40

Photography and surrealism

41
What is a surrealist photograph
tunction ot the mysterious signitcation vas to point to
a moral philosophy, ethics or theological meaning, but
to grasp the meanings at vork in surrealism ve vill
need to exchange those telds ot thought (philosophy
and theology, tor that vhich more obviously tascinated
the surrealists, ot sexuality and the unconscious and
the discipline vhich theorized it psychoanalysis.
Primal Scenes
Historically, the uncanny has an emergent use in the
+;;os prior to its more recent psychoanalytic sense, as
meaning not quite sate to trust. In 1he Lncanny
essay lreud notes that the German vord tor it, das
Unheimlich, has tvo meanings, both the homely and
the unhomely, so that one meaning the opposite
is alvays behind the other.
46
1hus something homely
can become unhomely and something unhomely can
become uncanny by also being homely (yet strange,.
In enect, the uncanny is like a return ot the repressed
ot an antithetical meaning. In an earlier paper, 1he
Antithetical Meaning ot Primal Words (+,+o,, lreud
had already dravn the connection betveen the vay
that dreams combine contrary things into a unity in the
same vay that vords in ancient (Lgyptian to Semitic
and Indo-Luropean, languages also have antithetical
meanings at their origin.
47
No seems not to exist
so tar as dreams are concerned, lreud says.
48
Such
is also the logic ot tantastic and marvellous tales and
vhat ve see there is not the collapse ot reality into a
dream-vorld, but the emergence ot a psychical reality
imposed upon the real. Iaplanche and Pontalis: 1his
notion [psychical reality| is bound up vith the lreudian
hypothesis about unconscious processes: not only do
these processes take no account ot external reality, they
also replace it vith a psychical one. In its strictest sense,
psychical reality denotes the unconscious vish and
the phantasy associated vith it.
49
What is described here is not only the characteristics
ot surrealist practice, the imposition ot psychical reality
on the real, but also the strategy that the surrealists
used on existing signitying systems ot representation.
1he captioning ot the photograph ot tvo vorkers
gazing dovn a hole on the cover ot La Rvolution
o Sigmund lreud, 1he
Lncanny (+,+,,, Art and
Literature, PlI + (Harmonds-
vorth: Penguin, +,:,.
; Sigmund lreud, 1he
Antithetical Meaning ot Primal
Words, S.L., Vol. XI, trans. ames
Strachey (Iondon: Hogarth,
+,:o,.
: lreud, 1he Antithetical
Meaning ot Primal Words, p. +.
, Iaplanche and Pontalis, The
Language of Psychoanalysis, p. o.