Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method

Right now, I am at the Library of Congress reading through a book titled Beyond Pleasure by Margaret Iverson. The book has given me a great deal of insight into the ways that Surrealists affected post-Freudian psychoanalysts. Although the majority of this information is unrelated to my topic, I have still found some valuable information.

For one, both Andre Breton and painter Salvador Dali had close personal relationships with psychoanalysts in the 1930s. Freud radically affected Surrealist art, and, in turn, various Surrealists influenced psychoanalysis. According to Iverson,

The 1930s were particularly fertile years for exchanges between the Surrealists and the then newly qualified psychiatrist [Jacques Lacan].

The book then goes into the ways that Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dali worked together and influenced each other, with Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis at the center of the discussion. Now, my research does not focus on ways that Surrealists affected psychoanalysis, but, instead, the other way around. Luckily for me, chapter 3 of the book (titled "Paranoia") discusses a book by Dali that is extremely relevant to my research: The Tragic Myth of the Angelus of Millet. Dali's book discusses "an apparently banal rural scene showing a peasant couple pausing in a field for evening prayer" (page 40 of Beyond Pleasure). The painting, of course, is Jean-Francois Millet's The Angelus. The first thing that caught my attention was Iverson's description of the work in a section called "Paranoid Criticism" on page 42, chapter 3:

The rigorous exposition of the argument in Dali's Tragic Myth, the clarity of its prose, and its scholastic division into three sections and subsections mimes, I think, Freud's literary mastery. In particular, frequent reference is made, in both style and content, to The Interpretation of Dreams. Dali freely uses the language of dream interpretation, including such terms as "latent content," "condensation," and "displacement."

Iverson's discussion of the work is exactly what I hoped to find in my research: a confirmation of the theory that Freud did in fact affect Surrealist art. In this case, Iverson demonstrates that even Surrealist art-criticism was influenced by Freud. After researching further into Dali's book and reading some excerpts, I can say that I agree with Iverson's opinion. Furthermore, Dali's interpretation of the painting is intriguing: he argues that instead of praying with the angelus, the peasant couple is actually mourning the loss of a child and experiencing sexual frustration.

As I wrote in a previous post about one of David Gascoyne's poems, various Surrealist art-works seem to have been written with the intention of being interpreted from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Now, it also becomes clear that Surrealists themselves interpreted works of art from a psychoanalytic perspective, just as Freud did when he interpreted Oedipus Rex and formulated his idea of the Oedipus Complex. In fact, Dali had a name for this type of art criticism, which doubled as a Surrealist technique when creating art as well: the paranoiac-critical method (mentioned on page 40 of Beyond Pleasure), which encouraged both the artist and the critic to see various ideas and objects in a single image.