All Of These Elements Make Up What We Would Recognise As A Dream; Each Works

All of these elements make up what we would recognise as a dream; each works upon the initial dream-thought and inscribes and translates that into a manifest dream-content that is, consequently, analysed and re-translated by the analyst. However because the dream-work's primary function is one of censorship, in order to access the unconscious meanings behind the images, the analysand either has to engage in free association or in dream recounting; thus by-passes the psychical censor and offering a royal road (Freud, 1966: 60) into the unconscious.
Surrealism's use of Freud
In his canonical The Story of Art (1979), E.H Gombrich states that:
(The surrealists) were greatly impressed by the writings of Sigmund Freud, who had shown that when our wakening thoughts are numbed the child and the savage in us takes over. It was this idea which made the Surrealists proclaim that art can never be produced by wide-awake reason. They might admit that reason can give us science but would say that only unreason can give us art. (Gombrich, 1979: 471)
We could suggest, in the light our studies here that Gombrich is only partially right in his assumptions of both Freud and surrealism. Surrealism's use of Freud (as we saw with the work of both Breton and Aragon above) can be seen as an attempt to not so much assert the eminence of unreason in art but to explore that which is beyond reason, or at least that which is underneath it.
A work such as Dali's Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) for instance, displays a surface of unreason but, commensurate with Freudian notions of the dream-work, can be subjected to an interpretation that reveals its hidden (or unconscious) logic and structures; this could be seen, perhaps, as the difference between the surrealist use of Freud and Dada's nihilism.
In Dali's 1936 work we see all of the various elements of the dream-work present: there is, for instance, obvious condensation, with disparate elements (the beans, the landscape, the deconstructed body, the head, the cabinet etc) being brought together in a fractured unity that mirrors the definition given Freud that we looked at above.
We can also recognise displacement, as the fingers of the hand metamorphose into an elephant's trunk, the lower limb becomes a tree stump and the end of the central thigh becomes a breast. There is also, obvious symbolisation taking place within the picture, we can recognise canonical phallic, sexual and ontological symbols the breast, the beans and the atrophy but most of all, what we witness in this picture is an image of the unconscious in praxis, as it condenses, displaces and symbolises its own desires, drives and fears.