Surrealism and Psychoanalysis: a Time Dissolved

The proximity between Surrealism and psychoanalysis is no secret and has manifested itself both in the visual arts, with painters such as Magritte and Dalí, and in encounters between historical figures such as Breton and Freud, Dalí and Lacan. Although Freud was not interested in Surrealism, the reverse is not true: Freud’s elaborations on an ego “not master in its own house” strongly appealed to Surrealist writers, who saw in the unconscious – this beyond of the “self-conscious ego” – a source of exploration for artistic creation.

Lacan, for his part, did not ignore the Surrealist movement. In 1931, he drew upon Dalí for his studies on paranoia, which he carried out in his doctoral thesis published in 1932 and entitled On Paranoid Psychosis in Its Relations to the Personality. But what does Dalí have to do with paranoia?

The artist, in his curiosity about the unconscious and its “manifestations,” inaugurated what he called the “paranoiac-critical method”: the self-induction of hallucinations for creative purposes. Indeed: hallucinations in order to create works of art.

“The only difference between me and a madman,” he said, “is that I am not mad.”

Moma Collection, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018

One year after beginning this process of artistic creation, Dalí painted the famous canvas of the melting clocks: The Persistence of Memory. The work contests the imposition of a realist, rational, conscious normality. The distorted clocks defy the imperious notion of a single time, the chronological one. Articulating strangeness and familiarity, Dalí sought to “materialize irrationality with the fury of precision,” infiltrating “abnormal” and unsettling elements into everyday scenes.

The unconscious operates in a similar way. It dismantles the predictable and escapes the expected by imposing on us a time that does not follow the clock that regulates our lives. Freud stated: the unconscious is timeless. Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory plays with this notion. Upon finishing his painting, the artist asked his wife whether she would be able to forget the image of his work within three years, to which she replied that, once seen, that canvas could never be forgotten.

Salvador Dalí,  The Persistence of Memory, 1931.

Memory can persist beyond the precise definition of minutes and hours. The unconscious, which we can relate to Dalí’s notion of “irrationality,” deforms clocks, melts hands, markings, determinations, predictions, and above all, exactitudes. Like the unconscious, Dalí’s “irrational” distorted clocks blend with the familiar, indicating the presence of the bizarre in this world so full of normalities. However unexpected it may be, both the unconscious and its indefinite temporality belong to the “real” world.

Lacan, for his part, goes beyond Freud’s notion of the unconscious as timeless, proposing instead that it is oriented by a logical time. Not chronological, but logical. Dreams, anxieties, or memories that seem to return suddenly testify to this: logical time disrupts pre-established patterns of normality — “I thought I had already resolved this issue”… and here it is again, isn’t it?

Through the unconscious, the unexpected insists, the old returns — and this is why pain does not obey calendars. Memory persists. Not everything can be measured in hours.

But then… are we to suffer forever?

If it is by logic that the unconscious is oriented… then it is by working through this logic that we can create new positions in relation to old sufferings, until, by viewing them from different angles, they lose their place in favor of new memories.

FREUD, S., Une difficulté de la psychanalyse, 1917.

LACAN, J.,  De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, 1932.

SANTOS, L. G. dos, Surrealismo e Psicanálise: O inconsciente e a paranoia, 2017.

Moma Collection, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018