DREAM-WORK AND ART-WORK

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

Abstract: If artists, art historians and critics are to benefit from Freudian

psychoanalysis in any way, then they must confront the central achievements of

Freud's work and not just his more marginal writings on art and artists. In order to

explain the way in which dream images are produced, Freud introduced the concept of

dream-work; it is proposed that a comparable concept - art-work - would be useful in

the field of artistic production. Freud made frequent use of the pictorial analogy in

discussing the mechanisms of dream construction; this paper reverses the dream-

picture relationship and examines, via a number of concrete examples, the extent to

which pictures can be elucidated by the terms condensation, displacement, etc. which

Freud employed to explain dreams. The underlying hypothesis is that the ways in

which dreams, jokes, pictorial and poetic images are constructed are fundamentally

similar.

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I. INTRODUCTION

If one asks an artist 'How are your art works produced?', the reply is likely to

consist of a description of materials, tools, and physical processes plus an account of

feelings, intentions and attitudes to subject matter. What one is unlikely to receive is

any cogent account of the art-work itself, that is, a description of the operations
(which are both mental and manual in character) by which the images (either

mental or physical) that form the basis of the artist's raw material are transformed

during artistic labour. What artists lack is a set of concepts and a vocabulary with

which to describe these operations. Freud's text The Interpretation of Dreams [I] is

useful in this respect because it provides appropriate conceptual and linguistic tools

via its description of the mental activity called 'dream-work'. A comparable concept

'art-work' would be helpful in clarifying the way in which pictorial signs are

constructed.

Although some of Freud's assumptions about the functions and control

mechanisms of dreams have been challenged by recent neuro-physiological research

[2], his theory of dream-work still provides the most illuminating model of artistic

creation. In fact, Freud's writings on dreams and jokes (not only in The

Interpretation of Dreams, but also in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious [3])

are so fertile that only a small number of the possible connections with images in

visual art will be explored in this essay. Freud frequently cited pictorial and

symbolic representations as examples when explaining how dreams are constructed.

He was also influenced by the art theory/criticism of his day, in particular by the

work of Giovanni Morelli, advocate of a new method of attribution which depended

upon an examination of the 'unconscious' formal and stylistic characteristics of an

artist's work [4]. This essay has a modest and limited objective; namely, to reverse

the direction of Freud's dreams-pictures analogy in order to see to what extent

pictures can be explained by the concepts Freud employed in relation to dreams.

The underlying hypothesis of the essay is that dream-work, joke-work and art-work
are three comparable, if not identical, processes.

II. MENTAL AND MANUAL

At the outset it may be objected that dream-work is an unconscious process

involving internal mental operations while artistic labour is a conscious mental

process controlling the manual manipulation of physical materials and implements.

These differences exist but the unconscious also plays a role in art-work and, as we

shall see shortly, there are parallels between the unconscious operations of dream-

work and the physical transformations typical of artistic production. Freud himself

applied the concepts which he developed in reference to dreams to jokes, which, like

art, are generated by a mixture of conscious and unconscious processes, and are the

social products of individuals playing with an entity -language - that transcends

individuals.

In Chapter 6, ‘The Dream-Work,’ of The Interpretation of Dreams [1, pp. 277-508]

Freud likens dreams to picture puzzles and argues that dreams remain nonsense so

long as they are regarded as literal, realistic representations. He claims that the

manifest content of a dream is a kind of 'pictographic script' which represents in an

indirect manner a latent, hidden content, what Freud calls 'the dream-thoughts' [1,

pp. 277-78]. The task of the psychoanalyst is to investigate the relations between the

manifest dream-content and the latent dream-thoughts. The task of dream-work is

the labour of transposing, translating the dream-thoughts into the concrete imagery

of the dream-content and in the process distorting them. Freud discusses this labour

under various headings, for example, condensation, displacement, the means of

representation, and secondary revision.

