Degenerate Art and Mad Art

Original in German

               Degenerate Art and Mad Art¹
   by
   Carl Schneider, Heidelberg.
                                                   Head of Heidelberg University Psychiatry
                                                                 (Received 19 March 1939)

                                                                     Source: Archive for Psychiatry - Volume 110


After a tour of the exhibition "Degenerate Art", every sane and clear-thinking person will feel a deep sense of satisfaction and gratitude that such a "spook in German life" is now finally a thing of the past.
For every true German who visits the halls of art feels the need to be uplifted and liberated at the same time and to find in the work of art the simple, true and noble image of his life captured and portrayed in words, pictures, sculpture and architecture according to its innermost essence. We do not wish for cloying kitsch, but rather for the elevation of the essence; we do not wish for abstract evaporation, but rather for an image that is close to nature and life; we do not wish for the shivers of horror, guilt and lust, but rather for the reverent and devout immersion in the wonders of an unbiased and powerful life. And we refuse to be deceived by superficial idealisation about the difficulties of life or to be distracted from the essential core of all natural events by intoxication and contentless formal representation.

We therefore thank the artist when he tames our aspirations, our looking, our feeling and our thinking in all their fullness, truthfully and beautifully, in his work, and thereby succeeds in balancing and mastering by deepening the tensions which we have not succeeded in eliminating. For then we feel that it is given to him to rise from obscurity into brightness and at the same time to clarify in his purest essence what we felt only darkly. He becomes our educator by finding the word for what we felt and could not put into words; by teaching us to see what in form, colour and shape we had only a vague grasp of; by showing us in sculpture the formation of our body and the play of the limbs to calm admiration and by creating for us in the mighty building the festive space in which our life may rise to higher and firmer communion.

Through this ability to express what lives in us, to form what surges in us in an unshaped way, through the gift of allowing us to experience more deeply in the work of art the community of our innermost feelings and wills, and thereby to unite us in a nobler community, the true artist becomes at all times a truly leading co-educator of his people.

As with every human being who clarifies, elevates and enriches our lives and ultimately also makes them easier through the representation of the essential, the feeling also arises in us towards the artist that his gift establishes a natural primacy, a natural nobility of the person. And this feeling, which is the root of our veneration for the artist, is all the more gratifying the richer he is able to develop his talent.

This feeling of the artist's special position in nature already stimulates us to think about where the artist gets the abilities and the strength to create. This reflection on the reasons for the artist's natural talent is heightened by the observation made early on that the artist, both at the moment of creative development and often throughout his life, is burdened with tensions unknown to the average person. Often enough, they force the artist to subordinate himself to his talent, which raises his way of life out of the ordinary. This raises the question of the essence of artistic creation.

Until about the beginning of the 19th century, there were two opposing views on the solutions to such questions, through which one tried to understand the essence of artistic creation.
The first saw the tension at the centre of the artist's life, the rapturous devotion to the work, the overwhelming of the idea received, the intoxication of creation that overcomes everything, but at the same time also the artist's almost prophetic ability to form the still unformed. And just as it seemed appropriate to this view to ascribe to the seer the ability to experience the secrets of the future in direct contact with the divinity through inspiration and revelation, so it seemed only natural to it that the artist, like the raging seer who was seized by the divinity in the truest sense of the word, should also receive his work directly through the divinity.

According to this, artistry is rooted in the ecstatic madness of the supernatural connection with the divinity. God uses the artist as an instrument of revelation, just as in religious and unique revelation he makes his will known to the prophet in a wonderfully supernatural way. It is the conception of the southern people of various races that has confronted us here since time immemorial ². It has the consequence that the artist appears as an instrument seized by incomprehensible providence, that he can basically do nothing for his art and its maturation, that he receives the work without being in himself distinguished in his natural constitution and nature, and that he is detached from the sphere of other men who, with the contrition and unredeemedness of the unredeemed, may gaze in wonder and shudder at the work finally produced. The artist's inability to make himself and others aware of the ultimate intellectual roots of creative intuitions has always been cited (e.g. also by Lombroso) as proof of this view.

The second view has been native to the Germanic-Nordic habitat since time immemorial and has migrated with Germanic-Nordic man wherever he has come. In this view, too, the artist appears as a tool of providence. But in a completely different way. In the artist, Providence does not use a supernatural process, but the natural laws of life, which are inherent in human life in general, as the means necessary to educate people to a higher education and to shape their lives and themselves. The artist received his gift from his race, through heredity; he is the nobler educated and his gift is the higher or highest perfection of precisely what we are. He received his ennobling natural gift, but not the work. This he has to create and develop in his own work, in iron self-education, in persistent maturing, so that it may do ever better justice to its educational destiny.

Thus his gift becomes a natural good which imposes responsibility and obligation on him, which he serves no differently than we serve our responsibilities and obligations, only admittedly on a higher and therefore more difficult level and with only greater and more ruthless self-investment. While he rises above us like every nobleman, he nevertheless remains connected with us in life and commitment, he remains obliged to us like every educator and leader, and therefore, precisely because we venerate him, he remains inwardly close to us and understandable to us³. Here it is not denied that creative intuition in its ultimate mental and spiritual sources can only rarely be made conscious. But these sources were nevertheless felt as the result of one's own life, and the process of the creative intuitive fusion of all thought germs into artistic experience or deed is interpreted as a natural process of life, which is nothing more mysterious than the gifts one received in the first place.

Significantly, it is a Jew, Lombrose, who first formulates it, after a few little-known precursors such as Moreau and Hagen, in a way that has become authoritative for further treatment.
By referring to the ancient writers, distorting the ecstatic, visionary rapture of the thinkers of antiquity into a common mental illness in the materialist view of the nineteenth century, he first presents the proposition that genius and insanity are originally related as a truth that unfortunately cannot be avoided, even if it is paradoxical, in order to then make it probable by means of a series of assertions, the most important of which are the following:⁴

The artist and genius in general, just like the sane person, are said to be connected with the insane only in countless gradations (p. 254), since in the realm of nature there are no steps and leaps at all. Only this makes it understandable why great progress is so often realised by fools or half-fools. Only in them could one find the originality as in the geniuses and at the same time the necessary extravagance (p. 254); one need only unite the unshakable fanatical conviction of the madman with the calculating cunning of the genius (p. 257), and one would have the power capable of stirring up the dull masses. Genius shows a wealth of morbid traits in its passion, in the unconsciousness of the formation of ideas (pp. 7, 11), in the excessive sensitivity of the senses (p. 18), in the tendency to disorder that is also characteristic of the fool (p. 32), in the originality that is also characteristic of the fool (p. 33).

Lombroso's devaluation of talent is accompanied by an astonishing appreciation of the art of lunacy for the time. Lunatic poetry is compared with poetry in general in terms of choice of words, subject matter and rhythm, and everywhere reference is made to alleged affinities. The sources of the art of the insane, and at the same time the contact with genius, lie in the fullness of insight of the mentally ill, in the heightened power of thought, in the heightened rhythm and the heightened emotional storms (pp. 131f., 180, 181, 183).

If the symbolic character and the obscene are more prominent in the materials of the madmen, then this, like other less essential features, is only an indication of the kinship of madman's work with the art of the Stone Age, the art of primitive peoples (pp. 210, 211, 218, 2153), and at the same time proof that the drive to create art, which lies dormant in all human beings, has been buried by civilisation. Essentially through the same processes it is disinhibited in genius and in madness (p. 212).

The influence of the stars on the birth and creation of genius is said to have taken the place of divine inspiration. In any case, no actual work of thought and work on oneself is necessary (p. 61) and the origin of the genius as well as the mental constitution of their descendants and their own allegedly so frequent illnesses from mental disorders prove all the more how precariously close the creative deed of the genius and the delusional idea of the mentally ill are to be placed biologically.

