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According to Greek Mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his

own reflection in a pool. Unable to embrace the watery image, he


pined away, and the gods immortalised him as a flower
(Available from: www.tate.org.uk )

Salvador Dalis work is particularly useful for the application of psychoanalytical

theories because It was only after the writings of Freud revealed to him the symbolic

world of the unconscious as a buried reality did he give full rein to his bent for dark

inexplicable fantasy He came to regard the dark wonder world of dreams and

hallucinations as the only subject matter worthy of artistic treatment (Powel, 1992;

273). This idealisation of the unreal is reflected in his painting Metamorphosis of

Narcissus.

Freud used free association to trace the symbolic meaning of dream imagery to the

unconscious. Dali applied the same psychoanalytic device to his pictorial imagery. In

the painting there are two sets of representations of idealised desire as opposed to

reality. In the foreground to the left we see Narcissus representing the ephemeral

androgynous beauty, seeming neither male nor female and yet both. To the right we

see the hand representing harsh reality. On the background to the left we have a crowd

of animated naked individuals. These individuals are either male of female and

represent reality, while on the right hand side we have the image of perfection in a

pedestal, again androgynous and signifying the perfection of idealised unity. This

repetition of themes reflects the way Freud writes, constantly coming back to the

same fundamental points. Just as Freud manifests the compulsion to repeat (which is

necessarily unconscious) in the conscious writing of his work, Dali expresses the

same in his painting.

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The giant stone hand in the foreground immediately draws the eye and is much

more prominent than the ethereal figure of Narcissus. Holding an egg (a favourite

Dalinian symbol representing duality of hard exterior and soft interior, and links with

pre-natal imagery) that here could represent reproduction, the sexual drive, or life

instinct. Yet at the same time we see ants inexorably crawling towards that egg. Ants

in Dalis paintings represent death. This hand (hand of creation?) therefore, holds life

yet cannot help but be affected by death. The flower sprouting from the cracked egg

represents a merging of those two concepts. It is a new life, but a new life that has

sprouted from death, as the flower grows upon the place where Narcissus dies. The

duality and complementary nature of Eros and Tanatos as explained by Freud in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle are therefore brought together in this painting.

The other theme of this painting is the idealisation of unattainable desires. The

hand represents the harsh and unchangeable reality of life and death as represented

by the sexual and death drives in duality and opposition to the ephemeral and

idealised figure of Narcissus.

Narcissus, in turn, represents desire, as the reflected image symbolises what Lacan

describes as the moment of initial recognition, when the mirror image represents a

more perfect idealised image of the self. But it also essentially represents miss-

recognition, for the image is perceived as other that is necessary to complete us, but

that we may never be united with. This is what the myth of Narcissus illustrates so

well, the longing to be reunited with our other half that we experience from that

first Lacanian moment - the first moment in which we realise that we are not complete

- and that we project on others as love. I love in you something more than you,

something that completes me it is the eternal search return to that perfect state of

unity with the mother which in itself was always an impossibility.

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According to Freud we will always desire to be reunited with our mother and

return to that ideal dyadic relationship that precedes the intrusion of a third party

(represented by the father or anyone else that effectively comes between the child and

mother). Narcissus desire is the desire to regress to that stage.

This could also be linked to Freuds initial description of the death drive. Freud

hypothesizes that all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of

thingsand inanimate things existed before living ones. Therefore we could

interpret this image of Narcissus not only as longing to be united with his image, but

perhaps also longing for death, which would lead to this inorganic state of being.

Towards the background we see the already mentioned naked figure on a pedestal.

This for me could represent love sublimation, the act of putting someone on a pedestal

and raising that person to the status of Thing. Yet it is not the person per se that we

are raising to that level, but the idea of completeness that we aspire to. The figure on

the pedestal, like Narcissus, is androgynous, neither obviously male nor female,

representing the unity of the two halves that is impossible and that we all idealise.

This duality is also symbolised by the fact that the pedestal stands on a chequered

floor, and it is placed precisely with half of it sanding on a black square and half on

white, uniting male and female in the perfect unison idealised in the Oedipus

complex, where the yearning to be reunited with the mother, to be complete and

return to that perfect relationship is expressed in this ever unfulfilled desire.

I believe this phase of Dalis work is extremely useful as a case study for

psychoanalytical theory, as he not only knew of and actively used Freuds ideas in his

work, but also used these to analyse and depict his dreams, mirroring Freuds own

techniques of observing and dissecting ones own dreams. The fact that these works

appeal to us in ways that we cannot immediately explain is testament to their

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effectiveness as art constructed to effect us on a subconscious level and they serve to

prove the practicality of many of Freuds theories.

Bibliography

BELSEY, C. (2005) Culture and the Real: Theorising Cultural Criticism. London and

New York: Routledge

BENDLE, M.F. (2001) death, the Abyss and the Real. Psychoanalytic Studies, 3 (2),

223-36

FREUD, S. (1984) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In: A. Richards, ed. The Penguin

Freud Library, Volume 11. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis.

London: Penguin, 267-338.

FREUD, S. (1989) On Dreams

LACAN, J. (1992) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques

Lacan, Book VII. London and New York: Routledge

POWELL, J. (1992) Twentieth Century Art, 273

Websites

On signification of imagery used in Dalis paintings:

(anom) Available from the County Hall Gallery Website:

http://www.countyhallgallery.com/education/dali_symbols.htm

On Dalis Background and some of his other work:

(anom) Available from the Salvador Dali Museum Website:

http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/collection

On Metamorphosis of Narcissus

(anom) Available from Tate Modern Website:

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=2987&sear

chid=7426&tabview=image

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