ABSTRACT
This chapter further notes the importance of how life writing, modernist literature, the visual arts, and psycho-medical sciences converged in Central Europe. Using the example of Jindřich Štyrský’s dream diaries and his erotic works from the interwar period, this chapter traces the complicated paths of the transfer of psychoanalysis into Czech culture before the outbreak of World War II. A careful examination of Štyrský’s Surrealist work will demonstrate that in their reception of psychoanalytic theory, Czech artists were attracted to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams as well as the psychoanalytic appreciation for the various forms in which human sexuality could express itself. Analyzing Štyrský’s erotic and oneiric work in the context of the influence of psychoanalytic knowledge on the medical milieu of interwar Prague provides a better view of how theories by Freud, Otto Rank, and Marxist psychoanalysts such as Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich impacted the Czech Surrealist milieu.
