Research - Surrealism

Surrealism was sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of imagination. The most frequent types of imagery is nature, Salvador Dali's work often included ants and Joan Miro's work was heavily influenced by birds. Surrealism grew out of the "Dada" movement, the main influence for the surrealists was the work of Giorgio de Chirico.


Giorgio de Chirico, 1914, The Song of Love, oil on canvas, 73 x 59.1 cm

"By employing fantasy and dream imagery, artists generated creative works in a variety of media that exposed their inner minds in eccentric, symbolic ways, uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means."

There were to main methods of distinguishing surrealist paintings, one was the use of hyperrealism which can be seen in Dali's works, with the crisp detail and fine illusion of three dimensions. Automatism on the other hand, was another approach used to "tap into the unconscious mind" this helped the artist bypass reason and rationality, forgo conscious thought and embrace chance when creating artwork.

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm

Sigmund Freud

Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human thoughts and desires.

The Unconscious

The concept of the unconscious was central to Freud's account of the mind. Freud believed that while poets and thinkers had long known of the existence of the unconscious, he had ensured that it received scientific recognition in the field of psychology. The concept made an informal appearance in Freud's writings.

The unconscious was first introduced in connection with the phenomenon of repression, to explain what happens to ideas that are repressed. Freud stated explicitly that the concept of the unconscious was based on the theory of repression. He postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances. The postulate was based upon the investigation of cases of traumatic hysteria, which revealed cases where the behavior of patients could not be explained without reference to ideas or thoughts of which they had no awareness. This fact, combined with the observation that such behavior could be artificially induced by hypnosis, in which ideas were inserted into people's minds, suggested that ideas were operative in the original cases, even though their subjects knew nothing of them.

Freud, like Josef Breuer, found the hypothesis that hysterical manifestations were generated by ideas to be not only warranted, but given in observation. Disagreement between them arose when they attempted to give causal explanations of their data: Breuer favored a hypothesis of hypnoid states, while Freud postulated the mechanism of defense. Richard Wollheim comments that given the close correspondence between hysteria and the results of hypnosis, Breuer's hypothesis appears more plausible, and that it is only when repression is taken into account that Freud's hypothesis becomes preferable.

Freud originally allowed that repression might be a conscious process, but by the time he wrote his second paper on the "Neuro-Psychoses of Defence" (1896), he apparently believed that repression, which he referred to as "the psychical mechanism of (unconscious) defense", occurred on an unconscious level. Freud further developed his theories about the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where he dealt with condensation and displacement as inherent characteristics of unconscious mental activity. Freud presented his first systematic statement of his hypotheses about unconscious mental processes in 1912, in response to an invitation from the London Society of Psychical Research to contribute to its Proceedings. In 1915, Freud expanded that statement into a more ambitious metapsychological paper, entitled "The Unconscious". In both these papers, when Freud tried to distinguish between his conception of the unconscious and those that predated psychoanalysis, he found it in his postulation of ideas that are simultaneously latent and operative.

Dreams

Freud believed that the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awaken the dreamer.

In Freud's theory dreams are instigated by the daily occurrences and thoughts of everyday life. His claim that they function as wish fulfillments is based on an account of the “dreamwork" in terms of a transformation of "secondary process" thought, governed by the rules of language and the reality principle, into the "primary process" of unconscious thought governed by the pleasure principle, wish gratification and the repressed sexual scenarios of childhood.

In order to preserve sleep the dreamwork disguises the repressed or “latent" content of the dream in an interplay of words and images which Freud describes in terms of condensation, displacement and distortion. This produces the "manifest content" of the dream as recounted in the dream narrative. For Freud an unpleasant manifest content may still represent the fulfilment of a wish on the level of the latent content. In the clinical setting Freud encouraged free association to the dream's manifest content in order to facilitate access to its latent content. Freud believed interpreting dreams in this way could provide important insights into the formation of neurotic symptoms and contribute to the mitigation of their pathological effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud#Dreams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud#The_Unconscious

I will be reading further into the work of Freud as it has inspired me a lot, although not an artist I feel his work would be greatly beneficial to my research and the development of my project. I think that it may inspire me to think outside the box and explore other ways of developing my art.