Psychotic Pictorial Expression: Th. Spoerri: Adolf Wölfli's Picture World. ( 7 pp., 12 color plates).W. v. Baeyer and H. Hufner: Prinzhorn's Basic Work on the Psychopathology of the “Gestaltung.” ( 6 pp., 16 color plates).G. C. Argen and C. Traversa: Children's Drawings and their Bearing on the Doctor-Patient Relationship. ( 7 pp., 12 color plates).

These three monographs (all published by Karger: Basel/New York on behalf of an International Iconographical Collection by Sandoz A. G.) deal with the pictorial production of the mentally disturbed.

In 1921, the Swiss psychiatrist Morgenthaler published a monograph on Adolf Wölfli, a paranoid schizophrenic who, during his long stay in the psychiatric hospital in Waldau,

Berne painted a number of pictures. This monograph, together with Prinzhorn's work published a year later, initiated the era of lively interest in psychotic art.

Spoerri's book brings beautiful reproductions of twelve of Wölfli's paintings. The text is written by Prof. Spoerri and gives a searching and deep analysis of each painting in terms of the psychopathology of the artist and the principles of psychotic pictorial expression. Some of the symbols are interpreted in Freudian, others in a Jungian sense. The affinities between these paintings and some currents of modern art, such as Surrealism, are of general cultural interest.

v. Baeyer's and Hufner's work gives a valuable excerpt of the classic work by Prinzhorn which appeared in 1922, and was the first comprehensive study of pictorial productions of the mentally ill. This book heralded an era of interest in this topic and led to many other publications. None of the latter has ever, to my knowledge, reached the significance of Prinzhorn's original work. The main value of this publication are the beautiful reproductions of the illustrations. The brief explanation appended to each illustration hints at some important principles of psychotic art and correlates them with the patient's psychopathology.

The monograph by Carlo Traversa (Department of Child Neuropsychiatry at the University of Rome) discusses the portfolio which is a selection from the exhibition of children's drawings, held at the Second European Congress of Child Psychiatry in Rome, June 1963.

Twelve plates from a collection of more than 600 pictures are chosen to illustrate the psychopath