While being treated for a serious mental breakdown in 1940, Carrington passed her days by filling sketchbooks with art that reimagined the hospital as an 'underworld' inhabited by strange, hybrid beasts.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
In the late 19th century, Rops created a vast oeuvre of drawings, etchings, prints and paintings of such breathtaking fruitiness—often laced with satanic elements—that even Picasso responded to him in awe. Rops' works depicted naked witches riding brooms, voyeurs in top hats and courtesans riding penis-shaped bicycles.
In a recent talk in Zurich, German psychoanalyst Konstantin Roessler surveyed the current state of dream research. Tracing some of the earlier scientific studies on dreams, he made a renewed case for the importance of dreams. Even formerly skeptical neuroscientists have now begun to see the meaning, purpose, and value of dreams for everyday life and overall psychic health. Dreams as Meaningless "Content"
Unfortunately, hypnosis has a negative reputation among the general public, in large part because of how it's been portrayed by the movie and entertainment industry. Also, I was aware that in the late 19th century there were many false positive and negative claims about hypnosis that soured the public on the possibility that hypnosis could be helpful. I did not want to create or add to a 21st-century perception that hypnosis was quackery, and therefore chose to withhold telling about some of the most amazing events that I had encountered with my patients when I first wrote about hypnosis, because these stories might have been too hard to believe.
The timing could not be better: We have much to learn in this moment from a movement that was both explicitly antifascist and radically hopeful - and from how the not-so-antifascist Dalí broke from it. But Dreamworlds presents precious little of the historical and political context - for example, the birth of the movement out of the grotesque terrors of World War I - that would help viewers grasp the relevance of what's in front of them.
