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It is clear that Dalí and Freud evinced quite different perceptions of their meeting on July 19, 1938. The following briefly discusses the cultural and historical factors which contributed to their differing perceptions.
Dalí had been expelled from the surrealist camp and was turning towards the High Renaissance of Raphael. Yet, more than any other artist, he stood for surrealism in the mind of the general public. It was he who had made surrealism a common term as much by his genius for publicity, his mustache and pronouncements, as by his paintings. His flamboyance did raise serious questions about the integrity of his work. But before he turned his life style into a surrealist publicity gag, he had sought to make his art a pictorial documentation of freudian theories. The article on “paranoia” which he pressed on Freud did not have to do with psychiatric paranoia but with what he referred to as “critical paranoia”—a method of inducing and harnessing multiple images of persecution or megalomania. He would start a painting with the first image that came to mind and go on from one association to the next, attempting to lift the restrictions of control and thus tap a flow of delerious phenomena.
In so doing, Dalí was borrowing from another surrealist, Max Ernst, and his method of “frottage.” Ernst was making a deliberate effort to exclude all conscious mental guidance of reason, taste and morals in order to become a spectator at the birth of his own work [3]. By restraining his own activity and accepting his passivity, he discovered a sudden intensification of visual faculties. What emerged was a succession of contradictory images superimposed on one another as in a hypnagogic state or homospatial thinking [4].