To the “Infinite Spaces of Creation”: The Interior Landscape of a Schizophrenic Artist

Abstract

Abstract Of the personal worlds that fall within the domain of geography, the the world of the schizophrenic is perhaps the most distinctive. Schizophrenics possess a subjective world imagery that reflects their past experience, family background, delusions, hallucinations, cognitive processes, and quests for order. These imageries are, on rare occasions, expressed in art. The art of Adolf Wölfli offers a glimpse of schizophrenic images and perceptions and enables us to enter a world otherwise enshrouded in mystery. Our revelations on the world view of an incarcerated schizophrenic enable scholars to add a profoundly subjective geography to their repertoire and to their understandings of the most personal of worlds.