Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí

"Finalmente ho incontrato Sigmund Freud a Londra. Ero stato accompagnato da Stefan Zweig. ... Prima di accomiatarmi volli dargli una rivista in cui c'era un mio articolo sulla paranoia. Freud non cessava di fissarmi, senza fare minimamente caso a ciò che gli mostravo. Mentre continuava ad osservarmi, quasi volesse penetrare la mia realtà psicologica con tutto il suo essere, esclamò rivolgendosi a Stefan Zweig: "Non ho mai visto un tal prototipo dello spagnolo. Che tipo fanatico!" - Dalì -.


"... finora ero incline a considerare i surrealisti, che a quanto pare mi hanno eleto a loro patrono, pazzi completi (diciamo al 95 percento, come per l'alcol). Il giovane spagnolo, con i suoi occhi innocenti e fanatici e la sua innegabile maestria tecnica, mi ha indotto ad un'altra valutazione. Sarebbe in effetti assai interessante esaminare da un punto di vista analiticol'origine di quell'immagine". - Lettera a Stefan Zweig, 20 luglio 1938.

Freud giunse a Londra il 6 giugno 1938. Gli furon concesse accoglienze quasi trionfali: "... per la prima volta, e molto tardi, ho provato che cosa vuol dire essere famosi", scrisse al fratello Alexander. Molte personalità importanti vennero a fargli visita: Stefan Zweig portò con sé il pittore Salvador Dalì nel luglio 1938, nell'oaccasione Dalì fece uno schizzo ad inchiostro su carta carbone del volto di Freud (vedi immagine qui sotto).

Dalí had been expelled from the surrealist camp and was turning towards the High Renaissance of Raphael. Yet, more than any other artist, he stood for surrealism in the mind of the general public. It was he who had made surrealism a common term. Before he turned his life style into a surrealist publicity gag, he had sought to make his art a pictorial documentation of freudian theories. The article on “paranoia” which he pressed on Freud did not have to do with psychiatric paranoia but with what he referred to as “critical paranoia”—a method of inducing and harnessing multiple images of persecution or megalomania. He would start a painting with the first image that came to mind and go on from one association to the next, attempting to lift the restrictions of control and thus tap a flow of delerious phenomena.

In so doing, Dalí was borrowing from another surrealist, Max Ernst, and his method of “frottage.” Ernst was making a deliberate effort to exclude all conscious mental guidance of reason, taste and morals in order to become a spectator at the birth of his own work. By restraining his own activity and accepting his passivity, he discovered a sudden intensification of visual faculties. What emerged was a succession of contradictory images superimposed on one another as in a hypnagogic state or homospatial thinking.

All the surrealists believed, with Freud, in the central importance of the unconscious for art and poetry. They, too, were greatly concerned with the intensive study of the imagination. (The Surrealist Manifesto [1924] was written by André Breton, a serious student of Freud). They conceived of the canvas as a blank table on which the artist inscribed the visual associations issuing from the depth of his personality. Chance, randomness, and coincidence, like the slip of the tongue or the pen, or automatic writing, as well as the dream and the irrational, were royal roads to the unconscious.

French symbolism was not only the chief source of surrealism; it was, more importantly, one of the main intellectual currents in Europe at the time of the birth and early years of psychoanalysis . Also, like psychoanalysis, symbolism was drawn to the further reaches of mental life searching for the many hidden meanings condensed into a single sign. Despite failures and having almost fallen into oblivion, the symbolist movement in France influenced almost all eminent 20th century poets, such as Joyce, Proust and Stein, as well as the drama (Maeterlinck), criticism and music (Debussy). It also gave rise to similar schools in England, Germany and other countries.

Since the symbolist movement in France was at its height towards the end of the 19th century, it is fair to ask, “Did symbolism influence Freud?” Except for Baudelaire, who died in 1867, its most illustrious figures flourished at the time Freud worked at Charcot's clinic in Paris (October 1885-February 1886), as well as the next five years when Freud was absorbed in the work of Charcot and Bernheim.

Freud considered the surrealists “complete fools.” He dismissed the German expressionists as “lunatics” in a letter to Otto Pfister. After an evening in an artist's company, he wrote to Jones [1]: “Meaning is little to these men; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to the Lustprinzip.”

The day aftrer meeting Dalì Freud wrote to Zweig that what changed his estimate was “that young Spaniard, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery” (italics mine). In other words, it was a dramatic and dynamic contrast he sensed within Dalí which interested him. It was that special combination of passion and control which Freud recognized—knowing it well within himself.

In the 1920s-30s, Freud’s theories on the unconscious mind became so pervasive as to be taken for granted by the Surrealists.  Freud used the psychoanalytic device of free association to trace the symbolic meaning of dream imagery to its source in the unconscious; Dalí applied the same method to his pictorial imagery.

Based on psychoanalytic studies of paranoiac dementia, Dalí consciously charged his paintings with psychological meaning which he called his “paranoiac-critical method”, using countless symbols of persecution mania, sharp instruments (castration), sexual fetishes, and phallic images, many taken directly from case histories of paranoia in Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, as well as from Freud’s works.

Paranoia is a mental disease characterized by delusions and projections of personal conflicts ascribed to the supposed hostility of others. Dalí’s work imitates paranoiac conditions, because while the paranoiac is able to find proof of persecution, Dali only simulated the illness.  He used paranoia less in the psychiatric sense than the etymological sense: para, meaning alternate, noia meaning mind. Thus, his "paranoiac-critical method" became a forced inspiration as Dalí submitted his paintings at once to the caprice of dream and wide-awake calculation.  His images, based on readings in psychiatry, eventually began displacing experiences drawn from his own psyche. 

Bibliografia:

1. Jones, E.: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume 3. New York: Basic Books, 1957, p. 235 and p. 412;

2. Rose, G.J. (1983). Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí: Cultural and Historical Processes. Am. Imago, 40:349-353;
3. Ernst Freud, Lucie Freud e Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1978). Sigmund Freud.