Freud & Surrealism

Tanima Yeasmin

Abstract:

Surrealism, which spanned from 1920 to 1951, was a distinctive art, literary, and intellectual movement. It emerged in Europe following the conclusion of World War I, when artists were in a condition of dissatisfaction and required a means of escape. Surrealism aimed to transcend conventions by portraying irrational concepts that adopted a fresh outlook on life. Freud's views regarding the psyche exerted a significant influence on the movement of surrealism. He believed that analysis had the ability to interpret dreams as encrypted manifestations of unconscious anxieties, wants, and conflicts. Upon conducting my research, I discovered that a significant number of surrealist artists experienced challenging childhoods and adversities, in various forms. I argue that through the lens of surrealism, artists were able to confront their fears and explore the grotesque aspects of their own selves in a distinctive manner, with the guidance of Freud's theories.

Keywords:

Surrealism, Freud, automatism, unconscious mind, paranoia

How to Cite this Paper: Yeasmin, Tanima. 2024. “Freud & Surrealism.” CUNY Manifold, June 2024. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/freud-surrealism/section/81f2f19e-8ed6-40b6-bb19-7b049f9b7620

Surrealism (1920–1951) was an art movement unlike any other. It was a literary and intellectual movement, too. It developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. It is important to note that, due to the war, artists were in a disgruntled state and needed an escape. This was a movement that allowed you to go into a dream-like state. Surrealism was about breaking out of previous norms, depicting illogical ideas, and looking at life from a new perspective.

Freud’s theories of the mind had a great impact on surrealism. He thought that analysis could decipher dreams as coded expressions of unconscious fears, desires, and conflicts. The content of dreams can be broken into two parts. The manifest content of a dream includes all the actual content of the dream, and it is essentially what the dreamer remembers upon waking up. The latent content of dreams is the hidden and symbolic meanings within them. Unconscious desires and experiences were the primary subject in many surrealist artists’ works.

An example of automatism. Automatic drawing by André Masson (1896–1987), ink on paper, made in Paris, France. Public Domain.

Automatism was one of the ways surrealist artists practiced allowing the unconscious mind to take control. This was the same method Freud used to explore the unconscious minds of his patients, whether through drawing or writing. André Baton, who launched the surrealism movement with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism, defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism […] the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns.” Some notable artists who practiced automatism were Joan Miro, André Masson, Max Ernst, etc. Joan Miro practiced surrealist automatism by transcribing his ideas onto a canvas without preconceived notions. Andre Masson let his pen travel rapidly across the paper without conscious control. Max Ernst put together images from magazines and catalogs. All three artists practiced automatism, but in different ways, creating art that was vastly different from one another. Automatism was about not overthinking, but letting your mind wander, and letting your creativity flow while creating. It is the closest thing humans have to being able to create the same dreams your unconscious mind does.

The Empire of Light by Rene Magritte, c. 1950–54. Public Domain.

When one thinks about the visualization of Freud's theories manifested into art, René Magritte’s artworks come to mind. Magritte used painting as a tool to challenge perception and engage the viewer’s mind. “In short, Freud is stating that dream-displacement is the process by which a seemingly trivial idea or image has a piece of it replaced by something that does not fit, something disturbing, exciting, or disorienting; in essence, it is the very thing that makes the dream different from an everyday occurrence.” Magritte's paintings such as The Blank Signature (c. 1965), Empire of Light (c. 1950), Rape (c. 1945), and Golconda (c. 1953) exemplify this idea. In The Blank Signature, the horse is bisected by background grass, and without that element, it would’ve been a normal painting of a man riding a horse through a forest. Once again, the painting in the Empire of Light has normal elements, like a street scene set against a sky background. However, it is paradoxical due to the sky being pastel-blue whereas the street is in darkness, and that is where the dream-like element comes in. In Magritte’s paintings, he uses scenes that are normal to us but utilize displacement to make them abnormal, almost like how our dreams are, where we create our perception and essentially our reality, where day and night can exist together.