At one point in his work, Lombroso praises the importance of the Jews for the development of the revolutionary ideas of the 19th century, and indeed, one finds in Lombroso's formulation sufficient affinities with the ideas of class struggle, the materialist conception of face and Marxist conception of life, as well as the celebration even of criminal subhumanity, to recognise that he had gone to Marx's school and was racially related to him.

This racial and spiritual rootedness at the same time pointed the direction of the further development and effect of Lombroso's assertions, as well as limiting the main circle of people who were capable of further education or felt called to it: Marxists, Communists, Jews, whom the liberalists of all shades joined in these questions of art as well as in politics, all only an example of the same development known to all of them arising from the inner kinship of liberalism and Marxism.

At first, Lombroso's assertions found little echo in the life of the nation as a whole. The healthy outlook on life of the overwhelming majority of the people rejected them. But with the increasing decay of national life and with the increasing Communist assertion, the growing disunity and weakness of the non-Marxist sections of the people, it gained in importance and finally became a widespread opinion. Partly it was perceived as a tingling sensation, partly it gave a seemingly plausible explanation to superficial and shallow thinking, partly, based on similar teachings of psychoanalysis and individual psychology, one could deny the primacy of the artist. One could see not strength and talent, but weakness and illness, or at best their overcompensation, in the artist's work and thus gain a convenient excuse for one's own inability, for a lack of creative power, for one's own sickliness and unworthiness.

To the serious thinker, however, at least the question as such seemed worth examining. He thought that the sentence that nature does not make any leaps could indeed be understood in such a way that artistic creativity is connected to the norm through countless transitions. And since psychiatry, on the other hand, taught him just such transitions between mental health and mental illness in the field of so-called deviant characters and psychopathies, right down to the finest ramifications of character, thought and attitude to life, he too was at least prepared for the political attack that was now being attempted on art and also, with the help of art, on the life of the nation as a whole.⁵

With the seizure of power by National Socialism, the ground was initially taken away from all of these intermingled assertions and effects, which supported each other because of their similar ideological underpinnings. However, they still circulate, partly openly and partly in disguise, and through their pseudo-scientific nature they exert a suggestive power on the untrained, which is capable of inhibiting the complete recovery of the overall völkisch conception in the field of art and art education and must therefore be destroyed.

Basically, after Lombroso, no essentially new basic ideas were added to the conception he had developed. On the other hand, some of his assertions were exaggerated to the extreme, for example when the Jew Herzfelde, as early as 1914, made the mentally ill the very model of the healthy artist. In addition, the art of the insane was elevated to general significance for artistic creation by a dialectic that was not immediately obvious, for example, when on the one hand its study was regarded as an essential task of science, and on the other hand the products of degenerate art, which were often so very similar to the art of the insane, were labelled as important masterpieces and now, through the vain proof of a vain higher humanity of the materials treated in the art of the insane, the artist tried to stimulate the production of related representations.

In so far as serious researchers examined the art of the insane, they were usually unable to detach themselves from the perspective of the time. Without their wanting to, their explanations could therefore be made useful for the same purpose of inciting the artist to degenerate production. At the same time, however, by elevating the art of error to the status of so-called high art, it was possible to obscure the unbiased view of the people, who, precisely when a well-known artist falls mentally ill as a result of an unfortunate hereditary connection or some other cause, take an understandable interest in the personal fate of this artist.

For by searching with persistent single-mindedness the lives and families of eminent artists for morbid incidents, in order to support the assertion that genius and insanity spring from the same root, the effect of genius on the healthy average man was placed basically on the same line with the unprejudiced man's shudder at insanity⁶. The admiration, veneration and allegiance of the people towards genius then becomes a neurosis caused by a kind of hypnotic effect and suggestion ("fascination"). Of course, the free and independent citizen of the liberalist age had to keep himself free of this neurosis because, trained by psychoanalysis and modern psychotherapy, he could recognise that the effect of genius did not address the higher spirituality to which Marxism and liberalism wanted to liberate him, but only his more or less animalistic instincts of dependence and subjugation inherited from the Stone Age, or in the jargon of the schools, his masochistic urges. That the veneration for genius grows out of the experience of cultural, political or social liberation, that genius is venerated and famous because the values it creates produce actual objective, psychological and biological effects, is thus denied. The whole effect of genius is a "spook", caused by the fascination of the good average man as a result of the mystery in the abnormal !

While the liberating, ennobling, enriching, and especially the educationally stimulating effect of the gifted artist of all genres was thus distorted by the disparagement of the effect of genius into the neuroticising contagion that questionable spirits exert on one another, and at the same time the decent needs of the healthy average man for allegiance to the noble were poisoned by their equation with sexual bondage processes of degenerate psychopaths, the ungifted were given a free path to equality with the genius, especially if, as a psychopath, he brought with him an original understanding for all such exaggeration of the differences in values between human beings, which are in themselves biologically based.

On closer examination, however, the whole edifice of thought, so complex and supposedly constructed with compelling scientific consistency, rests on a rather shaky foundation. For even the most comprehensive compilation of all artists and geniuses who have ever been mentally ill would never in itself have justified the assertion that genius arises from madness, that mental illness is the basis of artistic talent, since there are enough artists and geniuses who have undoubtedly remained sane, but at most the assertion that both unfortunately occur side by side in the same person with a certain frequency, but thank God at least rarely. In order to protect the artist and the genius from this fate, which destroys his achievements, this should of course have led to the investigation of the causes which caused the occasional coexistence of genius and a predisposition to mental disorders.

Apart from cases of mental illness of the artist as a result of some external cause, this could only lie in heredity and, just as one had recognised the independent heredity of countless physical characteristics, one would also have recognised the independent possibility of heredity of the various physical characteristics. Thus, just as one had recognised the independent heredity of countless physical characteristics, one would also have had to examine the independent heredity of the most diverse mental dispositions; consequently, also the incessant hereditability of the dispositions to "genius" and to "madness", whereby - no matter how complicated the hereditary processes of both dispositions may be - at least the fundamental biological difference of "genius and madness" would have been recognised and the whole thesis would have been brought down. Of course, the insight into the biological independence of individual mental dispositions was consistently prevented by the traditional concepts of spirit and soul.

Consequently, it would have been logical to protect the genius by means of a suitable hereditary care of the people, so that its high and noble qualities would not be interspersed with diseased qualities through the action of the general laws of heredity and thereby possibly be abandoned to destruction. Instead of this, however, the soon generally implanted opinion that basically some kind of madness is the root of all higher artistic and creative achievement led to the completely absurd fear, still held by many people today, that the eradication of morbid dispositions by means of hereditary health legislation could at the same time lead to the eradication of high talents. This opinion, however, is wrong because the aptitudes of all kinds are inherited independently of each other, just like all other aptitudes.

It is therefore quite possible to gradually eliminate one of the unfavourable ones from the people and to preserve the other favourable, nobler, higher, more valuable one through suitable hereditary care. Where this cannot or will not be seen in the case of the mental faculties, it is only due to an erroneous conception of the structure of the soul's life, produced by the traditional metaphysical or religious views of the world, whether it be idealistic, monistic, materialistic, positivistic, dualistic, scepticistic, criticalistic, or otherwise clothed in some other way, or, for my part, arising from some theory of interaction between spirit and body.
Thus, by mixing up all the natural differences between the healthy average human being, the highly gifted artist and the less gifted or the mentally ill person whose original talent has been destroyed by an unfortunate hereditary disease, the insight into the natural differences, also existing in the artistic creative process, of the mental life processes to be compared with each other has also been destroyed.

