Nise: The Heart of Madness

I'm thinking this morning how fortunate we are to have the prosperity and freedom to pursue  pleasures and passions.  To play with children and animals, to feel the rain on our skin, to make and do whatever brings joy--these are such big deals!

In the movie I stayed up until 2:00 watching, based on a true story that takes place in Brazil in the 1940s, I'm reminded of the opposite of those freedoms.

When the psychiatrist, Dr. Nise De Silveira, arrives at the National Psychiatric Hospital in Rio De Janerio, she sees a dirty and barren-looking hospital controlled by a team of doctors who are sold on treatments she refuses to participate in: lobotomies and electroshock therapy for those suffering with schizophrenia.  "I will not do this!" she says.  "I refuse to treat illness with violence."

For her refusal, she's demoted to a program staffed by two nurses with no training in occupational therapy, and she sets about cleaning the filthy space allotted to them and to observe the patients.  Then slowly, fearlessly, she works with them, treating even the most violent and aggressive ones with respect.

She and her small team introduce them to art. One man--formerly considered so dangerous he's put in solitary confinement--pounds clay and makes sculptures; another paints mandalas. Soon (how soon we don't know) the bare walls are filled with paintings and sculptures.

Nise begins a correspondence with Carl Jung who says of the paintings, "It's clear that these patients are working with people who are not afraid of the unconscious."

Patients formerly restrained and subject to shock therapy begin to create vibrant art. A formerly violent woman begins to take care of animals, mostly stray dogs, that someone brings in from outside.

When their paintings and sculptures are exhibited in a gallery, a man who's worked with the patients says this:

"One of the most powerful functions of art is the exposure of the unconscious--which is just as mysterious in the normal as in the so-called abnormal.  The images of the unconscious are only a symbolic language that psychiatry must decipher. But nothing prevents these paintings from being harmonious, dramatic, captivating, alive or beautiful, such as true works of art. This is an opportunity to see what conventional psychiatry is attempting to stifle."

At the end of the film, the actual now-aged Dr. De Silviera is interviewed.  "There are ten thousand ways to belong to life and to fight for your own time. We intend to recuperate men who are considered garbage towards a socially useful life. And maybe even richer than the lives they were leading before."