 Already a parallel suggests itself between Freud's view that dreams have double

meanings (latent and manifest) and the way images function (signifiers and

signifieds) and symbols work (literal and metaphorical levels of meaning). The

correlation between art-work and dream-work is made quite explicit in Freud's

frequent references to the means of representation in works of art as examples of

how dreams are formed. Furthermore, the task of the psychoanalyst in interpreting

dreams appears to match that of the viewer or reader seeking to grasp the meaning

of a work of art, a meaning which, like that of a dream, often stubbornly resists

decoding.

III. CONDENSATION

Anyone who has reviewed an art exhibition will be aware that the number of

words required to describe and interpret the works on display adequately always

seems excessive; in short, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. This commonplace

indicates the degree of condensation of ideas which imagery facilitates. As Freud

points out, a similar economy of expression is typical of dreams: 'Dreams are brief,

meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-

thoughts. If a dream is written out it may perhaps fill half a page. The analysis ...

may occupy six, eight or a dozen times as much space' [1, p. 279]. One method by

which dreamers and artists achieve condensation is by the omission of material: a

play or film with a number of scenes taking place at different times and locations

will omit altogether the intervening periods of time. Classical rhetoric labelled the

same process 'ellipsis': the omission of certain words in poetry. Every artistic

representation involves omission in the sense that the world is never depicted in its
plenitude (no landscape painter represents every leaf on a tree). Indeed,

condensation is inherent in pictorial representation: pictures present the illusion of

a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional plane. Examples of pictorial

synecdoche (a part which stands for a whole, for example 'All hands on deck' where

'hand' stands for 'a sailor') are another means by which condensation is achieved.

Both artists and viewers derive pleasure from condensation because of the economy

achieved in the means of expression: a figure which combines together two or more

images has the same appeal as a multi-purpose gadget.

An example of pictorial condensation cited by Freud occurs in Leonardo da

Vinci's painting 'Virgin and St. Anne with the Infant Jesus' (Paris, Louvre). Freud

notes that the figures of the two women 'are fused with each other like badly

condensed dream-figures' [5, p. 114]. This fusion is even more marked in the

cartoon for the painting in the National Gallery, London. Freud speculates that this

'fault' in the painting and drawing can be explained by postulating a secret meaning

based upon the assumption that Leonardo was raised by two mothers: 'It seems that

for the artist the two mothers of his childhood were melted into a single form' [5, p.

114]. Let us consider this type of pictorial figure in more detail.

IV. COLLECTIVE AND COMPOSITE FIGURES

Freud claims that the relations of similarity, consonance, and the possession of

common attributes between two items are highly favoured by the mechanism of

dream-formation and all are 'represented in dreams by unification' [I, p. 320]. For

instance, the dream-work of condensation often unites the features of two or more

people into a single dream-image, which Freud terms 'a collective figure'. Pictorial
equivalents to collective figures are commonly found in caricatures, especially in

caricatures of politicians which combine the features of the politician with those of

an animal, as for example, E. W. Kemble's caricature (1912) of Theodore Roosevelt

as a bull moose. (Such animal-human combinations are also commonplace in

religious and mythological paintings, angels and cupids, for example.) Such

caricatures are disturbing because the creatures produced by the work of

condensation are grotesque hybrids in which the head is that of a human being

while the body is that of an animal. Only in certain places is there a genuine overlap

of human and animal characteristics - such elements Freud called 'doubly

determined', as for example in the bared teeth of Roosevelt and the moose.

Linguistic equivalents to collective figures, also found in dreams, Freud calls

'verbal compounds'. These consist of two or more words joined together, for

example 'alcoholidays'. This amusing neologism is rather different from a simple

compound such as 'breakfast' because the letters 'hol' are shared by 'alcohol' and

'holidays'; hence the word incorporates a pun comparable to that pictorial element

shared by both humans and animals in caricatures. (Clifton Fadiman has coined the

term 'meld pun' to describe verbal puns of this kind.)

