The Interpretation of Dreams gave Surrealism the theory it worked from. Dalí spent years trying to meet him and managed it once, in London on 19 July 1938, carrying Metamorphosis of Narcissus to show him.
Freud is in these pages for what the artists took from him rather than for the clinical work itself. The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) supplied the twentieth-century avant-garde with a usable proposition: that the mind edits itself, that the edit can be got around, and that what surfaces when it is has meaning. Surrealism built a method on that, and André Breton — who had used psychoanalytic technique on shell-shocked soldiers during the war — wrote it into the 1924 manifesto.
Freud himself was unimpressed. He thought the Surrealists cranks, and said so, until Salvador Dalí was brought to his house in London on 19 July 1938 with a painting under his arm. Freud had fled Vienna three months earlier and had a year to live. He wrote to Stefan Zweig the following day that the young Spaniard's technical mastery had made him reconsider.
Met · 1938
Once, on 19 July 1938, at Freud's house in London, arranged by Stefan Zweig and Edward James after years of failed attempts. Dalí brought Metamorphosis of Narcissus and drew Freud while the others talked. Freud wrote to Zweig the next day that the visit had changed his opinion of the Surrealists.
Dalí read The Interpretation of Dreams as a student in Madrid and built the paranoiac-critical method on psychoanalytic ground. The influence runs one way: Freud had not heard of him before 1938 and thought the Surrealists cranks.
Influenced
Dalí read The Interpretation of Dreams as a student in Madrid and built the paranoiac-critical method on psychoanalytic ground. The influence runs one way: Freud had not heard of him before 1938 and thought the Surrealists cranks.
Met · 1938
Once, on 19 July 1938, at Freud's house in London, arranged by Stefan Zweig and Edward James after years of failed attempts. Dalí brought Metamorphosis of Narcissus and drew Freud while the others talked. Freud wrote to Zweig the next day that the visit had changed his opinion of the Surrealists.