Confronting the foreign. Surrealism and psychoanalysis in dialogue

ABSTRACT

Influenced by psychoanalytic theory of drive and the desire, the surrealist movement aimed at breaking down the rational I of the individual, to liberate desire and sexuality and create a free human being by transgressing moral and social conventions. I explore the idea that sexual desire may be experienced as something foreign in us – as a drive for excess and boundlessness. Reflecting on the revolutionary project of surrealism from a psychoanalytic perspective, I specifically discuss female sexual desire as articulated by surrealist artists. I argue that art may confront us with what is foreign, thereby ‘calling’ upon us to integrate what was hitherto unrecognized.

KEYWORDS:

• Surrealism
• female desire
• otherness of sexuality
• foreigness
• psychoanalysis and art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The paranoic refers to the emergence of the object as an active process of perception of the surrounding world, as opposed to the rather passive process connoted by the concept of automatism. Certainly, an important epistemological discussion that I will not go into further here.

2. Breton and his colleagues, wanting to demonstrate the thin line between normality and madness, had experimented with simulating psychotic episodes, expressed through automatic writing. To my mind this amounts to a kind of ideological idealization of madness, that ignored the pain and chaotic destructiveness of the psychotic state of mind.

3. Lacan’s doctoral dissertation was an in-depth study of Aimée, a psychotic patient he treated for one and a half year. Through his case studies, he demonstrated the family- and social dynamics determining the psychotic states of mind, thus arguing that patients are ill from culture, not nature. By rending psychosis understandable, the early Lacan contributed to humanization of psychiatric illness, important in the society at that time.

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Notes on contributors

Siri Erika Gullestad

Siri Erika Gullestad, Dr. philos.,Professor emeritus of clinical psychology, University of Oslo. Training and supervising analyst, IPA. Gullestad is former Head of Department of the Department of psychology and former president of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Association. Currently Chair of Research Committee, IPA. Author of many articles and books within the psychoanalytic field, e.g. Theory and practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Listening for the subtext. Routledge, 2020 (with Bjørn Killingmo); The otherness of sexuality: Exploring the conflicted nature of drive, desire and object choice, Int J Psychoanal, 2020. Gullestad was awarded the Sigourney prize 2019.