Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between psychiatric practice and literature. Those materials that suggest patients' “literary” activities, both in narrow and wide senses of the term, have been selected from an archive of a private hospital in Tokyo before the Second World War and their meanings and functions in and out of the psychiatric hospital are discussed. The two apparently contradictory forces of producing patients' discourse and forbidding their subjectivity are present and did somehow contribute to the making of the “literature” of the mental patients.
