Abstration and improvisation against affective blunting

Psychiatrists interested in the plastic production of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia have long noticed the predominance of abstraction in their work, the stylization, the geometry that was present there. The current opinion at Nise’s time was that their work revealed “a continuous cooling of affection, an ever greater disconnection from the real world, an opinion that Dr. Nise did not accept.”
But I did not examine the paintings of the patients who frequented our atelier sitting in my office. I saw them paint. I saw their frowns, I saw the impetus that moved their hands. I was unable to accept the established opinion. […] By a happy chance I found clarification for this challenging problem in the art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s book – Abstraction and Nature. Art will remove things from this disturbing whirlwind, it will empty them of their vital and always unstable manifestations in order to subject them to permanent laws that govern the inorganic world. Through processes of abstraction, man seeks “a point of tranquility and a refuge. 
– Nise da Silveira

The psychiatrist sets his mind on the word and wants to translate everything into words; nobody is trying to belittle the words, but there are many other ways of communicating […]. So we set out to study the images.
– Nise da Silveira

 Expressions, largely unconscious and that almost always occur suddenly, originated from inner events; therefore, impressions of Inner Nature. I call them Improvisations. 
– Kandinsky (1947)

Our painters often mix with the abstract the defined forms of symbols, solid utilitarian objects, fantastic or real beings, all depending on their inner bearings. The instinctive tendency to playfulness links to abstraction. The forms live their own lives then, remodeling themselves in multiple ways. Maybe this game will lead them to disintegrate into rather chaotic scribbles, or else, this tendency to play with forms might come to be associated with the no less instinctive tendency towards ordering, inherent in psychic life.
– Nise da Silveira

Images painted by Fernando offer an extraordinary opportunity to elicit the use of painting as a means of defense when the agitation of thoughts and emotions is great. There is a red tangle on the left, the chaos. On the other side, there is the left hand with the palm turned upwards (at which he could look while painting). And from the lines of his own hand, he raises the construction of geometric figures – still unbalanced – in space. In the palm of his hand, Fernando found the lines, those first elements. He took them as a basis for geometric constructions whose function will be to oppose chaos. This painting is part of a series with very close variants made on roughly consecutive days during a period of regression.
– Nise da Silveira

But I did not examine the paintings of the patients who frequented our workshop sitting in my office. I watched them paint. I saw their frowns, I saw the impetus that moved their hands. I was unable to accept the established opinion. […] By a happy chance, I found clarification for this challenging problem in the book by art historian Wilhelm Worringer—Abstraction and Nature. Art will remove things from this disturbing whirlwind, it will empty them of their vital and always unstable manifestations in order to subject them to permanent laws that govern the inorganic world. Through processes of abstraction, men seek “a point of tranquility and a refuge”. 
– Nise da Silveira