by Susie Verde

On 25 and 26 July 2025, the beautiful Rio de Janeiro Art Museum (MAR) hosted the VII Seminar on Image Reading: The “Epistemology of Nise da Silveira,” bringing together mental health professionals from different regions of Brazil in an aesthetic, clinical and deeply human experience.

The seminar featured high-level presentations during which psychologists, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, nurses and art
educators shared practices inspired by Nise’s work. Sensitive listening,
the acceptance of psychological suffering through images, and
respect for subjective uniqueness was at the centre of the speeches — all revealing how Nise’s epistemology remains current, necessary, and profoundly transformative.

A visionary figure in 20th-century psychiatry, Dr. Nise da Silveira
challenged the biomedical model and the violent practices of the time. Instead of restraint and electroshock, she proposed affection, therapeutic workshops, and expressive freedom as a means of accessing and caring for the psyche.
Her book “Benedito: Um Negro que Pintava “(Benedito: A Black Man Who Painted) is an essential work of her thinking: a testimony to the power of artistic creation as an expression of the unconscious.

The dialogue between her work and the thinking of Carl Gustav Jung permeated many of the round tables and conversation circles. Jung was a fundamental reference for Nise, especially in her understanding of images. Each image is stored here is a key to better understanding the human condition
And that is exactly what the seminar did — it brought to light, with respect and passion, the stories of many men and women who found, through art, listening and images, a new way of life.

In times of so many psychological and social urgencies, revisiting the work of
Nise da Silveira is more than a tribute: it is an ethical and poetic call
to imagine other ways of caring, other possible worlds.