Dalí's Paranoid-Critical Method: what and what are its characteristics

Surely more than one remembers the famous drawing of the old-young woman, in which, depending on how and who looked at it, the image of a girl or an old woman appeared before us. The drawing in question does nothing more than collect the precepts of the famous paranoid-critical method of Salvador Dalí or, what is the same, enter the viewer's mind and manipulate it.

Put like that, it sounds quite forceful, and even disturbing. However, we are tired of contemplating works that follow this idea, especially those that make up the Dalí corpus; representations of a totally subjective reality whose greatest architect is the spectator.

In this article we will talk about Dalí's paranoid-critical method, what its characteristics are and what it meant for Surrealism and art history in general.

What is the paranoid-critical method?

The paranoid-critical method is based on the ability of the human brain to perceive relationships between things that, in reality, have no association. This phenomenon has been extensively studied by science, and there have been many artists who have been inspired by this curiosity of the mind to create no less curious works.

Because, in fact, and although he was the main promoter of it, Salvador Dalí was not strictly the creator of this system, although he did baptize it with this original name (in his line, of course) and exploited it to the point of limit.

Take for example his famous painting the three ages, executed in 1940.

A priori, what our brain captures are three faces, related to the three ages of the title: the child, the young and the old.

However, if we take another look at the painting, we may realize the elements that remain hidden from the retina of the spectator: the young man is, in reality, a woman and a child sitting before a hole in the rock, and his eyes, some distant mountains that seem a mask As for the old man on the left side of the canvas, he is composed, in turn, of an old woman hunched over before some trees. Thus, magically, a different picture appears before our eyes., a new work, another reality.

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paranoid delusions

In 1932, Dalí was already immersed in the group of Surrealists, who had welcomed him in Paris in 1929. However, in the 1930s the Catalan painter began to disassociate himself from the guidelines of the "official" movement and began to follow his own rules. This, of course, did not please the rest of the Surrealists, who ended up expelling Dalí from the group in 1934.

That year, 1932, a copy of the work fell into his hands. De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, written by his friend Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who, according to Dalí's account in his memoirs (see bibliography), went to visit him after the publication of his article the rotten donkey, which had strongly impressed the psychiatrist. With Lacan he later collaborated on the first issue of the Minotaure magazine, one of the most iconic publications of the Surrealist movement.

Lacan's book emphasizes that, contrary to what classical psychiatry stipulated, paranoid delusion is the result of the conjunction between the interpretation of the mind and delusion.

In other words, unlike what was postulated in the classroom, where it was stated that to create the paranoid delusion one had to There must first be an erroneous interpretation of reality, Lacan maintained that both phenomena were given to the same time. From this idea Dalí drew the basis for what would become his most famous method.

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playing with the brain

But Dalin's inspiration did not stop there. Tireless and curious, he studied in depth how paranoia worked in the brain, and he paid particular attention to how the fishermen of Cap de Creus named the rocks on the cliffs. These names had a lot to do with the figures that their minds "saw", and that varied according to the person, the perspective and the moment of the day: a an eagle, a rooster, a camel... Something similar happens when we gaze at a sky full of clouds and try to "discover" what shape have.

Therefore, it is clear that the human brain creates realities and establishes connections that, in truth, do not exist. Paranoia has a lot to do with this, since clinically it is about thoughts, generally obsessive, that have little or nothing to do with reality. In both cases, the mind is interpreting a specific element in its own way.

With all this, the Catalan painter devised a system to recreate this paranoid effect on the viewer, through works expressly designed for this purpose. The table that we have mentioned before, the three ages, is a good example of this, but we also find this method in other Dalí creations, such as Appearance of a face and a fruit bowl on a playa (1938), or Galatea de las Esferas (1952), in which a series of atoms end up drawing the face of a woman (in this case, Gala, his wife).

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Dalí and the “new surrealism”

Despite the fact that the paranoid-critical method was not the cause of Dalí's expulsion from the Breton group and company (it had much more to do with the fact that it did not adhere to communism), we can say that the basic idea of ​​this new Dalinian system is totally contrary to the proposal of the surrealists.

On the one hand, Breton and his colleagues bet on automatic creation (the so-called automatism) whose base was conscious non-participation in the execution of the work. In the case of Dalí, on the other hand, everything is scrupulously studied. The paranoid-critical method leaves nothing to chance, precisely because it plays with the compositions to stimulate the viewer's mind. There is nothing automatic in Dalí's creation, but rather a well-thought-out system organized in detail.

André Breton, the leader of the movement, went so far as to praise Salvador Dalí, whom he considered to be endowed with enormous talent, and in his book Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme (published the same year as Dalí's expulsion from the group), he affirms that the paranoiac-critical method is a "first order instrument". It is curious, then, that despite such fascination, the divergences ended up weighing more, with the result that we all know.

The other paranoid-critical methods

Yes, Dalí was the greatest exponent of this method and he took full advantage of it, but we have already said that it was not an original method. For centuries the history of art used the misinterpretation of reality to create powerful and attractive images. Without going any further, the famous Renaissance trompe l'oeils (whose name is already sufficiently explicit, trompe l'oeil, "trap the eye") do not stop using, in a certain way, the Dalinian paranoid-critical method.

On the other hand, there are artists who have earned their fame through “playing with their brains”. Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93), for example, produced his famous fruit portraits with this intention. His work Fruit Basket, executed around 1590, is a still life if we look at it from the right; but if we turn the canvas, a human face suddenly appears. A little more recently, artists like Charles Allen Gilbert (1873-1929) left us their own contribution to the method with his work Everything is vanity, quite reproduced, where a girl appears looking at herself in a mirror who, carefully observed, becomes a skull. But Dalí himself was aware of all this when he screened a work on the surrealists before the surrealists that, unfortunately, never saw the light of day.