Another example of a collective figure is the bizarre and aggressive painting 'The

Rape' (1934) by René Magritte, which depicts a woman's head and neck with a

female torso in place of a face: breasts replace eyes, navel replaces nose, pubic hair

replaces mouth. Caricatures in which torsos or genitals and faces are combined

were well known before the advent of Surrealism and Freud cited their existence

when describing dream-images in which similar fusions occurred. The meaning of

such collective figures cannot be given except in relation to the particular dreams

and patients with which they were associated. In the case of Magritte's picture, the

context of a dream is missing and the device appears to have been used simply

because Magritte found it curious; this, to my mind, indicates the weakness of so

much Surrealist art: it isolates and illustrates fragments of psychoanalytic material

for the purposes of aesthetic delectation and shock-value [6].

Besides collective figures Freud identifies 'composite figures' which he explains by

analogy with the multiple exposure technique of photography, that is, the projection

of two or more images on to a single plate. In a composite figure 'certain features

common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another

cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture' [I, p. 293]. A photographic

figure of this kind is John Heartfield's 1931 image of a German political party as a

man with the snarling features of a tiger produced by superimposing a photograph

of a tiger's head over that of a man's. Freud's writings on jokes are also relevant to

caricatures and photomontage such as Heartfield's because in them he explains that

jokes are 'especially favoured in order to make aggressiveness or criticism possible

against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke ...

represents a rebellion against authority, a liberation from its pressure. The charm of

caricature lies in this simple factor ... ' [3, p. 105].

Graphic designers frequently exploit the multiple exposure capacity of

photography in order to make visible the link between products, surrogate

consumers and certain human values. For example, an advertisement for cigarettes

depicts a man and woman with their arms around one another sauntering along a
beach by the edge of the sea. Over this image is superimposed the image of the

cigarette packet. The product is shown as integral to the environment which the

loving couple inhabit. Thus, an identification between the values of human love,

leisure time, health, the glories of nature and the pleasure of cigarette smoking is

asserted pictorially: the fusion of product and landscape echoes the emotional

fusion of the lovers and the melting of night and day at sunrise and sunset.

Freud's distinction between collective and composite figures is not one which can

be simply applied to all pictures combining several images. For example, an

advertisement for English Cheddar cheese which combines features drawn from

three distinct images - the Union Jack, a circular yellow cheese, and a view of the

Cheddar gorge - appears to exhibit both collective and composite characteristics.

Perhaps it will suffice to call this a 'compound figure'.

V. DOUBLE MEANING

It is evident from the above examples that images can be combined together in

different ways and with varying degrees of synthesis (this seems to be the basis of

Freud's distinction between collective and composite figures). When two images are

combined in such a way that both are equal in power an ambiguous figure is

produced, that is, one which is capable of a double meaning or signification.

(Alternatively, one could say that the viewer projects two different meanings on to a

single signifier.) Textbooks on the psychology of perception often reproduce

drawings of ambiguous figures, such as the one which can be read as a duck or as a

rabbit. The curious feature of such images is that the viewer oscillates between one

reading and another; on the conscious level, at least, the viewer cannot see the
drawing as a duck and as a rabbit simultaneously, but only successively.

Freud comments extensively on the way multiple use is made of a single word in

the technique of joke construction and describes various instances of double

meaning, for example 'double meaning arising from the literal and metaphorical

meanings of a word' [3, p. 36]. A pictorial equivalent of this type of double meaning

is a personification where the same form can be seen literally as the figure of a

woman and metaphorically as the political concept 'Liberty'.

Brancusi's 'Torso of a Young Man' (1925) and 'The Princess' (1916) may be cited

as examples of sculptures with double meanings. The first can be read as a highly

simplified torso and as an erect penis and testicles; similarly, the second is the head,

neck and shoulders of a woman and the erect genitals of a man. In both sculptures a

single form yields a double signification like that of the duck/rabbit drawing;

however, in this instance the double meanings are not exactly equal in power: in the

first work the torso-image dominates the phallic-image, while in the second the

phallic-image dominates the Princess-image. Clearly, the sexuality of Brancusi's

double meaning sculptures makes them visual counterparts to linguistic double

entendres (a word or expression with two meanings, one of which is lewd).

