“I trust in the continuity and expansion of this work. It is a collection that is already internationally renowned. I hope the local authorities acknowledge its high value and do what they can to facilitate its future development, because it represents a very important contribution to the scientific study of the psychotic process.”

“I was impressed with the paintings made by the Brazilian schizophrenics, because they present in the foreground the usual features of schizophrenic painting, but on other levels they display a harmony of shapes and colours that is not common in paintings made by schizophrenics. What is the environment like in which these patients paint? I suppose that they work surrounded by sympathy and by people who aren’t afraid of the unconscious.”

“I am profoundly impressed by the works of art I’ve seen here. Brazil’s artistic collection is growing and the world needs to know these paintings and drawings. I admire the people who helped the patients to free themselves in this way. Brazil should protect these works. They belong to the greatest spiritual heritage of this nation.”

“Casa das Palmeiras is a pioneer of open treatment in our country and in the world. Even before the great reform movements in Italian, French and American psychiatry, Dr. Nise da Silveira, with Casa das Palmeiras, signaled to the ministries of health of the world something that today has been incorporated into the health programmes of the World Health Organization and Pan-American Health Organization – the need for psychosocial care centres, psychiatric emergency centres, psychiatric outpatient clinics, psychiatry wards at general hospitals, and the possibility of home treatment.”

“The meeting with Nise da Silveira was an event that led me to meditate on the obscure paths within, the ones that lead to the secret spring of creatures, beyond the surface and the rumour of things, to cloisters and cultivated gardens, to the Mediterranean yonder beyond the horizon, to the inaccessible ground of night, which determine, after all, the imponderable laws that govern humanity.”

“Nise da Silveira played a decisive role, with impressive synchronicity, in the history of Brazilian psychiatry and art. If this introduced innovative methods for relating to patients, it also enabled Brazilian art to move in a very original direction, which was unthinkable before her.”

“The Museum of Images from the Unconscious, the work of Nise da Silveira, is a prodigious anthropological-existential collection, in whose archives one can read the history of man, of his progress from the origins to the present day, of his slow accumulation of experience, expressed through myths and symbols, whose structural axes constitute the collective unconscious – the phylogenetic heritage of the species.”