How abstractly and conceptually one proceeded in researching them, despite all pseudo-exactness, is shown most clearly by Prinzhorn's doctrine, based on Klages, of the dominant position of the inner image in the artistic creative process. According to him, the pictorial works of the sick also have one thing in common psychologically with art, that they are attempts at creation. Let us leave aside the fact that, in the course of the representation, the attempts at creation gradually transform themselves into successful creations for Prinzhorn through the dialectic already indicated, because they should each time give sufficient expression to the inner impulse from which they arose.

We then hear that the perfection of a work and its rank are determined only by its rhythmic vitality, by "the highest vitality in perfect design" and that every other concept of art makes use of inadmissible cultural "auxiliary points of view", through which the actual creative process of the soul is obscured and at the same time the metaphysical meaning of design is concealed, which Prinzhorn understands entirely in the sense of Klagessian metaphysics of expression. Art belongs to the expressive facts in which the soul appears directly. First of all, this need for expression is not determined by objects at all and is joined by the instinct to play and the instinct to decorate as equally indeterminate mental impulses. If the tendency to order, the instinct to imitate and the need for symbolism are added, the circle of the psychic sources of art is outlined and clear psychological concepts supposedly take the place of the psychologically incomprehensible processes of the imagination.

These sources of art are said to prevail in every human being, in the child as well as in the Negro, in the adult as well as in the artist. But in so far as the art arising from these sources is aimed at representation, which is not at all necessary, since it can also express itself in symbols, it is aimed at a visual image. It is always a matter of transforming a visual image into a spatial-physical form, and the basic psychological process is always the same. All the differences in representation, conception and reproaches that occur in the work are of secondary importance, are stylistically formal peculiarities that are basically irrelevant. For they only concern the attitude of the creator to his object. This attitude, however, can be as close to nature as it is distant from nature, or even completely abstract, without touching the actual essence of the basic artistic process^₇.

This, however, creates the prerequisite for blurring all actual differences between works of art and the degenerate art-like products and the pathological results of pathological processes of the soul. For art then lies solely in the production of inner images of any kind. These, however they may be constituted as facts of expression, have an absolutely metaphysical intrinsic value, and whoever produces them in himself, consciously or unconsciously, in health or disease, creates art, whether he scribbles like the child or paints like Rembrandt.

If the same tendencies are to a large extent evident in such explanations as those already encountered in Lombroso and Lange-Eichbaum, then in them the dialectic of the decomposition of art was nevertheless taken a step further within the framework of Klage's cosmic philosophy of the soul, seemingly scientifically secured by the progress of graphology because it was based on it, and at the same time the door to art was opened to every non-artist, because everyone, even the non-artistic person, if only he had a sufficient lack of self-criticism, could now claim that his need for expression, which came to expression in visual images, also had metaphysical justification and stemmed from the world feeling of the time. In addition, anyone could counter any objection as to why he did not paint or create in the same way as Leibl or Myron or write poetry like Schiller with the assertion that he had chosen the abstract formal representation and the symbolic character. But as far as the artist himself did not say so, others did it for him, art dealers of all political persuasions and art critics, but especially the communists and Jews among them who were interested in decay.

Whoever, as a psychiatrist, has the opportunity to examine the visual images of the sick more closely, will recognise that they have a completely different structure than those of the healthy and that even in the healthy, in the course of development from child to old man, a constant biologically based transformation of all vividly imagined, pictorially fantasising processes of the soul is observed.

Whoever took the trouble to study the visual images of the healthy, the sick and the artists in a comparative way would have had to describe the maturation processes of the visual imagination in the healthy person. This has not yet been done with sufficient scientific precision'. But whoever takes the trouble to do so will immediately notice that the ingenious or highly gifted person already behaves differently from the average in this respect in his youth, that a similar difference - admittedly in the different inner structure of the soul's processes - is observed between the mature artist and the average adult, and that the same applies to old age. Again, the alteration of the originally healthy imaginative activity through mental illness to the manifold forms of pathological imaginative activity up to the hallucination, which is completely out of the realm of the normal, and which occupies a special biological position, means a series for it.

The same point of view applies, by the way, to the evaluation of the products of the creative urge. Whoever wanted to arrive at scientific knowledge here, but above all at a knowledge corresponding to the actual biology of the soul's life, would have had to draw a line from children's art via Negro art⁸ to mad art and from this via degenerate art to what we call art in general, he would have had to compare the doodling or attempted drawing of the average person or the juvenile works of the Dadaists and Cubists with the first or juvenile works of gifted or brilliant artists, the piano masterpieces of the average child with the first compositions of Mozart, the self-made birthday poem that the later Expressionist poet once wrote as a child with the childlike poetry of Goethe. The same would have been done in the comparison of artistic maturation processes. Then, of course, the comparison of the average artist and the pseudo-artist predisposed to degenerate art with the truly gifted or the genius would have become even more cloudy. For with all truly bio-logically founded dispositions and qualities, artistic ability also shares this one decisive characteristic, that it develops according to a law peculiar to it - partly with the help of the environment - matures, transforms itself within certain limits and only dies out completely with death. Whoever cannot show such a development does not have the 14lerkmal or only has the disposition for it to a modest extent. And so it is no wonder that the mentally ill, the average man, the psychopath, the degenerate artist lack such processes of artistic maturation and development.

The mentally ill person in particular is incapable of such biological development, even if he had brought with him some modest or significant predisposition to art. For the illness bends the original development, it replaces the natural development with the pathological development or, in many mental disorders, with the extinction of all biological possibilities of development of the original dispositions.

This makes it impossible to equate the creative processes, even the mere need for expression in the artist and the average, even for members of the same people or the same races. Only in the case of identical identical twins would the biological prerequisites for such similarity be given. In view of the different races, it is necessary, in contrast to the increasingly popular classification of primitive art, especially of Negro art, in the total art of humanity since Lombroso, to make clear, apart from the appropriate transfer of the investigation of the respective processes of maturation, the difference which is given by the development of Nordic art since the time of the Teutons and the Greeks up to the present day, in all its fullness of form and expressive power, in comparison with Negro art.

It is therefore also wrong when we are repeatedly assured that civilisation has buried the original artistic impulses that are present in all human beings, that in the neurotic, in the psychopath, in the mentally ill, the original biologic forces still unfold in order to overcome these inhibitions coming from civilisation.

It is assumed (and often enough explicitly asserted) that, just as in the case of the Negro, there is also a (supposedly similar) primitive basic soul layer in every German. This is usually called the archaic-primitive layer of the soul. According to the teachings of numerous (Jewish!) psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, it is said to express itself particularly easily in the mentally ill, but also in the nervous and the psychopathic; it appears tangibly here; but it forms, so to speak, the actual supporting layer of human life in general. In it, supposedly, especially for all those who believe in Freud, there is the symbolic disguise of all thoughts, feelings, constructions of the human spirit and all 'wishes, hopes and needs of the human heart. They consist of complexly undivided total experiences in which all the individual factors can be synonymous with one another, so that a line can mean a house, a house can mean the world, the world can mean heaven, heaven can mean sexual life, the earth as the womb of all life can mean the female reproductive organs. One gets the impression from the authors' assurances that this layer is not only the root of the entire culture, but also the unity of the human race, perhaps even the element that essentially determines man.

But there has never been even a shadow of proof that the primitive instincts of a healthy German are biologically identical with those of a Cameroonian or Indian. On the contrary, whoever, in order to verify this doctrine of the archaic primitive layers of the soul, undertook to psychologically dissect in greater detail the primal instincts and the most primitive impulses of thought and desire of healthy and sick people of the German nation, came upon the irreconcilable differences in the soul life of the Nordic races. Even where we feel and think more or less dreamingly or casually or even superstitiously and fearfully in twilight overall experiences, it is impossible for us to experience, think or perform the symbols and complexes accessible to the Jew, the Negro or the Indian. It is not this, then, that may be denied, that we too know crepuscular regions of our soul-life, but this must and may be denied, that these correspond to the crepuscular or developed regions of the soul-life of the Jew, Negro and Indian.

