JF Ptak Science Books Post 2045 Part of the series, a History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things
This is a detail from an image of great hope lost. Here's the full picture, one of many, one of hundreds similar to it:
This
is a letter from a woman named Emma Hauck (1878-1920), a "pateint", a committed
person, in an asylum for the "fatally" insane; a schizophrenic, an
incurable who simply wanted to go home. She was not insane enough to not
know where she was, not insane enough to not want to get out, not insane
enough to know that she was in desperate straights, not insane enough
to try to get some help. Emma Hauck wrote letters to her husband,
Michael (father of her two children) after her second and last commitment, beginning in 1909. Mostly the letters were composed of single words (like "kommen,
kommen", "come/come") or simple phrases ("Herzensschatzi komm" or "sweetheart/come")
written concisely and tightly, over and over again, layers of
kommen/kommen, so many that there is a geology of letters, though there
is no geologist.
The images appear in the book and collection of psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), in his Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung1,
which was published in Berlin in 1922. Prinzhorn was among the first
in his profession to study the art of the insane, and to use it in
diagnosis. In the meantime, over dozens of years, he accummulated a
collection of thousands of works of art (many coming when he was an
assistant to Karl Wilmanns at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg), most of which are housed today in the Sammlung Prnzhorn (UniversitätsKlinikum Heidelberg, here).
Emma Hauck's letters were never sent. I think it is unclear whether they were not sent because the institution in which she was confined did not mail them, or if she simply did not actually try to send them.
A very distrubing short experimental film was made by the Brothers Quay in the U.K. featuring Hauk's letters (complicated and viscerakized by a very grating Stockhausen soundtrack), which is located here.
Notes:
1. The English translation of this work: Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the mentally ill: a contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of configuration, translated by Eric von Brockdorff from the second German edition, with an introduction by James L. Foy, (Wien, New York: Springer-Verlag), 1995.
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