The influence of Freud on the work of Salvador Dali This essay will tackle and engage the level of influence Sigmund Freud had on the work of Salvador Dali. Being part of the surrealist movement Dali was interested in what could be revealed in his dreams and he saw his paintings as a gateway into the subconscious. Sigmund Freud revolutionized the way people think and interpret the mind with his theory of the subconscious most notably written and preserved in the ‘Interpretation of Dreams’. The subconscious is the part of the psyche that feels and thinks without the person being at all aware. According to Freud dreams that we have are like coded messages from the subconscious. Previous to Freud’s groundbreaking thoughts anybody who gave …show more content…
The whole idea is the repression of the child’s desire to have sexual relations with the parent of opposite sex. The artwork is a self-portrait with a distorted face pointed downward dominating the centre and it becomes almost a tree ready for things to hang off. The shape of a natural rock formation along the shore of Catalonia inspires the general form of the face. The painting stems from his fathers domination and his inability to have sexual relations with his mother, therefore it is a depiction of the shameful act of masturbation. The grasshopper comes from his early childhood fear of them and the appearance of one in the painting gives the indication of fear and maybe the inability to take control. Ants have been a symbol of death, decay and change in his work and this idea imposed itself on Dali through the childhood event of watching colonies devour entire animals. Additionally to educate a young Dali about sex his father left out a book containing explicit photos of untreated sexually transmitted diseases. This left the young Dali with strong associations between sex and decay. Within the artwork the ants are eating the grasshopper so could this an indication that he is slowly being relieved of his …show more content…
Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. Dali attempted to do this in his painting in a rather peculiar way. Dali would place a metal mixing bowl in his lap and hold a large spoon loosely in his hands. When he slowly fell asleep and started to relax the spoon would fall from his grasp, hit the bowl and wake him up. He would continue to do this so he floated a long in a not sleeping, but not awake state leaving his imagination to churn out images and ideas. Displacement in a dream is when we transform the person or object we are concerned about to someone else. An example of this is one of Freud’s patients was resentful of his sister-in-law and he used to refer to her as a dog. The patient then had dreams about strangling a small white dog. Freud took this and interpreted it as the patient wanting to kill the sister-in-law. If the patient had dreamed realistically and killed his sister he would have been overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. Therefore the unconscious transformed her into a god to allow his to feel less guilt and make the association less