draw. Morgenthaler’s pathbreaking study of Wölfli and his art, published in 1921, aimed at the center of contemporary debates about the relationships between creativity, madness, and art. This first English-language edition includes twenty-four color reproductions of Wölfli’s art and Wölfli’s brief account of his own life.

Madness and Modernism provides a phenomenological study of schizophrenic disorders, criticizing some standard conceptions of these disorders. Sass argues that many aspects of this group of disorders can actually involve more sophisticated (albeit dysfunctional) forms of mind and experience.

Coming of age on Park Avenue in the 1950s, Anne Roiphe had an adolescence entrenched in privilege, petticoats, and social rules. Young women at the time were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes, and became one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, sometimes with her young child in tow. For a time she was satisfied to play the muse, but at the age of twenty-seven, divorced and finally freed of the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art, she began to write. Here, in her clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed memoir, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.

Legendary game designer American McGee created one of the most visually arresting games of all time in Alice. Eleven years later, McGee returns with a sequel just as groundbreaking as his critically acclaimed classic—Alice: Madness Returns! Dark Horse and Spicy Horse studio invite Alice fans to take a journey through the wonderland of American McGee's imagination for an unprecedented look at the creation of this magnificent and disturbing world. With an introduction by McGee, The Art of Alice offers an intimate look into the stunning and terrifying artwork behind this blockbuster reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's enduring masterpiece!

Eighteen psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals describe the work, lives, and personalities of sixteen famous artists, writers, and musicians, examining their art from an esthetic viewpoint and also as reflections of the artists' emotional lives.