Pictorial double entendres are a common feature of the works of Dante Gabriel

Rossetti. Consider, for example, his drawing depicting a scene from the tale of St

George and the dragon (1862). St George is shown looking out of a window to

where the dragon lies dead while at the same time he washes his hands in a bowl of

water held by a maiden kneeling before him; part of the knight's left hand is

concealed by his right and what is shown - the thumb and knuckles-resembles, in
outline, the shape of the male genitals. The maiden's face, wearing a dreamy

expression, is very close to this hand/sexual organ; consequently she seems about to

perform fellatio. In this instance, the manifest and latent levels of meaning are

particularly clear though many viewers might not notice the latent sexual content;

even so, it is probably perceived subliminally.

Puns, play upon words, Freud calls 'double meaning proper ... This may be

described as the ideal case of "multiple use" ... thanks to certain favourable

circumstances (a word is able) to express two different meanings' [3, p. 37]. When

Falstaff says to Prince Hal 'Were it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent ...

' he exploits two different possibilities of language, sound and meaning: first, the

words 'here' and 'heir' are similar in sound but different in meaning; and second,

the word 'apparent', used twice, is employed in two senses, therefore it is a play on

the meaning of words rather than on their sounds. The example used above is

drawn from the book Upon The Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures by Paul

Hammond and Patrick Hughes. The authors take pains to explain the difference

between the two uses of language; the first one they call 'a pun' and the second one

they call 'a play on words' or 'double meaning'. As Hammond and Hughes point

out, 'Words can be read with the eyes or heard by the ears. This dual nature of

words allows the pun to put sound before meaning, and permits the play on words

to put meaning before sound.' They add: 'Pictures can only be seen. Since there is

no parallel duality in pictures, there is a less clear cut division between the visual

pun and the visual double meaning, there is more of a continuum' [7, Section 5].

Sculpture is an art that can be experienced via two senses - sight and touch
-therefore it should offer the same possibilities for puns and double meaning as

language. A sculptural work exploiting the difference between sight and touch is

Marcel Duchamp's 'Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?' (1921). This work - an assisted

readymade - consists of a small bird cage containing, amongst other things, a

quantity of white cubes. To the sense of sight these cubes appear to be made of

sugar but when the cage is picked up spectators are surprised to find how heavy it

is; they then realise that the cubes are made of marble not sugar. In other words,

the same items - white cubes - have a double meaning according to whether they are

seen or touched. In pictures comparable instances of such puns and play on words

would be: (a) any two shapes or figures which resemble one another formally but

which are different in meaning; and (b) the same form or figure used in different

contexts to bring out different meanings, or a single form or figure having more

than one meaning. An example of (a) is to be found in Magritte's 'Euclidian Walks'

(1955), a picture in which two similar triangular shapes appear side by side.

However, one is the conical spire of a tower while the other is the vista of a

boulevard seen in perspective. Examples of (b) include any painting in which the

same colour is used in different parts of the picture in such a way that different

meanings are brought out. Another example of (b): as a means of economy the

publishers of early printed books often used the same wood block illustration of a

townscape to show what various cities looked like, hence an identical image was

repeated and given varying significations via the printed text. (Pictorial examples of

double meaning and double entendre have already been cited.)

A common method of pictorial construction is the organization of elements with

their own autonomous meanings into a figure of greater complexity which has a

meaning different from that of its constituent parts. This compositional method

duplicates the basic tendency of human perception to organize separate stimuli into

patterns, wholes whose sum is greater than their parts (what gestalt psychologists

call 'grouping'). An example taken from advertising, cited by Bonsiepe, is the

outline of a house whose walls and roof are made up of matches (Bonsiepe terms

this figure 'fusion') [8]. Perhaps the greatest exploiter of this device in the history of

art was Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1637-93), a Milanese artist who specialized in

portraits of grotesque creatures composed of fruit, animals or landscapes. His

painting entitled 'Summer' (1663) in the Vienna Gallery depicts a personification of

Summer composed of fruit and vegetables appropriate to that season. The delight

provided by such works stems from the playful substitutions and displacements,

and from the economy of expression achieved by condensation.

