Salvador Dali's Paranoiac Village

“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises” (“Sigmund Freud Quotes”). Sigmund Freud was a very influential person in the Surrealist movement. Freud was a psychiatrist who developed a type of therapy called psychoanalysis. The goal of psychoanalysis is to make a person aware of their unconscious mind because the unconscious mind is what really determines a person's behavior (McLeod). In our textbook The Power of Art, Richard Lewis and Susan Lewis write that Surrealists were also trying to connect with their unconscious mind. In fact, they wrote that Surrealists used their art to give a “voice” to the unconscious mind (417). As stated above, Freud developed a way to connect a person to their unconscious mind with

For this assignment, I chose the painting Paranoiac Village which was completed in 1935. I think this is a great example of Dali's work and of Surrealism. I found a few things that distinguish Dali's work in the Surrealist movement and really show his philosophy of this movement . First, although the subject matter of his paintings are often absurd and bizarre, Dali's style and technique are very realistic, unlike many other Surrealist artists (Lewis ans Lewis 418-419). Second, Dali felt he was able to actually connect his unconscious mind to his conscious mind. As opposed to other Surrealists, Dali's artwork was his rational mind's interpretation of what was going on in his unconscious mind. Being able to connect the two minds is referred to as “paranoid critical activity” (“Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus"). And finally, although many of Dali's paintings include symbolism, Dali actually goes a little bit farther. In many of his paintings, he is painting things that actually are an optical illusion and become something else right before your