The same is true of the alleged correspondence between the sick feeling and thinking and the primitive thought-forms of individual races and peoples. Mental illness shows its peculiarity in that it increases the tendency to live in twilight regions of the soul, sometimes making these regions the sole spheres of life. But these dim and confused processes of the soul are not the same as those of the healthy, nor are the biological barriers which exist between the races, even in the depths of the soul's life, broken down by the disease. Drastically speaking, the mentally ill German who lives in twilight delusions does not become a normal Negro who thinks in archaic primitive symbols, and certainly not a mentally ill Negro; indeed, he does not even merely sink back to the level of the primitive mental strata of a Negro. But even the proof has not been attempted as to how the mentally ill Negro relates to his normal archaic-primitive thinking. The whole alleged line of argument is nothing more than a juggling with spiritualised, abstractly applied concepts, with arbitrarily interpreted and poorly observed psychological facts of various kinds.

However, it is peculiar to many disease processes that they lead the life processes, and especially the mental life processes, back to more primitive levels. Thus all sick people and psychopaths of all degrees and shades think and feel, strive and want more unclearly, more vaguely, more inconstantly than the healthy and even more so than the gifted. And as they are usually also more cowardly, more unstable, more unmanly, and more instinctless than the healthy and the gifted, they are also more inclined and more apt to adopt the obscurities, the blurriness, the primitive symbols and interpretations of others, even of other races. It was therefore quite clear that they had to respond in the first place when the alien and primitive symbols and the abstract formal ornamental forms of the primitives were offered to them as models of their activity.

Here lies the key to the fact that degenerate art had to become a truly sick art at the same time. For here, as in all such cases, the outermost wing, i.e. the mentally ill, gradually took the lead, so to speak. The other more or less degenerates, and especially the Communist Jews, aligned themselves with him. In doing so, the quite essential differences that still exist between the most absurd product of a genius and the pathological product of the delusions of a mentally ill person were suppressed, and examples of both were juxtaposed as alleged proofs of the inner uniformity and biological as well as artistic equivalence of all creation in the healthy and the sick. But it is a generally valid law that the healthy person can never imitate the sick person faithfully. Even if he tries to imitate the disease exactly, he will only produce a false distorted image of it, because the healthy life process cannot simply be transformed into the sick one.

This is as true of the artificially produced wound as it is of the feigned or imagined mental illness, or of the mental illness portrayed by the actor or the poet. And this law is also valid in the visual arts. If the painter does not simply copy a lunatic structure, which he would hardly stoop to do - at any rate I am not aware of such a case - but if he tries to produce a structure similar to lunatic art out of his own imagination, he would show the characteristics of the exaggeration of individual features, of arbitrarily distorted and arbitrarily absurd meaning, of arbitrary distortion in the inner relationships of the individual parts of the structure to one another; one would see how he tries to avoid the urge for harmonious design, for the compositionally appropriate structuring of the individual parts of the work, that is, precisely the same thing as he tries to avoid in his own imagination.

This is exactly what we see in attempts to simulate mental disorders or in certain hysterics who want to appear deluded. If, however, we look from this point of view at the works of normal artists usually compared with degenerate and insane art, e.g. Prinzhorn's examples, they do not even show these characteristics of an attempt to imitate the pathological, but even the boldest imagination of the genius who consciously wants to create the abnormal (e.g. monstrosities, representations of the insane, the insane, the insane, the insane, the insane, the insane). Even the boldest imagination of the genius who consciously wants to create the abnormal (e.g. monstrosities, depictions of hell and its spawn and the like) always leads to a sensible arrangement, to compositional unity, i.e. to features that are absent from the lunatic construct.
We need not concern ourselves with the extent to which this also applies to the comparison of Mad Art and Negro Art. But we recognise precisely from such features that conversely, or whoever succeeded in creating so-called art products which can hardly be distinguished from lunatic art, must himself, if not be mentally ill, at least as a psychopath be biologically inferior to the mentally ill.

One can only imitate what one inwardly has the biological prerequisites for. Of course, all those who praised degenerate art had forgotten this. If they had kept this in mind, they probably would not have committed many (apparently clever) dialectical ambiguities. For, since psychological theorists have repeatedly proved that the works of those artists whom we know as the producers of degenerate art can be integrated seamlessly and without any leap into the creative attempts of the insane, we may draw the conclusion from this very result that the producers of degenerate art also show an inner affinity to the abnormal in their biology. But then their "art" is also proof of their pathological nature as human beings.

This conclusion was always feared in the circles of friends of degenerate art. It was therefore carefully assured that even if the works were similar in style, material, alleged artistic intention and in the creative process from which they came the works of the mentally ill and the Dadaists, Futurists, Action Artists and all the other groups were similar, it was not possible to draw conclusions from the work about the biological nature of the artist himself⁹.

of the artist himself9. Perhaps one should assume that only the archaic layers in him had come to the surface, that the artist had only confirmed Prinzhorn's higher metaphysical feelings about the world. In fact, one has managed (basically without any proof) to conceal the true state of affairs from many serious thinkers. But since one can no more disguise and alter artistic handwriting than one can ordinary handwriting, he who produces degenerate art is himself degenerate. And whoever is capable of imitating degenerate art, the creations of madmen and great works of genuine artists, would prove his biological and human dubiousness precisely in this ability to change and disguise, since he would be deprived of the independent, bio-logically underpinned line of development and maturation. Thus such imitators within art have often enough - even if they did not degrade themselves to the point of imitating mad art - become mere forgers who ultimately deceived their fellow human beings. However, according to a similarly inexorable law, the exclusive copyists are never the great creators because of their ability to adapt. One therefore hardly does injustice to the experts of degenerate art if one places them in the neighbourhood of the sick; they have only too clearly represented themselves in their works.

Consequently, the interaction of the degenerate theory of artistic creation and the degenerate practice of art education and art criticism led to a gradually increasing accumulation of pathological elements in artistic life, which now filled the art market with their noise in all shades from the slightly fragile to the uptight neurotic, from the more or less socially dubious psychopath to the schizophrenic.

The first effect of this was to shift the subject matter of artistic representation. Insofar as substances were treated at all that the sane could also have chosen, they were distorted. The same thing happened here as everywhere where pathologically predisposed elements want to take over the work of the healthy without being properly guided or medically treated: Order is transformed into chaos, nobility becomes a common waste. To give just one example: Dix depicted sexual material, as it was called, in front of the dirt line of the front trench, motherhood and birth became a disgusting and offensive process, grief a grimacing grimace, awe a hellish fear, the wound of the war victim was mocked in poster style.

The greater part of the material, however, was taken from the aberrant inner life of these so-called artists. Their lust for sensation feasted on the exposure of the mysterious, their lust for fear revelled in scenes of horror. Their inner lack of content was reflected in their inclination towards abstract art, which, unlike real art, is not able to fill the representation of the material with the inner life of the artist, but, because the healthy inner life is lacking, must replace such fullness with the bloodless emptiness of abstractly conceived artistry.
Some of the materials, however, are so similar to those of the mentally ill that - as the exhibition forcefully teaches us - there is no longer any difference.
The second effect of the accumulation of morbid elements in artistic life was the mass of morbid self-productions.

From time immemorial, artists and poets had observed themselves as a result of their great gifts of observation, and in doing so discovered or observed many mental processes that escape the average person because he observes himself just as badly as he observes his world. Now, however, there were more and more reports of visionary experiences, of rushes of emotion, of dull urges, of agonising shocks and of anxious scruples in the conception of the idea as well as in the execution of the work. The beginners, however, who were unfortunately not so fortunate as to be predisposed to such "higher artistic experiences", struggled in helpless cramps to produce something similar in themselves. It was the same here as in many religious sects and confessional communities; individuals can produce the morbid religious experience because they are ill, the fragile ones cramp up in mock ecstasies, the healthy ones turn away in disgust.