VI. CHANCE-IMAGES AND HIDDEN-IMAGES

Human perception is an active process; this means that when viewers are

confronted by vague, indeterminate shapes or regimented rows of dots they tend to

project organization and meaning on to those shapes and dots. There is a strong

compulsion to discover figurative images in shapes which have not been

intentionally designed as such. Because such images are discovered by accident they

have been called 'chance images'. (They have also been termed 'simulacra' [9].)

Artists have used the propensity to see pictures in flames, cloud formations, star

clusters, rocky cliffs, and ink blots as a compositional technique for centuries. In

addition, certain artists have catered for this tendency of human perception by
planting hidden-images in the marginal areas of their paintings. Two famous

examples of hidden-images in painting are: the horse and rider concealed among

clouds in Mantegna's 'St Sebastian', and the enormous face embedded in a rock

face in Durer's watercolour 'Fenedier Fortified Rock at Arco' (1495). Children's

comics and books frequently contain picture puzzles which challenge the child to

find a number of images concealed within them (thus making more explicit the

participation of the viewer involved in all perception of images.)

Double meaning is clearly at work in hidden-images: there is a marked similarity

to ambiguous or alternating figures of the duck/rabbit variety - the same

configuration of marks is read as a face and as a rocky cliff. However, there is this

difference: the artist generally gives priority to one image - the overt one - in order

to camouflage the presence of the second one. Some viewers may never consciously

notice the planted image, while those that do will, from that moment on, have the

opposite difficulty, that is, once the hidden-image is exposed it becomes obtrusive

and tends to dominate the overt image.

The most potent hidden-images are those which retain a high degree of

indeterminacy, that is, those in which the viewer feels strongly that there is a

second, hidden-image but which escapes a final resolution. An example appeared in

the commercial illustration used to advertise the 1976 film 'Picnic at Hanging

Rock'. In this illustration one can half see the sinister profile of a giant figure in the

dark outline of rocks silhouetted against the sky.

Freud observes that 'reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the

means of representation most favoured by the dream-work', and he suggests 'if a

dream obstinately declines to reveal its meaning, it is always worth while to see the

effect of reversing some particular elements in its manifest content, after which the

whole situation often becomes immediately clear' [1, p. 327]. A left-right reversal of

a picture is easily achieved by holding it up to a mirror; this enables the analyst to

observe what effect such a reversal has on the composition of the picture. Top-

bottom reversals - achieved by turning the image upside-down - are generally

unprofitable except in those special cases in which images of faces incorporate other,

hidden faces which are exposed by the vertical transposition; as, for example, in the

drawing 'Reversible Face' by G. M. Mitelli (1634-1718), in which a young man is

instantly transformed into an old man when it is up-ended. (Hammond and Hughes

argue that the term for the literary equivalent of reversible pictures is 'metathesis':

'In metathesis fragments of words and things are changed in meaning as they

change order' [7, Section 18].)

John Heartfield, in his political photomontages of the 1920s and 1930s, utilized the

whole repertoire of pictorial devices developed within Western European art,

including the top-bottom reversible image. The 1934 work entitled 'A Dangerous

Stew' shows representatives of the German nation stewing upside-down in a cooking

pot. The pot is in fact a soldier's steel helmet which, when the image is reversed,

traps the people. Heartfield's montage warns against the one-pot stews advocated

by the Nazis as an economy measure, and as a means of raising funds for the Nazi

party. The caption reads: 'A dangerous stew ... German puzzle picture 1934 ... you

should all eat a one-pot meal ... (upside-down) ... then we can cover you with one

pot, steel.'
 VII. SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION

One of the ways by which the dream-work represents causal relationships,

according to Freud, 'consists in one image in the dream, whether of a person or

thing, being transformed into another. The existence of a causal relation is only to

be taken seriously if the transformation actually occurs before our eyes ... ' [1, p.