Salvador Dalí. (Spanish, 1904–1989utilize). The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13" (24.1 x 33 cm). © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph taken in 2004. Public Domain.

It would be difficult to talk about Freud's influence on surrealism without talking about Salvador Dali. Like Freud, Dali believed that the unconscious mind controls behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. He regarded dreams and imagination as central to human thought. The works of Dali can be literally considered auto-biographies: in his visual (and sometimes verbal) artistic expressions, he regularly used the contents of his dreams and hallucinations—a process he called the paranoid-critical method (critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations). Dali used the paranoid-critical method to relate objects that were otherwise unrelated. This method can be detected in the paintings of his surrealist period, like The Great Masturbator (c. 1929), The Persistence of Memory (c. 1931), Swans Reflecting Elephants (c. 1937), etc. The Great Masturbator and The Persistence of Memory are self-portraits, but in a bizarre way, depending on how the artist perceives himself. Knowing the artist’s uncomfortable relationship with sex and how he preferred to masturbate instead, one can come to understand the paintings more deeply. In The Great Masturbator, the center of the painting has a distorted human face, and a similar profile appears in The Persistence of Memory. Swans Reflecting Elephants, as the title suggests, is not something you see in real life but was put together using his paranoid-critical method.

Swans Reflecting Elephants by Salvador Dalí, 1937. Public Domain.

Contrary to typical studies of Surrealism that only center male artists, I wanted to discuss Leonora Carrington, an artist who was uninfluenced by Freud or Marx. “From the beginning, her revolution was a private one, having nothing to do with Marx, Freud, or Surrealist theorizing. The origins of her feminist vision lie in the paintings and writings produced between 1938 and 1947 and in the events that plunged Carrington into a period of personal crisis and redirection.” One of those paintings in particular is Self-Portrait (c. 1938), oil on canvas. Carrington is perched on the edge of a chair in a dreamlike scene where her hand is stretched toward a prancing hyena, and behind her is a rocking horse flying. A window in the room where Carrington is sitting reveals another white horse in flight. The presence of horses and hyenas is a common feature in her work, and considering she spent her childhood on a country estate surrounded by animals, we can see the influence her childhood has on her art. Furthermore, they represented an aspect of her animal self as symbols of freedom and liberty, which is what she yearned for and fought for. Surrealism was an outlet for Carrington to channel her creativity, but she looked toward her sexual reality instead of theorizing about it, like other surrealist artists.

Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) by Leonora Carrington, 1938. Public Domain.

After doing my research, I realized that a lot of surrealist artists had difficult upbringings and hardships, one way or another. All of art movement's artists embody their experiences, as their artwork consistently mirrors their personal struggles. With surrealism, I believe artists confronted their fears and grotesque parts of themselves uniquely, while Freud’s theories guided them. Surrealism was about looking at life from a new perspective, and that also meant looking at yourself and your thoughts through a new lens. It meant portraying life in ways never seen before. Freud’s theories were unconventional, and so was the art being made during the surrealism movement.

Tanima Yeasmin (she/her) is currently a Junior, studying Communication, with a concentration in Visual & Media Studies at Brooklyn College. She chose this topic because she found the lecture on Surrealism during Professor McCreight's class fascinating. Also, it allowed her to delve deeper into Freud's ideas and their relevancy. Art history has always been a passion for her, and she hopes to continue to learn about different art movements, artists, and their impact.

Works Cited

Whitney Chadwick, Leonora Carrington: Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness, Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1986), pp. 37–42 (7 pages).

Zoltán Kováry, The Enigma of Desire: Salvador Dalí and the conquest of the Irrational (2009). thedali.org.

Unknown author, Dream-displacement and Magritte’s “Blank Signature”, (2013).

André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, (1924).

Taito Katsumata, Psychoanalysis of René Magritte and Relationship with Lucid Dream (2019).