"Embodying the Androgyne: Psychoanalysis & Alchemical Desire in Max Ernst’s Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923)", in Black Mirror, vol. 1: Embodiment, ed. Judith Noble et. al., London, 2016, pp. 176–194.


Daniel Zamani

This essay offers a new analysis of Max Ernst's 1923 composition "Men Shall Know Nothing of This". As the first emblematic example for the Surrealists' fusion of alchemy and psychoanalysis, the work played a seminal role in the gradual shift from Paris Dada to the rise of the Surrealist avant-garde. Informed by Ernst's early studies of Psychology and History of Art at the University of Bonn, the work marked Ernst as a key player on France's artistic scene and firmly placed an engagement with psychoanalysis at the forefront of the Surrealists' artistic and political agenda. Previous approaches to the painting have nevertheless traced its cosmological symbolism to one specific prototype: Freud's 1911 study on the so-called Schreber case, in which he analysed Schreber's neurotic obsession with the solar principle as an unconscious fixation on the father-image, supposedly indicative of an 'inverted Oedipal complex'. My paper argues against this dominant reading of Ernst's composition as a 'pictoral transcript' of Freud's case-study, first postulated by Geoffrey Hinton in 1975 and never seriously challenged in recent research on the artist. I aim to demonstrate that Ernst's psychoanalytically informed painting has to be considered instead as a sophisticated blend of several iconographic sources, resulting in the highly abstracted image of the alchemical androgyne as symbol of perfect oneness and harmony. Ernst's emphasis on the merging of microcosm and macrocosm, the male and the female, the human and the divine ultimately embraced the idea of alchemical symbolism as an unconscious expression of what C.G. Jung later termed the animus/anima archetypes. The use of an alchemical metaphor, which resonated with ideas of metamorphosis and gradual transformation into ever higher states of psychic perfection, was thus a particularly potent symbol for Surrealism's artistic and political aspirations, clearly signaling a new direction for the French avant-garde of the early 1920s.