316]. A few lines later he adds: 'Causation is represented by temporal sequence.'

Although the intermediate stages in the processes of symbolic transformation which

take place in dream-work and art-work are generally hidden, the process of

metamorphosis is sometimes made visible by artists, as in Phillipon's famous

caricature of King Louis Phillipe (1834) which depicts the step-by-step

transformation of the King's face into a pear ('poire' in French is slang for 'head',

'fathead', 'sucker'). As Freud points out, the causal connections asserted in such

pictorial statements are persuasive because the transformations 'actually occur

before our eyes'.

VIII. DISPLACEMENT

Displacement facilitates representation: 'The direction taken by displacement

usually results in a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought being

exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one' [1, p. 339]. This process exactly parallels

the perpetual quest of the artist for striking images with which to depict abstract

ideas and diffuse feelings. Displacement also facilitates condensation: Freud cites

Raphael's fresco 'The School of Athens' in support of his contention that dreams

frequently combine into a single scene material scattered throughout the dream-

thoughts, just as Raphael represents a group of philosophers in a single space even

though historically they were never together at one time. In short, both dreams and

pictures represent 'logical connection by simultaneity in time' [I, p. 314].

According to Freud, there is a marked discrepancy between the outstanding

features of the dream-content and those of the dream-thought, which is the result of

the influence of the mental agencies of censorship and repression. The latter only

allows the representation of forbidden material in a distorted, disguised or indirect

form. In the process of dream-formation, Freud argues, there occurs a transference

or displacement of psychical intensities. Apparently minor and trivial details of a

dream thus become important to the analyst because significant dream thoughts

may have been displaced on to them. For this reason Freud's discussion of

Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses focuses on the detail of the manner in which

Moses' hand and arm hold God's tablets [10].

In some instances displacement operates in art-work at an unconscious level, in an

artist's characteristic brushwork for example, but in other instances it operates at a

conscious level: the artist deliberately places important elements in the marginal

areas of his or her pictures. A striking example is to be found in Holbein's 'The

Ambassadors' (1533), where a crucifix is half disclosed behind the edge of a green

curtain in the top left-hand corner of the picture; its presence indicates the existence

of a spiritual dimension underlying the material world so vividly portrayed by

Holbein in the foreground space. Although, therefore, the crucifix is a detail located

in the margin of the image, once it is noticed the meaning of the painting is altered

significantly.

When Freud cites the use of symbols in dreams as one of the indirect methods of
representation, it appears that another close parallel to the intellectual methods of

artists has been identified, but, when he adds: 'Dreams make use of this symbolism

for disguised representation of their latent thoughts' [I, p. 352], doubts arise because

one assumes that artists employ symbols in order to make their meanings clear

rather than to disguise them. However, Freud notes that although the presence of

symbols in dreams facilitates their interpretation, they also make it more difficult

because symbols have multiple meanings and therefore are often ambiguous. The

analyst can never be certain that the interpretation is completely accurate or

exhaustive. Anyone familiar with the uncertainties associated with the

interpretation of complex allegorical paintings will, I feel sure, confirm the

paradoxical character of symbolism. Allegory, for instance, is often used as a means

of expressing political criticism. Its very indirectness enables it to escape the censor.

On the other hand, the danger of indirect criticism is that it will not be picked up by

the unsophisticated viewers.

The notion of displacement is clearly analogous to the rhetorical operations which

produce pictorial metonyms and synecdoches. In the field of linguistics theorists

such as Roman Jakobson have already correlated displacement with metonomy and

condensation with metaphor.

IX. DISTORTION

Chapter 4 of The Interpretation of Dreams is devoted to the topic of distortion.

