The Paranoid-Critical Method
Techniques. Resources. Creative Processes. Genres
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The Paranoid-Critical Method
Did you know that the word “paranoia” is closely associated to the word delusional? Moreover, the delusional disorder was previously called “paranoia.”
In contrast to the emblematic method of the Surrealism, psychic automatism, Dalí created the paranoid-critical method, confessing that he got inspiration in The Interpretation of Dreams, by Freud.
Ambiguous images without a clear sense provoke multiple interpretations in the viewers, making them liberate obsessions, phobias and everything kept in the unconscious.
Dalí described his method in a complex, almost absurd and crazy manner like the works that the same resource causes: “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”
To sum up, with the risk that summarizing implies, psychic automatism liberates the unconscious of the artist without allowing the reason to take part at all. Instead, the paranoid-critical method tries to generate rationally ambiguities that make the unconscious mind of the viewer appear when interpreting the work.
Artists express themselves in one, and in the other one, the viewers.
Reality is finally, the reality each one sees, the one that our unconscious mind allows us to see. And Dalí was convinced of that: “What we see isn’t in things but in our souls.”
Image: Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937). Salvador Dalí.
Recommended links:
“I declare the independence of imagination and the rights of man to his own madness.”
Salvador Dalí and his Paranoid-Critical Method.
Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points: Surrealism.
The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dalí.
The Treachery of Images (1928/1929), Magritte.
Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points: Abstract Expressionism.
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