SURREALISTS INFLUENCED BY SIGMUND FREUD'S THEORY OF DREAMS?

How were the Surrealists influenced by Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams?

How were the Surrealists influenced by Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams?

The surrealists were substantially leveraged by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis. They were particularly receptive to his distinction between the 'ego' and the 'id'—that is, between our primal instincts/desires (the 'id') and our more reasonable patterns of demeanour (the 'ego'). Since our primal urges are often unsuitable/ unsuitable in terms of communal anticipations, Freud resolved that in a repressive world, we are incapable to share our dreams attentively and push them into the unconscious part of our minds. He believed that individuals should bring their concealed yearns to the perception of the conscious mind. Freud felt that despite the swamping urge to repress desires, the unattentive still discloses itself—particularly when the attentive mind relaxes its hold—in dreams, myths, strange patterns of behavior, misfortunes, and art. Through the film's disturbing succession of images and surrealist imagery, Bunuel and Dali were able to visualise the surrealist fascination with the reality of the unconscious: the concept that the 'real' is to be found beyond the surface, in concealed dimensions of the psyche. Bunuel believed that through visualising unconscious impulses, he would 'shatter the optimism of the bourgeois world, and force the reader (or spectator) to question the permanency of the prevailing order'.

Cinema, as Short puts it, 'permitted the superimposition of dreams and everyday reality; their suture in a seameless visual experience.'[4] The ambience of the film creates a mental state halfway between dream and reality, an almost conscious hallucination. Both Dali and Bunuel took inspiration when creating the film from the psychoanalytical practice of remembering their own dreams (the former recounting one of ants eating at his hand, and Bunuel's being the image of a tapering cloud bisecting the moon). They dispensed with the restraints of rationality, reason and established attitudes (moral, social and artistic), using images and ideas that would surprise and provoke the spectator, in order to create an 'autonomous' world. By obscuring the realist vision and idealist aesthetic the final images imparted dream-like states and represented 'the unconscious feelings and desires of man'- both principal preoccupations of Surrealism that aimed to shock spectators into a new awareness of them. The surrealist technique used by the filmmakers for the first time in cinema as a way of eliciting the unconscious is known as 'automatism': this consisted of allowing the mind to wander without any interference from the conscious mind. The resulting findings would not be random or meaningless, but would be guided at every point by the functioning of the artist's unconscious mind, and not by rational thought or artistic training. The film is full of surreal images we remain unprepared for- an example is the metamorphosis of the female protagonist's armpit with a sea-urchin accompanied by a single human footprint or the male protagonist's strange burden of donkeys, pianos and other ...