Many pictorial representations are judged to be distorted. What correlation, if any,

is there between these two kinds of distortion? Every judgement that a picture is

distorted implies that some unstated norm has been violated. For example,
according to the visual information supplied by the photograph in the

advertisement for National Savings Certificates, there is a man with a hand larger

than his head. Our knowledge of human anatomy tells us that hands are generally

smaller than heads, therefore we override the evidence of the photograph and

conclude that the man is normally proportioned and that it is the photographic

image which is distorted (even though a camera without defects is merely a

mechanical slave which cannot distort anything). In everyday experience there is

often a discrepancy between our knowledge of how things are and how they appear

to the senses; thus conflicts between cognition and perception can arise. Confidence

in the normality of the world is maintained by disregarding optical information

which shows alterations of shape, colour, size, etc. The function of censorship

operating in regard to optical information is similar to that operating in regard to

dream-work, namely, the prevention of 'anxiety or other forms of distressing affect'

[I, p. 267].

However, because pictorial representations stand in a secondary relation to the

world, they often display the discrepancies between cognition and perception and

thereby produce distress, anxiety or laughter in the viewer. Artists have a choice:

they can either take steps to harmonize their representations with the norms

operative within their culture (Naturalism), or they can deliberately exploit the

anxiety generating discrepancies for expressive or rhetorical purposes (Surrealism,

caricatures, photomontage, Expressionism). In Caravaggio's 'The Supper at

Emmaus' (1602?) there is a man on the right of the picture with his arm stretched

out towards the viewer. It appears that, in the interests of Naturalism, Caravaggio
disregarded the optical information which told him that from that vantage point the

man's hand would probably look larger than his head. Unlike Caravaggio, the

producers of 'distorted' advertising photographs do not aim at Naturalism; rather

than soothing the viewer they strive to startle, shock or amuse him or her by

presenting deformed and exaggerated images.

'A dream is the fulfilment of a wish', writes Freud [1, p. 121]. But often the

psychical mechanism of censorship prevents the wish from expressing itself except

in a distorted form. Distortion, by means of condensation, displacement,

interruptions and obscurities, is therefore a mask for the wish. In his text on jokes,

Freud contrasts them with dreams and argues that a dream is an asocial mental

product which sets little store by intelligibility whereas 'a joke is the most social of

all mental functions', hence 'The condition of intelligibility is ... binding on it; it may

only make use of possible distortion in the unconscious ... up to the point at which it

can be set straight by the third person's understanding' [3, p. 179]. Pictures are, in

this respect, more akin to jokes than to dreams. However, some dreams manage to

evade the agencies of censorship and nakedly assert their wishes, which may well be

sexual and aggressive desires forbidden by society. Aggression is frequently the wish

behind those caricatures and political photomontages which pictorially transgress

the norms of society, and therefore those representations are not at all distorted as

far as their producers are concerned; only those subject to attack or threatened by

such pictures judge them to be 'distorted'. To summarize: Naturalism requires its

adherents to operate self-censorship in the interests of conformity, in order to

ensure the reproduction of existing social relations, whereas non-naturalistic art

evades censorship in order to mount an aggressive assault on the norms of society

(in advertising this attack is artfully contained, and any anxiety is discharged by the

purchase of products or by laughter, etc.).

X. SECONDARY REVISION

A whole section of The Interpretation of Dreams [1, pp. 488-508] is concerned with

secondary revision. This mental operation occurs during dream-work but also

during waking hours when a night-dream is being remembered. As the term

'revision' suggests, this operation has a kind of editorializing function: it censors,

unifies, rationalizes and seeks to make intelligible the content of dreams. Freud

argues that the secondary revision is a faculty of waking thought. One may liken it

to the final stages in which an art-work is brought to completion (the phase in which

disparate parts are synthesized or tidied-up), or to revisions undertaken months or

years later. (The painting out of the genital areas of the figures in Michelangelo's

Sistine Chapel 'Last Judgement' mural is a clear instance of secondary revision

motivated by the desire to censor disturbing material.)

