ABSTRACT
During the same time that Freud and Jung were opening the doors to the unconscious through dream interpretation, taming its anxieties and demons, and exploring symbolism and unconscious phantasies, the French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was painting strange pictures with images springing to life from his imagination, insisting on their right as creations of the mind to exist in and for themselves. For Redon, anxieties and phantoms appear as doors to adventure, the fantastic behind the ordinary, the mystery behind the appearance: a plant blossoms with a face; a balloon becomes an eye. Redon was inspired by the engravings of Durer and Rembrandt, and his early work echoes theirs. In psychoanalytic theory, as in art, the imagination is in constant play, producing images and symbols shaped by the unconscious at the crossroads of body and mind, the place where mental entities emerge from the material reality of body experience.
