This article focuses on religiousness and spirituality in the art works of psychiatric patients of Nikkilä Hospital, Finland. The pictures analysed here belong to a collection held at the Helsinki City Museum and they were made during the twentieth century. The theoretical frame of the study is a cultural study of mental health. The collection is approached as presenting a specific kind of imagery which has connections not only to the personal history and diagnoses of the patients; their cultural context (...) and hospital environment is also taken into account. The religiousness and spirituality of the Nikkilä collection are also compared with outsider art and examples of art history internationally. (shrink)

This is the study of the creative potential of mediumship. It emphasizes a neglected and under-conceptualized form of creativity in the realm of personality development. Examples include the cases of mediums Pearl Curran, Hélѐne Smith, and Matthew Manning. Artists with mediumistic propensities are stressed, such as Keats, Rimbaud, Blake, Yeats, and James Merrill. There is discussion of Myers' theory of genius and how this bears on the concept of personal transformation. Myers' theory is used to shed light on Surrealism, outsider (...) art, and the lives of Socrates and Joan of Arc. All this is comprehended under the Keatsian rubric of "soulmaking." Keywords: mediumship--creativity--multiplicity. (shrink)