Freud cites a concrete example of the kind of intervention that secondary revision

makes in a dream, namely, the critical or reflective remark 'This is only a dream'. A

parallel in art immediately suggests itself: all those devices in works of art in which

the artificial, constructed or conventional nature of the work are foregrounded can

be equated with secondary revision (all those devices which tell the viewer 'This is

only a film, a play', etc.). To cite just one example: there is a Pop painting by David

Hockney entitled 'Picture Emphasizing Stillness' (1962) in which two men are

threatened by a leaping leopard; to reassure the viewer that the two men are in no
danger Hockney has printed between them and the leopard these words: 'They are

perfectly safe. This is a still'!

XI. CONCLUSION

As explained earlier, the objective of this article was a modest and limited one.

Many theoretical issues and problems thus remain and need to be developed

further. For example, the extent to which art-work is a conscious or unconscious

process, the comparability of the operations of censorship in dreams and in art. One

lesson is clear: if art history is either to dismiss Freudian psychoanalysis or to

benefit from it in any way, then art historians/critics must confront the central

achievements of Freud's work in such texts as The Interpretation of Dreams and

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and not just his more peripheral

writings on art and artists, as they have tended to do in the past.

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REFERENCES AND NOTES

(1) S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, J. Strachey, ed. & trans. (London:

Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953). Standard Ed., Vols 4 & 5.

Originally published 1900-1.

(2) R. W. McCarley and J. A. Hobson, ‘The Neurobiological Origins of

Psychoanalytic Dream Theory,’ American Journal of Psychiatry 134, 1211-1221

(1977).
(3) S. Freud, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, J. Strachey, ed. &

trans. (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1960). Standard

Ed., Vol. 8. Originally published in 1905.

(4) See J. J. Spector, ‘The Method of Morelli and Its Relation to Freudian

Psychoanalysis,’ Diogenes 66, 63-83 (1969); and R. Wollheim, ‘Giovanni Morelli and

the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship’, in On Art and the Mind: Essays and

Lectures, (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 177-20l.

(5) S. Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’, in Five Lectures

on Psychoanalysis, J. Strachey, ed. & trans. (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute

of Psychoanalysis, 1957), pp. 59-137. Standard Ed., Vol. II. Originally published in

1910.

(6) There is a lengthy analysis of Magritte's painting in J. J. Spector’s The Aesthetics

of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), pp. 172-176.

(7) P. Hammond and P. Hughes, Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures,

(London: W. H. Allen, 1978).

(8) G. Bonsiepe, ‘Persuasive Communication: Toward a Visual Rhetoric,’ Uppercase

5, 19-34 (1961).

(9) Two articles on chance and hidden images are: H. W. Janson, ‘The Image Made

by Chance in Renaissance Thought,’ in 16 Studies, (New York: Abrams, 1964), and

P. Reutersward, ‘The Face in the Rock,’ in Narrative Art, T. Hess and J. Ashbery,

eds. (New York: Newsweek/Macmillan, 1970), pp. 98-111. See also J. Michell,

Simulacra: Faces and Figures in Nature, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979).

(10) S. Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo,’ in Totem and Taboo and Other Works, J.

Strachey, ed. & trans. (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis,

1955) pp. 211-238. Standard Ed., Vol. 13. Originally published 1913-14. 'Moses'

essay originally published in 1914 with a postcript in 1927.

(11) R. W. Pickford, ‘Dream-Work, Art-Work, and Sublimation in Relation to the

Psychology of Art,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 10, 275-283 (1970).

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This article was first published in the magazine Leonardo, vol 16, no 2, 1983, pp.

109-114.

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of several books
about contemporary art, van Gogh, John Latham, firefighters in art, art and mass

media, art and celebrity. He is also an editorial advisor for the website:

"http://www.artdesigncafe.com">www.artdesigncafe.com</a>