In addition, however, the exact connoisseur of mental processes can distinguish the visionary experiences of the healthy, such as so-called eidetic visual images, second sight, fantastic facial appearances, etc., from the similar processes in the sick¹⁰. If, therefore, a healthy artist once sees passing phantasy images in a kind of "fullness of vision" without encountering this in all average people, he is no more ill than the bearers of the second sight in the habitat of the Palatine race. For the pathological vision, the pathological fantastic appearance of vision can be distinguished quite well from the vision of the normal, while conversely the exact psychiatric study of the self-productions of degenerate artists usually reveals the relationship to the visions of the sick.

The same applies to emotional experiences and to the so-called "metaphysical urge", which is said to be just as powerful in schizophrenics as in degenerate artists. It certainly happens that an average person only begins to think about the problems of the 'world' in the onset of mental illness. But the product of his pathological thinking is as far removed from philosophy as the schizophrenic picture or the schizophrenic sculpture is from art.

Nowhere, of course, are the differences between the healthy and the sick so overlooked - one could almost say so flippantly - as in the case of rhythm. Now, despite all reality, the language of the mentally ill should contain the actual liberation to rhythm in poetry-art. A mere art of rhythm in poetry was proclaimed, the essence of which was to be a similar condensation and abridgement of expression as is observed in some mental patients. And there were neurologists who attested to the inner correspondence of Switters' "141erzgedichte" with the products of confused mental patients and, based on such "knowledge", derived the root of all poetry from an exuberance of emotional life that is also inherent in the mentally ill (Mette)¹¹.
Here, too, the devaluation of the healthy, the overvaluation of the sick, the production of the degenerate and the pseudo-scientific obscuration of mental processes intertwined like a gearbox and had a devastating effect on the entire artistic life.

For the next consequence was that the value of work on oneself for the development of the artist was either deliberately denied or rashly disregarded. The first was done by the communists and Jews, the second by the bourgeois and many scholars. From certain circles, the opinion was spread that the true artist neither works nor needs to work in order to create something capable, and that he is a bungler who, because he wanted to achieve great things, worked on himself purposefully. The people, however, who were accustomed to work, did not understand how anything could be achieved without work, and so all the chatter only served to further alienate art from the people. In the end, however, it was clear that in this way the access to art was also paved for the work-shy.

Some work-shy psychopaths made use of it and the degenerate artists revelled in an art which, in contrast to the behaviour of the true artist, rolled out any "idea" into a so-called "work of art" without any further elaboration or examination.
This characteristic, too, was shared by degenerate art and mental illness, namely that the degenerate and the sick do not find access to clear work of their own accord. All the teachings that were mentioned served to present this as the inevitable result of that alleged unleashing of the higher spiritual impulses through illness, with which, as in paradise, liberation from the burden of work was apparently to be connected.

But even this alleged inevitability of the development to the (non-labour) imagination of the lunatic does not exist in mental illness. Within the framework of occupational therapy, we had the opportunity to demonstrate to a schizophrenic artist who had already produced pathological results that, with appropriate medical care and guidance, the mentally ill artist, despite the persistence of the illness, can be expected to produce just as remarkable artistic achievements as the average artist can be expected to produce quite ordinary work. I will show you the result of this process later. Of course, it was only achieved by doing the opposite of what Lombroso, Prinzhorn and others did: We did not abolish the pathological products of the artists, but we destroyed them and we guided the sick person in the solution of his self-chosen normal task.
If there is one thing that can put an end to the hype about mad art, it is the result of ophthalmological treatment of an artist who is incurable in herself. The so-called mad art was only a symptom of inadequate care and treatment, but not a revelation of the deepest secrets of creativity. And those who have produced degenerate art without being schizophrenic can see from this treatment result what they need: guidance for real work directed at them by healthy people.

In this context, we cannot give a biologically based teaching of artistic creation that meets the requirements of critical psychology. But the insight into the necessity of work for the further development and maturation of received artistic gifts leads to a number of quite far-reaching conclusions.
We have already seen that the biological maturing processes of the artistic gift in the artist may be regarded as proof that his gift is not of supernatural but of natural origin. The processes of the soul are proved to be natural by their practicability, just as this is the case with the life processes of all organs of the animal and human organism, which can be developed through practice. The totality of the processes of mental maturation and practice constitute the decisive counter-ground against any supernatural theory of inspiration in artistic creation, as well as against the slogan of relations between insanity and genius.

The nature and extent of the ability to practise, however, depend not only on education and training but above all on the respective natural nature of the soul's life processes and can, like the bio-logical processes of maturation, serve to determine it more closely, since the conditions of practising are quite different for different soul processes, even within the same human being. Here the difference between the artist, the healthy average and the mentally ill becomes immediately apparent. The latter has no purposeful capacity for exercise; the healthy person has it in quite different areas from the artist.
One is accustomed to reproach such a conception of the life of the soul as a natural process, that it is connected with a debasement of the processes of the soul. But it is not affected by such reproaches.

For it has just as little to do with the materialistic conception of the soul as with the intellectualistic-spiritualistic one, both of which are, after all, only the partly racially, partly philosophically historically conditioned modification of the conception, that spirit and soul, or spirit or soul, as supernatural beings, sink into the natural structure of the body, or are lowered by God as into a prison, and therefore, as aliens in the body and in nature, can at most freely develop their powers through miraculous interventions of God, but otherwise are only hindered, harmed, forced or falsified by the body. Opinions which give fertile ground to the already mentioned southern conception of the importance of supernatural inspiration for the artist's work, which are rooted in the southern habitat and are nourished again and again out of its races, while for the habitat of the Nordic race they represent mere phenomena of alienation.

The significance of these considerations can be seen in four essential lines of thought for the cultivation of art and the defence against degenerate art:
1. the origin of the spirit or the soul from supernatural sources must at the same time give the soul a permanent form¹² , through which, even if one, like Thomas Aquinas, thinks that the body is created by God to suit the soul in question, natural processes of maturation and even hereditary processes of maturation that can be promoted by one's own practice are excluded.
In our conception of the life of the soul as the epitome of natural life processes, however, their practice and their formation through practice, i.e. through self-education and education by others, becomes a moral duty, because it is only through them that the gifts received are brought to their highest development. Just as the natural conception of the soul's processes leads to the demand for the practice of all abilities, it places the highest moral demand there is, that of self-worked achievement, in the centre. On the other hand, it corresponds to the highest modesty of the gifted and the genius, which arises from the feeling of both for the gravity of the task to which the received gift calls.

Art, as in every other human activity, means the perfection of skill through work in the struggle with the perceived deficiencies of one's own person, and therein lies no less its moral value than in its representations.
(2) Of course, insight and a healthy instinct belong to the ability to exercise the not yet fully perfected ability to the perfected performance. For this reason, the prerequisites for this insight are just as essential to being an artist as they are to being healthy. The decisive factor for the artist is not only the talent for painting, shaping and writing, but also the entirety of his or her abilities. This basically self-evident sentence was also lost in the artistic degeneration of the systemic era, that only the faithful, diligent, disciplined, decent, discerning, self-sacrificing, honourable and honourable person can develop true art from a received gift of ability. With the fragile, the psychopath and the mentally ill, the degenerate artists shared to the full extent the lack of those fundamental qualities and dispositions and thereby proved their abnormality all the more, from biological deficiency to genuine mental illness.

