ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the figure of the psychiatrist and argues that for the centrality of empathetic, attentive listening in any act of psychiatric care, and then the chapter considers the spaces in which those dialogues have been staged. It examines how artists have figured the asylum, the hospital, and the community in order to understand the human and aesthetic meanings of space in mental care contexts and practices. The chapter discusses though, a third dropped stitch in the knit of this story: culture. Alongside the drubbing of orders of power through form, the visual tessellation of the film creates an asphyxiating sense of time. The long slow pan of the camera across the exercise yard, for example, captures men filling time in order to waste it. Perhaps the most remarked-upon scene from Titicut Follies is the force-feeding of a naked, emaciated patient by a smoking Doctor whose fag ash teeters nonchalantly over the funnel of liquid.
