Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and The Arts Events, 2019/2020
Unless otherwise stated, CRPLA seminars take place on Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00pm in Room S0.11 (ground floor of Social Studies). All welcome. For further information, please contact Diarmiud Costello: Diarmuid.Costello@warwick.ac.uk
CANCELLED - CRPLA Event - Antal Bokay: ‘Hysteria-Criticism and Paranoia-Criticism: Surrealism's Adventures with Psychoanalysis and the Mysteries of the Soul’
Surrealism, a major movement of late modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, showed an enigmatic parallel with and interest in psychoanalysis as the poets, painters and novelists tried to open a new depth of personal self-understanding. They were “loving Freud madly”: they studied psychoanalysis, Breton and Dalí visited Freud, and they integrated the basic ideas of psychoanalysis into their literary and theoretical discourses. Breton put the dream and automatism at the centre and developed a kind of hysteria-criticism, while Dalí introduced a more radical paranoia-criticism in his theories and creative work. Dalí’s work showed important parallel ideas with the psychoanalysis of the early Jacques Lacan. Dalí in 1938 visited Freud in London and took with him his freshly finished picture “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus”. This major painting is an excellent summary of his paranoia-criticism. The structuring of the picture, and the act of imagining the world through a paranoid-critical method, creates a surrealistic-hallucinatory psycho-analysis, and speaks of Dali’s narcissistic lacks and excesses as well as our own.