The Surrealists' dreams and their artwork

As Freud explained in The interpretation of dreams, the causality controls human psychological activity that non-accidentally represents itself through a dream, which is a process to satisfy our inner desires/libido. While we are sleeping, our consciousness becomes too relaxed to control our desires, and disguises itself as dreams. Therefore, the dream is a release of the repressed desires developed while we are awake. By analyzing people’s dreams, we can catch a glimpse of their psyche and desires which are embodied in their subconsciousness. However, rationality, morality, religion, society and experience in our real lives, are the shackles for creating surrealist artwork. The way that children and maniacs behave are not limited by these shackles, so we can see many childish and impertinent scenes in surrealist artwork.

According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, I think surrealist artists somehow follow their basic instinct while they are creating artwork. Generally speaking, most people are trained under traditional education and plan to blend themselves into modern society by following a set of stereotypes. Artists, Dali and Buñuel, detected the “death” of our Id which has been suppressed by different shackles. And they create surrealist works of art to break or rebel the conventional standard.

Freud separated human personality (“structural model of the psyche”) into three parts: Id, ego and superego.

To my understanding, Id refers to the instinctual self, and it’s a part of human unconscious mind. Id reflects a chaotic inner world that has no order, stability but desires, and is driven by libido that keeps telling us “be happy”. In Id, there’s no right or wrong, and everything is set to achieve self-satisfaction.

Ego, a mediator, makes people face live more easily in their conventional lives. It is constructed in our mind after acquiring education and civil environment. I believe Ego is a part of our conscious mind. It adjust the relationship between Id and our surroundings, in order to satisfy the needs of Id and not break any rules and standards in the real world.

Superego is a moralized self which is literally a higher form of ego. It restricts our behaviors in order to achieve the highest moral standard that formed when we were kids, and it forces us to emulate the social elites, accept culture, tradition and valid values. I believe that Superego is behind the motivation for us doing good deed rather than breaking rules.

Freud thought that these three psyche structures interact with each other, and Ego plays an important role among them to control the contradiction and balance. Therefore, one has to have a strong ego to make sure one’s personality is wholesome.

As the source of surrealist artwork, dream, interpreted by Freud, converses with our inner world. Things that happened in our dreams, like breathing, crying, and being happy, they all have their meanings. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud thought that when one is conscious, there is still an unconscious psychological activity happening in one’s mind. And when one is dreaming, the unconsciousness will be released in the dream. For example, I used to dream that I have a co-worker who wants to have a day off; However, I’m the one who wants to get away from work at that time. My dream disguised itself as it was someone else who wants to take a break and gave me an excuse for my desire. It used my co-worker as a symbol of me, and his wish of having a day off was a symbol of my real desire. By recalling those dreams and analyzing the symbols in it, I got a better understanding of my psyche and behaviors.

In order to distinguish the disguise of dreams, Freud divided dream into two different parts: The first one is called manifest content, which is the experience, such as dream scenes, sensations and so on, that a dreamer “actually” had in his/her dreams; Latent content, on this other hand, is referred to the hidden meaning underneath the dreamer’s dream experience, and it usually reveals the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts. A mask, for example, presents its gorgeous patterns as a manifest content, however, the person’s real facial expression, hidden behind the mask, is the Latent content. The dream/dream-work, as a process of converting Latent content to manifest content, has four methods to present itself to the dreamer explained in the book:

Condensation is a process to compress several latent contents in to one manifest content. For instance, if I dreamed about coins, it might mean a casino, the bank, some tips or a video game;

Displacement makes a tiny thing or idea become an important matter in your dream. I dreamed my co-worker wants to have a day off, for example, and his little watch got extremely big in my dream which implies that I really wish the time could pass faster;

Visualization is a process of the dream converting an abstract idea or thought to a specific “visual” scene. In the co-worker wants a day off dream, it was my idea of having a day off, and I visualized this idea in my dream as my co-worker wanting a day off scene, and how he shows he’s tired and really needs a day off.

Symbolism is the idea that a symbolic scene in our dream stands for a person or an idea. In this same example of my dream, my co-worker smoking with our boss stands for he is compromised by him, and he will keep working.

Based on Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, surrealism is about people try to discover human subconsciousness. Therefore, surrealist artwork encourages people to get away from rationality, organized experience and reality to embrace their symbolic inner world, to cooperate with their instinct, subconsciousness and dreams, to appreciate irrationality. The dreamlike artwork in surrealism usually reveals something even more realistic or significant than the real world.

Magritte’s painting: The Treachery of Images, which depicts a pipe realistically with an inexplicable sentence "Ceci n'est pas une pipe”(This is not a pipe) written below, challenges viewers’ conventional psychological expectation/prediction, and this idea even affects our realistic world. However, we can catch a glimpse of Freud’s dream theory in artwork from one of the most famous surrealist artists, Salvador Dali. In his painting “The Persistence of Memory”, Dali depicted a horse-like creature laying in an empty abandoned beach, and a part of the creature looks like a partial human face with eyelashes, nose and tongue which presents the passing time while we are sleeping. A platform constructed next to the creature, and a sear tree grown on it. The most intriguing element of this painting is that there are many clocks, usually made from metal and glass, are liquified and laying on the beach. And it implies that these tough-willed objects have become exhausted because they have worked for so long. Similarly, the sear tree also means elapse, senium and death. “The Persistence of Memory” depicts a dreamlike and delusive image which is a result of recording Dali’s unconsciousness consciously. I think for many surrealist artists, their instinct, dream and subconsciousness are their source of creation.

As a series of moving images, surrealist movies are able to present filmmaker’s dreamlike ideas in a poetic way. One of the most classic surrealist films would be “Un Chien Andalou” which was made by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. The film is constructed by a series of irrational scenes with couple of bizarre characters, such as a piano with a bloody dead donkey on it; Plenty of ants running out of a hole on a man’s hand. It is really difficult for audience to unscramble any plot. After several times of re-watching, I think the film is trying to present a series of dreams and fantasies of a mentally chaotic man. Buñuel used many symbolic languages to express the role’s sexual desire, orgasm, violence and profaneness, such as the scenes that show a man dying while he is touching a naked woman, a man slicing a woman’s left eye, and two confused priests attached to ropes. Based on Freud’s theory, “Un Chien Andalou” reveals an upshot of Buñuel’s unconscious psychological creation which is mostly dreamlike and disguised, and it is a way to express the artists’ Id, which is the most animalistic aspect of the human psyche.

Surrealist artists are affected by Freud’s idea to convert their ideas and thoughts into disguised symbolic subjects, characters or scenes to manifest their most dreamlike Id world, like the sexual fantasy pitched in “Un Chien Andalou”, the metaphor of time passing and memory.

I think Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and his interpretation of dreams are the sources of the creation of surrealist artwork. Consequently, the combination of psychoanalysis and art makes artists to create more profound artwork, and conversely, psychoanalysts are able to get a better understanding of artists’ psychological activities.