(3) These presuppositions and moral conclusions are not nullified by the fact of the different and independent practicability of the processes of the soul that have been passed on to the individual human being by heredity, regardless of whether a human being received them all in the highest perfection like the genius or in higher perfection like the true artist. Of course, we do not impose such obligations on the frail and the sick, who have not received dispositions to higher perfection, but to greater or even complete deficiency. But it is precisely because of his deficiency that we have the right to prevent his deficiencies from affecting his own life or the lives of his fellow human beings. For this reason the mentally ill person is given appropriate care and for this reason the elimination of the degenerate artists close to him from the life of the people is also justified on biological grounds, which, as always, coincide with the grounds of morality and expediency where the life of the individual and of the community has been conceived in a truly natural way.

The independent practicability of the individual mental processes that lie behind human achievements and, at the same time, artistic talents and abilities, also proves their biological independence from one another, a realisation to which the consideration of the heritability of artistic talent had already led, and permits their closer biological identification precisely for the purposes of hereditary theory.

The observation of the maturation and training processes, especially in their differences in gifted, ]average and sick people of all kinds, leads us back to the necessary foundations of all gifts: to the inheritance from the ancestors to the descendants.
This, however, leads to a fourth and most important thought: We know that artistic gifts in detail show a complicated structure of often very numerous individual predispositions and abilities, that therefore the inheritance of these gifts is quite complicated, and that the coming together of all partial predispositions to high gifts even within the same clan need not be repeated in every generation, indeed often only occurs under particularly favourable circumstances.
But we know this - and the genealogical tracing of the ancestral trees of great Germans teaches us emphatically that such dispositions of artistic talent, like all other dispositions, are in themselves eternal, if only their transmission through sufficient reproduction is ensured.

The laws of heredity in man are not yet fully known to us because of their complexity. But the growing knowledge of the genealogical tables of our people teaches us with increasing certainty that, precisely because of their entanglement, they offer the guarantee that the artistic community of our people will be renewed again and again out of the coming together of all healthy and perfected dispositions, even where the children of the individual artist himself or his grandchildren only pass them on in a divided or concealed way.

This, of course, only happens under one condition: namely, that the predispositions to nobler talents and noble character do not disappear from the people through counter-selection and elimination. And this danger has arisen where artists do not reproduce sufficiently or are prevented from reproducing by their plight due to lack of care on the part of the government.
In the times of artistic degeneration, the counter-selection of the sick and the eradication of healthy genuine artistry was actually realised. For at that time only the sick found sufficient living conditions, the healthy artist could starve to death and thus naturally could not find the prerequisites for the numerous flocks of children.

With deadly certainty, this process would have led to the destruction of the noblest hereditary traits of our people in the field of art, and would have turned a nation in which, unfortunately, due to insufficient care of the hereditary traits in the past, artists have always succumbed to a hereditary disease, into a nation of sick, illusory artists, with morbid factories of degenerate art, if the Führer had not put a stop to it. We owe him, but also all the healthy true artists who found the strength in times of need to preserve their endowments through their children, our deepest gratitude.

Our people need participation in art and preservation through it. Nordic man needs to experience his higher purpose, his deepened sense of life, in order to preserve his species. He suffocates in the air of degeneration. Precisely because we know that in the hereditary process of organic life not everyone can be given all the qualities and not everyone can be given them in the highest perfection, we rejoice when we become partakers of what we lack through the work of the more gifted. Thus, the enjoyment of noble art is a biological prerequisite for vitality, for the joy of life and thus also for enriching the life of our families.

The preservation of a healthy artistic life is therefore one of the prerequisites for keeping our people healthy. The psychiatrist, however, can serve this by helping to destroy the didactic illusory evidence which tried to derive the art of the degenerate and the insane from the same biological sources as the art of the healthy artist.

Endnotes

1 A lecture requested by the exhibition management of the "Degenerate Art" exhibition, but not given for external reasons.

2 One of the earliest formulations was in Democritus.

3 What we have outlined here for the conception of the essence of artistry as a difference between the Nordic race and the races of the southern habitat and the non-European races is also reflected in the artistic work of the races themselves. But this is not the place to go into this.

4 Characteristic of this is already one of the first sections of Lombroso's book with the heading: Physiology of Genius and its Relationship to Madness. Without a closer analysis of the two psychological and biological facts, it is assumed on the basis of a superficial historical introduction, which in itself already contains a petitio principii, with the sentence: "This is certainly a cruel and painful paradox". But this paradox does not lack justification, for - and now comes a sentence that is almost unbelievable in its factual frivolity: "Many profound thinkers, like mental patients, are subject to strange whims and have intemperate theatrical gestures about them". Examples of Lenau, Montesquieu and Napoleon will prove this. After a description of similarities between mental illness and genius in the form of the excretion of phosphoric acid(!), it is then said: "The great thinkers, like the mentally ill, usually have a hot head and cold feet, with them the blood flows in significant quantities to the brain, they have predispositions to painful acute brain diseases and are dull to the feeling of hunger and cold". Here, then, without closer examination, the sentence of the direct inspirational influence of the divinity on the poet and artist, originally familiar to the southern habitat, is falsified into a frivolous and banal equation of the physiological and biological processes in the organism of the mentally ill and the genius.

5 It is also part of this that the sentence has been repeatedly advocated, which Prinzhorn, for example, also adopts, that the world-feeling of our time is related to the world-feeling of the schizophrenic, e.g.: "If one looks carefully at the forms of expression of our time, one finds everywhere, in the fine arts as in all branches of literature, a series of tendencies that would only be found in a genuine schizophrenic. It should be noted that we are far from wanting to show signs of mental illness in these forms of expression. Rather, we feel everywhere a libidinal inclination to nuances which are familiar to us in schizophrenics. This explains the affinity of production, the attraction of our pictorial works (i.e. the pictorial works of the mentally ill). What we have said about the decline of the traditional sense of the world among visual artists applies to the whole wave of time through all professions. And no less widespread is the addiction to immediate intuitive experience with mystical self-deification, the metaphysical urge, from the genuine philosophical to the sectarian and theosophical, in which magical powers again play a role. Yes, we are tempted to use our formulation for the overall attitude of the schizophrenic design here and to find something of the ambivalent dwelling on the state of tension before decisions in the whole time. But the tendencies towards a schizophrenic world-feeling in this respect are mainly the same as those which two decades ago, in the expressions and world-feelings of the child and the primitive, began to seek redemption from the rampant rationalism of the last generations, in which not the worst think they are suffocating". A critique of such sentences is almost impossible. Anyone who contrasts the stupidity of such formulations with the healthy attitude to life of the healthy working class of our German people can only come up with one word: It doesn't get any higher than this.

6 Exemplary for the scientific implementation of these thoughts are the writings of Lange-Eichbaum. For him, the magic that genius exerts on the average person is nothing more than a fascination of the healthy with everything psychologically abnormal. Abnormality also makes achievement more conspicuous, and through the union of abnormality and achievement, genius has a double chance of attracting attention simply by adding them together. The interpenetration of healthy and bionegative qualities gives rise to new chemical compounds, as it were, which, beyond simple summation, result in favourable constellations which are particularly suitable for attracting attention in many ways. For example, healthy giftedness can be increased in its efficiency by pathological affectivity with regard to certain cultural goals. Here, the inner commitment of genius to the task it is confronted with is equated with the pathological emotional movements of abnormals without a closer examination of the biological nature of the emotional manifestation. In addition, however, the "pathological sting" in highly gifted people leads more often to works and achievements than in the satisfied healthy person, and indeed to works which, through their "immediacy and unaffectedness", seem much more like a unified whole and therefore compel one under their spell. "Therefore, in the process of becoming a genius (Lange-Eichbaum's expression), insanity plays the following role: the psychologically abnormal tends to stand out, it makes more of an impression, it sticks longer in the memory, it more easily achieves what humanity demands (blocked in the original). As a personality complex, it seems more enigmatic, more mysterious, and is therefore more likely to be the object of veneration. Its fate is biologically or sociologically caused, more often tragically .... the so-quite-other, the mirum-tremendum of the disguised alien-psychic traits and their consequences of fate awakens the impression of the truly metaphysical, demonic, superhuman-numinous."

