The Face of Madness. Self-Portraits and other Delusion Representations

How does one consider the expressive forms of the artistic languages of madness? Can they also be related to delusional and hallucinatory experiences in a symbolic and metaphorical sense? Moreover, can the artistic languages of madness also have emotional, cognitive, and liberating characteristics? In this paper, I will try to answer these questions using an iconographic corpus consisting of drawings and delusional texts produced by a schizophrenic (paraphrenic) subject. Indeed, in the drawings of our clinical case, the depictions of the head and face seem to represent a metaphorical reference to the reality of his delusional and hallucinatory experiences. Furthermore, psychotic productions are well-known for their figurative, expressive, and linguistic uses.