ABSTRACT
Near the end of high school, following nine months in a psychiatric hospital and a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the author found that she could not draw in perspective; something was "off" in her seeing that inhabited her drawing. As she turns to writing about the art of psychotic patients she cannot go about it any other way but in pieces, gathered to evoke rather than to explain. The artists present singular works that speak to anyone who wonders about psychosis as a lived experience, anyone who believes in the power of art. Intentionally, the author keeps her responses brief, and intersperse them with quotations that adumbrate what she is seeing and seeking. Religious motifs put to some idiosyncratic use no longer belong to collective belief, but are part of the artist's singular vision. The body of the psychotic becomes open to every kind of fantasmic capture by the other.