For this reason, very different high talents are elevated to the status of genius. "The precondition of genius is in every case first of all ordinary fame among the many". It is strange that Lange-Eichbaum does not make it clear at all how this ordinary fame among the many actually comes about. The biological, sociological effect of genius, its ennobling, educating, promoting, i.e. basically its actual creative effect, is thus distorted by equating it with the effect of the mentally ill and abnormal on the healthy. There is no direct examination of whether the extraordinary nature of genius is really pathophysiologically and patho-psychologically equivalent to mental illness. It is rather generally concluded that because some of the geniuses (according to Lange-Eichbaum 12°ö, partly on the basis of investigations, many of which come from Jews [Herzberg]) became abnormal or mentally ill, every genius must in any case bear bionegative traits. Therefore, it is finally said: almost everywhere, the gifted, sometimes also the ungifted insanity triumphs over the healthy talent. The psycho-pathological is an excellent pacemaker for talent and now comes a dialectical sentence that is supposed to conceal the brittleness of the argumentation: "It is not genius that is insane, but insanity that tends to become genius because it tends to become famous in the first place.

7 I will only give Prinzhorn's most important trains of thought, from which the correctness of the account given above emerges. "These pictorial works (i.e. of the mentally ill) are attempts at design, that is what they have in common psychologically with art". In the same way, one must first examine what the similarity between "art of the primitives", "children's art" and "art of the insane" is, especially what psychologically underlies this similarity. Neither the contrast between sick and healthy nor the contrast between art and non-art is other than dialectically unambiguous. One would only find polar opposites with countless transitions that could be named unambiguously, but only in accordance with a cultural convention that prevails here and now. Therefore, it would be advisable to take the psychologically most central concept of design as a point of orientation. Certainly, the problem is highly entangled, especially since Lombroso and in pathographies, and lay people are generally sensitive to the opinion of the psychiatrist. But there must be something deeply common in all these forms of madness, namely ecstasy, poetic intuition and insanity. The question is whether, with a valid psychological retracing of the essentials, these exceptional states are somehow related, namely the artistic process of inspiration on the one hand and the feeling for the world of the mentally ill on the other. In the final analysis, the concept of design was not at the centre of consideration for psychological but metaphysical reasons.

Life in general is to be understood as a hierarchy of creative processes and only on the basis of such views can one arrive at valid evaluations. By searching for the roots of the creative instinct in man, one recognises in the need for expression the centre of the creative impulses, which are nourished from the whole circle of the soul. From this centre, the creative tendencies are developed, the manifold mixture of which determines the nature of the resulting work of art. "What remains decisive, however, is the basis that everything designed embodies expressive movements of the designer, which as such can be grasped directly, without the interposition of a purpose or any other rational authority. Here we are already abstracting from all immediate biological differences that may exist between the mental process of the mentally ill and the mental process in the healthy artist. In addition, however, any attachment to artistic ideals of any kind is regarded from the outset as the interposition of a purpose and eliminated from the investigation. Therefore, Prinzhorn cannot express the perfection of a work in any other way than with the term "highest vitality in perfect design". Any other evaluation would make use of widely ramified cultural auxiliary points of view. As a result, the term has become completely colourless and hardly usable for fundamental discussions because of its affectively overemphasised ambiguity. The actual refinement of works of art and the problem, which also exists in the natural sciences, of demonstrating the biological reasons for these differences, are thus pushed aside in favour of an abstract concept of art, which Prinzhorn now seeks only in the meta-physical sense of design in general, which in the context of cultural life is mostly concealed by external purposes.

This prepares the ground for the pivotal point of Prinzhorn's work, which is found in the following sentences: "We thus conclude and place in contrast to the sphere of measurable facts the realm of expressive facts, in which the soul appears directly and is equally directly grasped without the interposition of an intellectual apparatus. And all expressive movements as such are essentially subject to no other purpose than the one: to embody the soul and thus to build the bridge from the I to the Thou. The fact that this happens with freedom and perfection obviously constitutes its intrinsic value. This includes that the movement is actually filled with the soul, of which it is the expression, and furthermore that it is determined, possibly unambiguously shaped. The tendency of all conscious expression to attain perfection in form grasps these two components within itself. We find the beginnings of this even in very simple circumstances: in the child who, in the course of his play, invents a funny dance or creates a scribble on the blackboard, which the intimate connoisseur can very well interpret according to its expressive value; in the primitive who, in his dance mask, expresses his feeling for the world filled with magical and demonic ideas; and similarly in countless processes in which the soul takes shape. If we do not wish to confine ourselves to taking descriptive note of the visible precipitates of such expressive processes, but to penetrate psychologically into these processes themselves, we must name the impulse, not to say the force, which appears in them. We speak, then, of a tendency, an urge, a need for the expression of the soul, and by this we mean those impulsive life-processes which in themselves are not subjected to any purpose lying outside themselves, but are themselves enough directed only towards the shaping of themselves. A theoretical substantiation of this opinion cannot be attempted here, even in outline, which is why we prefer simply to present these propositions as the central point of reference of all the investigations in this book." It is indeed the case that Prinzhorn could not give a scientific substantiation for these propositions.

It contains a pure abstraction of formal thought processes, which, however, now gives rise to the proposition: "There are not works of art as there are stone axes or arrowheads; they are either there or not as purpose-determined tools and everything else is a question of technique. The creative process that is realised in a work of art of today is fed from very diverse spiritual spheres. And its sources need not all flow together before they deserve the name of design. Since, for Prinzhorn, there are no works of art to which a standard of value could be applied, art is characterised by creative processes that essentially flow from the need for expression, the play instinct, the decorative instinct, the tendency to order, the imitative instinct (this as the root of depiction!) and the need for symbolism, by which Prinzhorn vaguely understands everything that distinguishes primitive thinking from thinking directed towards rational scientific knowledge. None of these alleged psychological sources is now labelled biologically by Prinzhorn. They remain formal abstract concepts, which are illustrated with a few examples. And herein lies the reason why Prinzhorn then believes he has proved, with a semblance of justification, the similarity of the processes of formation in the most diverse people and races, which are undoubtedly not to be equated biologically. Characteristic here are in particular the remarks on playfulness, in which the remarkable sentence is coined that certain techniques, e.g. of graphics, watercolours, even sculpture, are simply nothing other than a kind of improvised play comparable to the doodling of a child. Another line of argument is directed against the so-called "tendency to depict", in line with Prinzhorn's argument against any objective evaluation of works of art. The tendency to depict says nothing about the reality or unreality of depicted objects. These are given as visual images. And for an image that pushes towards external design, it is immaterial whether it is based on something real and visible or whether its object can only be imagined.

The depictive tendency is only concerned with the fact that a visual image can be perceived by the viewer as exactly as possible from the depiction, as it was intended by the creator of the image. Whether an object is depicted realistically or abstractly is completely secondary from the point of view of the tendency to depict. This is a purely psychological concept. And the primary psychological fact is always: being directed towards an image. From the point of view of the need for expression, the depiction of real objects is certainly not necessary. This then creates the pseudo-scientific prerequisite that any design, no matter how incompetent, can be called symbolically abstruse art simply because it is directed towards an image.

Accordingly, for Prinzhorn, the need for symbolism becomes an essential prerequisite of art. It pushes back pure depiction, attracts systems of order, leads to convention in the language of form, to rhythmic solemnity and the predominance of abstract geometric elements, and points away from the individual work of art to obligatory regularities. This then corresponds to the conclusion: "The chimera of the organic correctness and completeness above all of the human body image has caused much mischief, despite Lionardo's and Dürer's ancestry, since it accommodates above all the pedantic inclinations of educational rationalism". Such a sentence contains the apparent scientific justification for the fact that one can deviate from the "chimera of the organic correctness and completeness above all of the human body image" at any time. The result of this deviation can be seen in the distorted figures, the paintings and sculptures in the Degenerate Art exhibition.

