Dissecting the Psyche

Jung's theory of the human psyche is that it is made up of three parts: the ego (conscious mind), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. As C. George Boeree, Ph.D., explains it, the collective unconscious is "the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences. The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes.

"An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an 'organizing principle' on the things we see or do. The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know it's there by how it draws matter and light to itself."

Self Discovery Through Art

For the purpose of personal analysis, Jung had talked about not judging the images of the subconscious, but simply accepting them as they came into consciousness so they could be analyzed. This was termed Automatism.

Artists were fascinated by the implications of these new psychological theories. They understood from them that the unconscious has important messages for the conscious mind, but the former communicates through images (symbols and archetypes) while the latter communicates through language.

Surrealist artists wanted their work to be a link between the abstract spiritual realities and the real forms of the material world. To them, the object stood as a metaphor for an inner reality. Through their craft, whether it be painting, sculpting or drawing, artists could bring the inner realities of the subconscious to the conscious mind, so that their meaning could be deciphered through analysis. Just as Michelangelo and Leonardo advanced the knowledge of the body's anatomy, surrealist artists strive to chart the anatomy of the psyche.

History of Surrealism

United States, have received no attention from critics, galleries or museums. This has left them outside the reach of three generations of Americans who, by and large, are unaware of the work done by surrealists during the second half of the century.

Michael S. Bell, a specialist in American Art, researched the surrealist phenomena while he was assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. His research led him to the conclusion that:

Surrealism as we know it today is closely related to some forms of abstract art. In fact, they shared similar origins, but they diverged on their interpretation of what those origins meant to the aesthetic of art.

At the end of the First War World, Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada movement, wanted to attack society through scandal. He believed that a society that creates the monstrosity of war does not deserve art, so he decided to give it anti-art–not beauty but ugliness. With phrases like Dada destroys everything! Tzara wanted to offend the new industrial commercial world–the bourgeoisie. However, his intended victims were not insulted at all. Instead they thought that this rebellious new expression opposed, not them but the "old art" and the "old patrons" of feudalism and church dominion. In fact, the bourgeoisie embraced this "rebellious" new art so thoroughly that anti-art became Art, the anti-academy the Academy, the anti-conventionalism the Convention, and the rebellion through chaotic images, the status quo.

One group of artists, however, did not embrace this new art that threw away all which centuries of artists had learned and passed on about the craft of art. The Surrealist movement gained momentum after the Dada movement. It was lead by Andre Breton, a French doctor who had fought in the trenches during the First World War. The artists in the movement researched and studied the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Some of the artists in the group expressed themselves in the abstract tradition, while others, expressed themselves in the symbolic tradition.