Leonardo

Dream-Work and Art-Work Author(s): John A. Walker Source: Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 109-114 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574795 . Accessed: 18/03/2011 05:43
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Leonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 109-114, 1983 Leonardo,

Printed in Great Britain

0024-094X/83$3.00+0.00
Pergamon Press Ltd.

DREAM-WORKAND ART-WORK*
John A. Walker**
Abstract-If artists, art historians and critics are to benefitfrom Freudianpsychoanalysis in any way, then they must confront the cental achievementsof Freud'swork and notjust his more marginalwritingson art andartists. In order to explain the way in which dream images are produced,Freud introducedthe 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 mechanismsof dream construction;this paper reverses the dream-picture relationshipand examines, via a numberof concrete examples, the extent to whichpicturescan be elucidated by the terms condensation,displacement,etc. whichFreudemployedto explain dreams. The underlying hypothesis is that the ways in which dreams,jokes, pictorial and poetic images are constructedarefundamentally similar.

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-workitself, 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 Interpretationof Dreams [1] 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 neurophysiological research [2], his theory of dreamwork 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. 277-278]. The task of the psychoanalyst is to investigate the relations between the manifest dream-content and the latent dream-thoughts. The task of dream-workis 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 109

*This paper is based on a chapter of an unpublished book entitled Pictorial Rhetoric. **Lecturer in the history and theory of art, 87 Hillfield Avenue, London N8 7DG, U.K. (Received 19 April 1982)

110

John A. Walker 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 Surrealistart: 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' [1, p. 293]. A photographic figure of this kind is John Heartfield's 1931image 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. Thejoke ... represents a rebellion against authority, a liberation from its pressure.The
charm of caricature lies in this simple factor ... ' [3, p. 105].

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 representsevery leaf on a tree). Indeed, condensation is inherent in pictorial representation: pictures present the illusion of a threedimensional 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' [1, 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 'verbalcompounds'. 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 Rene 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

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 circularyellow 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 varyingdegrees 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

Dream-work and Art-work 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 conterparts to linguistic double entendres(a word or expression with two meanings, one of which is lewd). Pictorial doubleentendresare 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: (1) the words 'here' and 'heir' are similar in sound but different in meaning; (2) 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 UponThePun:Dual Meaning in Wordsand Pictures by Paul Hammond and Patrick Hughes. The authors take pains to explain the difference between the two uses of language; (1) one they call 'a pun' and (2) the other 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 Selavy?' (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: (1) any two shapes or figures which resemble one another formally but which are different in meaning; and (2)

111

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 (1) 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 (2) 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 (2): 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 greatercomplexity 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 greaterthan 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 'chanceimages'. (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 Dtirer'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

112

John A. Walker 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 connectionby simultaneitvin time' [1, 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 dreamthoughts 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 halfdisclosed 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.

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 representationmost 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 reversalof 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 caricatureof 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

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' [1, p. 352], doubts arise because one assumes that artists employ symbols in order to make their meanings clear ratherthan 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 uncertaintiesassociated 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 correlateddisplacement with metonomy and condensation with metaphor. IX. DISTORTION Chapter 4 of The Interpretationof Dreams is devoted to the topic of distortion. Many pictorial representationsarejudged 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 largerthan his head. Our knowledge of human anatomy tells us that hands are generally

Dream-work and Art-work 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' [1, 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 anxietygenerating 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 fulfillment 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 aggressiveassault 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.).

113

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 InterpretationofDreams and Jokes and TheirRelation to the Unconsciousand not just his more peripheral writings on art and artists, as they have tended to do in the past. REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. S. Freud, The Interpretationof Dreams, J. Strachey, ed. & trans.

of Press&TheInstitute Psychoanalysis, 1953). (London: Hogarth Standard Ed., Vols 4 & 5. Originally published1900-1. and 2. R. W. McCarley J. A. Hobson,TheNeurobiological Origins
of Psychoanalytic Dream Theory, AmericanJournalof Psychiatry

134, 1211-1221(1977). of ed. Strachey, & trans.(London:HogarthPress& TheInstitute Ed., 1960).Standard Vol. 8. Originally published Psychoanalysis, in 1905. 4. See J. J. Spector,The Methodof Morelliand Its Relationto FreudianPsychoanalysis, Diogenes66, 63-83 (1969); and R. Wollheim, Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific
Connoisseurship, in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures 3. S. Freud, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, J.

(London:Allen Lane, 1973)pp. 177-201. in of da 5. S. Freud,Leonardo Vinciand a Memory HisChildhood, in 59-137. Standard Ed., Vol. 11. Originally published 1910. in 6. Thereis a lengthyanalysisof Magritte's painting J. J. Spector,
The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972) pp. 172-176. 7. P. Hammond and P. Hughes, Uponthe Pun:Dual Meaningin Words Five Lectureson Psychoanalysis,J. Strachey, ed. & trans. (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957) pp.

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

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

8. G. Bonsiepe, Persuasive Communication: Toward a Visual

Rhetoric,Uppercase 19-34 (1961). 5,

9.

Rock, in NarrativeArt, T. Hess and J. Ashbery, eds. (New York: Newsweek/Macmillan, 1970) pp. 98-111. See also J. Michell,

The (NewYork:Abrams,1964),and P. Reutersward, Facein the

Two articles on chance and hidden images are: H. W. Janson, The Image Made by Chance in Renaissance Thought, in 16 Studies

114

John A. Walker
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).

Simulacra: Faces and Figures in Nature (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979). 10. S. Freud, The Moses of Michaelangelo, in Totem and Taboo and Other Works, J. Strachey, ed. & trans. (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955) pp. 211-238. Standard Ed.,