Unless you have known me a very long time indeed, you will likely not know that at the age of 11 I went to my friend Gina’s halloween birthday party dressed as my ‘inner self’. All the other kids were dressed as binbag witches or face-painted pumpkins, but I had just come back from holiday and my mum disapproved of the idea of halloween, so I went in my regular clothes and decided to tell everyone I was my ‘inner self’. Gina ended up going to art school and I haven’t spoken to anybody else who was there before or since, so I don’t think my slight weirdness had any great impact on my life, but it demonstrates to me that even at a young age I was aware of the idea of a subconscious self, and kind of fascinated by it.
On the surface, there might not seem like a huge connection between Rorschach, Dali and tarot. Each has a distinct aesthetic sensibility that embraces the abstract in a different way, and each seems to encourage its viewer or practitioner to engage with it in a different way, dipping into the ‘reader’s’ mind at a difference place and with a different purpose. It might seem at first that they are not even the most significant path to the unconscious – the works of Freud, Jung and Klein are much more well-known or the basis for more clinical practitioners. But if we look beyond this, we can find a number of connections: all three come from a fine art background; all three encourage an active participation; all three aim to unshackle the mind of expectations whilst connecting to thoughts and feelings more deeply. Dali’s film work even shows that he was aware of the potential of this kind of soul-searching for psychological praxis, and directly connects artistic exploration with inner truth, whether in overcoming amnesia or understanding sexual predilection.
These few things, of course, aren’t the only ways we search our subconscious for meaning: any teen will be aware of the myriad of pseudo-Freudian dream dictionaries online which you can search for the images that come into your mind when you sleep; people pay for hypnotherapy and sleep-teaching tapes to suggest to their inner selves that they ought to stop smoking or be more confident. I myself am sceptical of these assertive approaches to the psyche – how is it possible for an image to mean the same thing to a man in 1910s Vienna as it means to a woman living in the UK in the 21st century? That is not to say that a dream cannot be elucidating, that the images do not tell us what is on our minds and how we think, but that the culture we grow up in changes how we read an image, and even from person to person, associations and interpretations change. To put it a more Freudian way – for me, a cigar is just a cigar, but a heeled shoe represents glamour or business or a need to show off in a way that I doubt it would for somebody of a hundred years ago, and to dream of either image would need to be interpreted in the context of my mind. Rorschach officially has a set of just 10 inkblots and these, like Freud’s interpretation of dreams, can be read in a very rigid and structured way – if you see a butterfly then this, if you see a human figure then this – but what is compelling about Rorschach’s test, which is not present in Freud’s work, is that the burden of interpretation falls on the patient rather than the doctor. In Freud’s method, you take your abstract thoughts to a doctor and they tell you what you think; in Rorschach’s, the patient explores their deeper feelings and explains the method and the symbolic significance to the doctor. This connects it to tarot, which gives you a ‘mystical’ answer to a question you ask or an overview of your life, and requires that you fill in the blanks. Who are the people you are thinking about when given a certain prompt? What are the potential pitfalls of your new project or relationship? The cards can only reveal what is already inside your head by probing, and their method is artwork and mysticism.
We take for granted that art, even surrealist art, is a creative process, but we forget that surrealism and the occult have similar practices, such as automatic writing and meditation. Most people aren’t aware that Rorschach’s father was an art teacher and that in fact he almost went to art school, choosing medicine only at the last minute. The artist of the quintessential Anglo-American tarot deck, the Rider-Waite, Pamela Colman Smith, came from the same background as Rorschach and Dali, marrying both fine art and contemporary experimental artistic practice in her pursuit of the transcendental. Art of the 21st century wasn’t meant to be merely looked at, and Dali exhibited himself and his brand as much as he did paintings. He worked with Schiaparelli, with Hitchcock, and with Mia Farrow, all the time exploring how the wearer, cinema-goer, magazine-reader or gallery-attender viewed his art. Dali gave very explicit answers regarding his inspirations that belies its mass appeal – the average person does not share Dali’s pathological fear of genitalia, yet something in the abstract and eccentric forms of his work has become iconic, despite a lack of shared context. Dali’s method of making art allowed the observer to read it in their own way. Even in narrative-bound mediums, such as feature film, or in a context where eccentricity was prized, such as the fashion world, Dali’s work defies a universal interpretation, instead allowing his viewer to choose how they engage with his work, and what context they bring to it. There is sometimes a ‘right’ way to view a Dali work, in a biographical sense, there is sometimes an intention behind his work; but despite that the viewer does not search for biography in his work they way they do with Van Gough, Picasso, or Georgia O’Keefe.
The goal of a tarot reading is to tell you what you already know. Art therapy does the same, using creative practice to unlock feelings or memories and enable us to move forward – and with tests like the inkblots or interpreting a surrealist work, we decode and add richness to our subconscious. By turning to Rorschach, Dali, and tarot, we set the parameters for exploring our internal world with external stimulation, and allow ourselves to analyse not only what we think, but why we think the way we do. We see not just images, but the composition they create together, and how that fits in to our preconceived conception of the world. A dream cannot tell the future any more than the stars can, but it can anticipate our reactions and explain anything that passes through our mind, and through embracing the artistic path of Smith, Dali, and Rorschach, we can understand the ‘inner self’ that, although it may not show up in costume, is ever-present and guides us through life.
To-Do:
· Go to Weimar – I have wanted to since I first got here, and a colleague told me that the museums there are open now. Goethe’s house, here I come!!
· Send mail to friends – I’ve had some letters on my desk for months that I want to respond to
· Make a plan to return school keys and English text book
Today’s Culture:
· Several years ago I bought a book on Rorschach himself and the test he created, after hearing about it in a programme on the radio which, in all honestly, I have not yet got around to reading (postgrad life does not leave space for non-fiction pleasure-reading), but it remains on my list.
· The New Yorker and American Vogue – I finally found a small stack of international magazines for sale in my little German town and am thrilled to be able to read something cultural without the aid of a dictionary.
· Gilmore Girls – I started watching it during the pandemic and now I’m on the last season. I’m hoping to finish it before I get home.
Late Romantic 
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