Maya Deren, A study in Choreography (film still), 1945 © Maya Deren/Bildupphovsrätt 2025. Sinziana Ravini, writer and psychoanalyst (Photo: Christina Abdeeva)

Conversation in the Collection: Surrealism and Psychoanalysis

Conversation

24.4 2025

Stockholm

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In the fifth part of “Conversations in the Collection”, the author and psychoanalyst Sinziana Ravini and Lena Essling, curator of the exhibition “The Subterranean Sky”, meet in a conversation about the connections and relevance of surrealism and psychoanalysis today.

CONVERSATION IN THE COLLECTION: SURREALISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Sinziana Ravini and Lena Essling

Date

Saturday 24 May 2025

Time

14.00–15.00

Place

In “The Subterranean Sky – Surrealism in the Moderna Museet Collection” floor 4

Language

Swedish

Price

150 SEK, 120 SEK for students and seniors (entrance ticket included).
Free for those with an annual pass and other free categories

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Contact: Alexander Kateb, Moderna Museet

In 1924, the French poet and author André Breton wrote the first surrealist manifesto. Breton was deeply inspired by psychoanalysis – he discovered Sigmund Freud’s theories in 1916 and visited him in Vienna in 1921. The meeting with the founder of psychoanalysis had a decisive influence on the surrealist movement, for example through automatic writing and the use of dreams as a source of images, stories and free associations.

According to Freud, there are two paths to the unconscious: dreams and language, which make us hear what the unconscious says and which we do not want to hear. But there is a third path, argues the author and psychoanalyst Sinziana Ravini – namely art, which she thinks is always a journey to and from the unconscious.

Listen to Sinziana Ravini’s and Moderna Museet curator Lena Essling’s conversation about the connections between surrealism and psychoanalysis – and why they are still relevant today. After the conversation, Ravini will do her own psychoanalytical dive into the mysteries of surrealism.