![]() ![]() Alongside a far more optimistic and aesthetic discourse on the natural history of the marvelous, this pessimistic discourse played grotesquely with images of regression. I will then discuss how these key biogenetic elements of Freudian metapsychology fed into a surrealist discourse that privileged the expression of the instincts, and which paraded regression in the face of the bourgeois dependency on a progressive scientific discourse. This text will then be explained in relation to Salvador Dalí’s Tragic Myth, which, I will argue, follows Freud’s text with its own ‘phylogentic fantasy’ of a bestial return to the form of an enormous praying mantis a narrative that in turn echoes the evolutionary-inspired tales of H.G Wells and the world of fantasy fiction with which Dalí was familiar. Freud’s so-called Phylogenetic Fantasy will be discussed as outlining the bases of his metapsychology in biogenetic theories, and as an extraordinarily imaginative speculation about the primal origins of society and their influence on human development. Like many of his generation, before the genetic synthesis had established Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Freud looked less to Darwin and more to Lamarck’s ideas for answers to issues of inheritance and the primal experiences and memories that he believed phylogenetically structured the neuroses in the civilized adult. ![]() Freud’s biogenetically grounded ideas concerning the primal and the civilized, repression and the instincts, progress and regression, would find strong echoes in surrealist discourse, revealing a kind of biological unconscious of surrealism. ![]() Sulloway’s Freud Biologist of the Mind, I will discuss how the psychoanalytic whitewashing of Freud’s biological grounding in the theories of Darwin and Lamarck has hidden from view some essential points concerning his ideas on human development. The readings of Freud’s work that have dominated discourse in art history, as elsewhere in the humanities, have predominantly avoided discussion of the biological foundations of his theories. ![]() The surrealists exploited, through the image of regressive transformation or atavistic affinity, anxieties long prompted by evolutionary theory and the possibility that human development could be terrifyingly reversed. Notions such as “inorganic state”, “trauma of birth”, death instincts and imago, are also explored, as they reverberate in Dali’s writings and paintings of the time.ĪAH 2014 Session Metamorphoses Donna Roberts Proposal Spectres of Regression: Dismal Darwinism, Freud, and Surrealist Metapsychology This paper will focus on the spectre of regression that developed through late 19th century natural science and psychology, and in turn came to underline key areas of surrealist art and writing, particularly in the 1930s. The paper explores the views of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Jacques Lacan concerning intra-uterine life and the ways in which that partakes in the life of the individual, as these are expressed in the psychoanalytic texts known to Dali. Life in the womb becomes a point of differentiation between Dali and the leaders of surrealism, mainly Breton, and a meeting point for the Catalan artist and the psychoanalytic trends in Paris between the wars. Employing The Secret Life of Salvador Dali as a starting point, the paper focuses on Dali’s conception of intra-uterine life, as well as its representation in his work in the 1930s. Sanctioned on the part of the surrealists as early as 1924 in André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, this interplay proved to be an ongoing process, which influenced most of the people who were at some time related to this group of avant-garde artists, including Salvador Dali. This paper examines the interface between psychoanalysis and the surrealist movement in the 1930s and early 1940s in France. ![]()
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