Fusing the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud with Karl Marx, André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson and
Joan Miro set out to liberate the unconscious from sexual repression. By 1928, Surrealists scrutinised
Charcot’s hysterical patients, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich), sexual fetishism, ‘convulsive beauty’ and ‘mad
love’. By that time, the pluralism inherent in the movement became increasingly apparent. While Luis Bunuel
and Salvidor Dali launched Surrealist cinema, Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, and Meret Oppenhim explored
woman’s ‘mad love’ and ‘masquerade’. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Sade’s
libertinage, Georges Bataille and Hans Bellmer pursued eroticism, putrefaction and violence. Not only will this
course reveal these multiplicitous interwar dimensions, but also Surrealism’s diverse legacies from the
Situationists, Jim Morrison and The Doors to Mark Dion’s recent Surrealist bureau. Following the mission of
the new Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies, it will expose how Surrealisms lives on.