A Brazilian psychiatrist who came to Rio de Janeiro to practice, de Silveira was disturbed by the use of shock therapy on patients. She instead encouraged schizophrenics to draw their feelings on paper. Austrian psychoanalyst Carl Jung encouraged da Silveira’s revolutionary “art therapy”, and she later founded the Museum of Unconscious Images, which has a collection of more than 300,000 patient drawings.
Da Silveira also allowed many patients to walk around the grounds of her clinic, and kept cats and dogs around as a way to bring normality to disturbed people. She died in Rio October 30 from pneumonia. She was 94.