Psychoanalysis

About

Sigmund Freud's claim that hidden wishes shape dreams, slips and symptoms gave 20th-century artists new ground to explore. André Breton, who had trained in medicine and read Freud closely, launched Surrealism in 1924 as a way to release the unconscious. Salvador Dalí developed what he called the paranoiac-critical method, painting double images that shift as the eye reads them, and he sketched Freud in London in 1938. The Chilean painter Roberto Matta called his late-1930s canvases psychological morphologies, landscapes of the mind.

Carl Jung, Freud's one-time ally, filled the Red Book (c. 1915–30) with his own painted visions. Later artists made analysis itself their material. Louise Bourgeois spent decades in psychoanalysis and made The Destruction of the Father (1974), a cave of swelling forms around a table, and Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (1973–79) charted her son's early years through the theories of Jacques Lacan.