1. SURREALISM, MYTH, AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS

2. Introduction: Surrealism and difference
 Ideas of diversity and difference are
its most interesting features.
 Surrealist work – shifting terrain of
representation that constantly uses
difference to generate meaning.
 Difference was expressed through
metaphor of the „feminine‟ (central
organizing metaphor of difference)

3. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Sexual aspect of modernity
was a key concern for
Surrealists.
 From the beginning, Surrealism
was a heterogeneous
movement.
 There was never stylistic unity.

4. Joan Miro‟s Peinture (Painting), 1927
 A tenuous line is trailed
across the vivid blue
surface of the painting,
leaving suggestions of
forms, such as that of
the breast on the right-
hand side of the picture.
 Never allows the
imagery to become
resolved or fixed.

5. Salvador Dali‟s Les Accommodations des
desirs (Accommodations of Desires), 1929
 Dream landscape
with the forms
placed in an
illusionistic
space.
 Relations between
the forms are
mysterious, as in a
dream.

6. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 The desired effect was to reveal
the unconscious in
representation, and to undo
dominant conceptions of order
and reality.
 Not only a matter of questioning
„reality‟, but also of how „reality‟ was
normally presented.

7. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924
 Author : Breton, a writer and a poet.
 Surrealism: “psychic automatism in its pure
state that should be expressed through the
word or in any other manner”
 Refusal to be prescriptive was part of the
Surrealist commitment to invention, to the
unexpected, and to allowing as little
intervention as possible by the conscious
mind.

8. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Andre Masson –
produced numerous
„automatic‟drawings.
- work on many levels
of suggestiveness.
- ink line scrawled over
the page, returning
frequently to erotic points
of the body.
- Surrealism:“complete
state of distraction”

9. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Meret Oppenheim‟s Fur
Breakfast – cup, saucer,
and spoon from Uniprix
(department store), and
covered these with fur of
Chinese gazelle.
 The familiarity of the form of
the cup and saucer is
shattered by the
unexpected material, the
fur, and the sexual
connotations.
 Became an icon of
Surrealism

10. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Women, for the Surrealists, were closer
to that „place of madness‟, to the
unconscious, than men were.
 „Woman‟ was made the object of
desire, who also stood as a sign for
desire.
 Surrealism placed „woman‟ at its centre,
as the focus of its dreams.

11. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Surrealism valued
here and drew
attention to all that
the „call to order‟ had
repressed – the
underside of
modernity, the
erotic, the bizarre,
the unconscious
material of mental
life.

12. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Pictures of
Surrealists
 Words at the bottom
page read: “It is
woman who casts
the biggest shadow
or projects the
greatest light in out
dreams.”

13. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 I do Not See the
(Woman) Hidden in
the Forest by Rene
Magritte
 Female body:
common fantas
 Woman – poet‟s
muse and as „other‟
are stock motifs in
Surrealist thinking.

14. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 The dreams that escape in Surrealism may
involve the dreams and fantasies of the male
unconscious, but the way in which they are
revealed is always a matter of representation.
 Surrealism placed sexuality and desire at the
centre of its concerns.
 Associative and suggestiveness were
positively courted in Surrealist imagery.
 Surrealism for Aragon, “mythology of the
modern”

15. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 The mythology that Surrealism
constructed for itself both focused on
„woman‟ as „other‟, as closer to the
unconscious than men.
 Surrealists saw the ideas of Karl Marx
and Sigmund Freud as a means to
criticize the existing social order and
the dominant culture that they saw as
repressive.

16. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Surrealists used many
Freudian motifs.
They also had a
poetic sense of the
mechanisms involved
in the dreaming
process.
 Max Ernst‟s Oedipus
– collage

17. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 Freud argued that in the dream, there is both
„manifest‟ – what appears, and „latent‟ –
unconscious speaking
 Condensation - process by which the latent
content is condensed or compressed into the
manifest content.
 Displacement – process by which the focus is
shifted in the dream from an important
element to a seemingly insignificant one,
through censorship.

18. Introduction: Surrealism and
difference (cont.)
 For Freud, the unconscious was the first and
most important assertion of psychoanalysis.
 Surrealists explored the language of dreams
and the processes of dream work. They looked
inside themselves for what was infantile, but they
also sought to explore memory lapses, the
repressions, of a whole culture.
 Psychoanalytic theory addresses the differences
between men and women. It has been used by
feminist writers as a way of exploring the
relations between the sexes.

19. Breton‟s Nadja
 Focus of Walter Benjamin‟s discussion in an
essay called “Surrealism: the last snapshot of the
European intelligentsia”
 Account of a chance encounter with a woman,
Nadja, and with Paris itself.
 Breton meets Nadja as he wanders aimlessly
through Paris.(flaner – stroll or dawdle; flaneur –
someone who loafs about or loiters)
 Aimlessness – submission to whatever may
happen, to risk

20. Breton‟s Nadja (cont.)
 Desire, the main subject of
the book, is tied up with
looking, observing.
 Control, either social or
psychic, was seen by the
Surrealists as a form of
oppression.