Prinzhorn is indifferent to whether he has depicted human bodies in an organically correct or distorted way, he states that "large areas of design are free of this (organic correctness) and shift the accent of representational depiction to very different components, without thereby falling prey to a justified censure. In each case, it is necessary to trace this visual image back to its determining factors". This means, then, that because there is an ornament, it is permissible to represent the human body in a distorted form, and such distorted formations have a claim to the name of work of art, because the visual image culminates in the accentuated component and because "the degree of rhythmic animation of a work determines its rank as a formed one". The consequences for the equation between the art of the insane and the high art of the healthy artist are then contained in the following sentences: "Leafing through our pictures (of the mentally ill) proves vividly enough that the religious and erotic spheres obviously predominate in the soul life of these sick people to a completely different extent than can be noticed in healthy people". This is not only due to a loss of inhibitions, but also to a decidedly metaphysical urge, which is, as it were, already prepared by the devaluation of the environment and the abolition of the difference between real and unreal. "What is disturbing about your problem, however, is the question of whether the metaphysical urge of the schizophrenic, founded in this way, is of the same nature as that of the healthy person or whether it is based on other preconditions.

We see the solution in the same direction as with all such problems: the basic tendency is essentially the same in both cases. Prinzhorn's alleged proof is then crowned by the fact that the autonomous working of the creative instinct is supposed to be proven for all artistic creation in the art of the mentally ill. "The creative process bursts forth from these people without any verifiable external stimulus and without guidance, impulsively, purposelessly; they do not know what they are doing. Whatever one may say about the value of this source of knowledge, it is certain that nowhere like here do we have before us, as it were, in pure culture, those components of the creative process which lie unconsciously preformed in every human being .... It follows from this that tradition and training are only able to influence the creative process on its periphery by encouraging it through praise and rebuke, rules and schemata. But there is, so to speak, a core process, for the course of which the abilities are preformed in every human being". The artistic process of seeing and hallucination are therefore basically the same, because they both come from creative processes. "As certainly as creation is an activity and does not have much to do with visions and the like, the ability to experience vivid images in dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations points to an original creative power. Of course, Prinzhorn is also of the opinion that this original creative urge, which is innate in every average human being, has been buried by the development of civilisation. This is the opinion that we have heard continuously advocated by psychoanalysis and Marxism. It is the source of the judgmental equation of the banal average man, the degenerate, with the artist.

8 Not even in the studies of the Jae7xian school.
I am not referring here to the differences that exist between the high art of the Westerner and the art of the primitive in terms of sociological and cultural integration into life as a whole and in terms of the historical development of culture. However, they have been completely suppressed or overlooked in the usual equations, which we oppose here. As a result, the picture that was drawn up became all the more false.

9 Of course, Prinzhorn is also of this opinion. One cannot say whether a work of art originates from a mentally ill person because it bears the characteristics of the ill. This is why Prinzhorn refuses to draw parallels between contemporary art and his pictures of the insane, because it is wrong to construct the sameness of the underlying mental states from the similarity of outward appearance. It is strange that here the argument comes to the fore which should really have been appreciated at the beginning of the whole investigation. After Prinzhorn has spent an entire book proclaiming the formal equality of the creative processes, he suddenly discovers their alleged differences where it is now important to draw the practical consequence from the equality of the creative processes that he who makes degenerate art is himself degenerate.

10 Cf. here my "Beiträge zum Sinnentrug". 1930. 1931. 1932.

11 Mette, too, is of course of the opinion that the problem of the genesis of art and artistry is one of the most difficult and controversial in modern psychological research. The drastic nature of psychopathological phenomena is not infrequently suitable for creating particularly favourable dispositions for the discussion of related normal psychological conditions. It was therefore very important to prove an actual relationship behind the outward similarity of the phenomena or to shed light on their coincidence or inner insignificance. In particular, one must think of the mutual illumination of a series of convincing border phenomena. The idea of some kind of relationship between schizophrenics and artists is not entirely far-fetched. On the other hand, it is necessary to investigate the relationship between the language characteristics of schizophrenics and poetic productions. As you can see, the approach and the line of argument is basically exactly the same as that of Lombroso, Lange-Eichbaum and Prinzhorn. One seconds each other without actually making a single new argument. Only the dialectic of the argumentation becomes more finely meshed and therefore more difficult to see through. Mette now compares schizophrenic poems with a Dadaist product. It is instructive to juxtapose at least some of the examples Mette compares:
Developed! Listen Listen
Next! Sharpen Listen
Around ! Swinging Screams
Up ! Sounds Sounds
Geatment ! Shouts Shouts
Light ! Flaps Clear
Light ! Clang Blades
There looks the father! Whirring Buzzing
He's getting bolder! Hum Purr
The virgin, 'Mother! Coo Coo
Will she soon to the father! Gurgling Gurgling
Witnesses give you strength! Pstn Pstn
Heightened senses ! Hsstn Hsstn
And everything lives in him heightened life ! Rurren Rurren
Gathering makes healthy ! Collect Collect
Healthy ! Gather Gather
And now around ! Words Words Words
Around ! Word
Up! The word ! Chaos !
Ready !
Go on!
The word !
Tangible !
Makes healthy !
The word !

It is then explained that rhythm is the creative principle of the present (following a short theory of expressionist poetics by Lothar Schreyer). Compare this sentence with Prinzhorn's sentence. Rhythm is expression and power. Harmony wants finiteness, perfection: power wants no end. It is never perfect. Rhythm is imperfect, infinite. It is the dissolution of every measure. The work of art of the present is aharmonic, rhythmic. The external relationship of the schizophrenic style of writing, of the schizophrenic compulsiveness of language, of the terse turns of phrase that break through conventional grammar, for example, when a sick person does not say: "I'm staying at the Goldene Krone Inn, but I can't get a bed, neither in the hotel, nor in the inn, nor in my private room. Everything is occupied", but: ,.nachte gasthofs goldene krone, kein bet, weder hotel gasthofs noch privat, ist besetzt", with the expressive tendencies of expressionism, compels a higher interest, because the representation contains in some elements a hint for its inner conditions. It is given by the fact that the concept of expression for the experience of something intangible entitles the poet to his peculiar freedoms. The transformation of language takes place on the basis of a special emotional excitement, in which the specific experiential value of the experienced thing makes integration into the available fixed linguistic forms impossible. This is exactly the same as Prinzhorn's assertion in the field of visual art. The creative tendency cannot express itself in the forms of organic correctness and completeness, just as the particular emotional excitement of the expressionist poet cannot fit into the grammatical forms of normal language. The affective excitement of the expressionist poet leads to immediate discharges. In the same way, Prinzhorn's creative power leads to immediate discharge without purpose. Of course, Mette also equates schizophrenic emotionality with artistic emotionality and assumes that illness releases productive forces. "Illness and genius appear in this perspective as two opposite end results of the same constitution, essentially characterised by an excess of sensitive and emotional components". Mette also does not lack the unwarranted, equation between the self-testimony of the mentally ill and the self-testimony of the poet. And it is presented as a phenomenon of extraordinary interest that, just as in the language of some schizophrenics poetry-like expressive features and forms of expression are to be found in that of some poets quite similar to those of the schizophrenic. A predilection for schizoid and schizothyme natures is attributed to Goethe and Shakespeare, and it is concluded that the most excitable and emotionally intense type of poet is undoubtedly the schizothyme, and that some of them continued on the path to illness.

12 Substance Thought.

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