Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

A Famous Migraine Suspect

"My mom and I have always thought Picasso might have had them."

(Leeanna English, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: Re: Famous migraineurs, August 2, 1997)

"Then Salvador Dali must have had them too!"

(Helen Simmons, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: Re: Famous migraineurs, August 2, 1997)

A migraine sufferer's report

"I clearly remember my first migraine. I was visiting with friends, when a strange zig zag of light flashed across one eye, almost like lightening. Like a Salvatore Dali painting everything seemed surreal, almost as if the room were melting. People were talking to me, but I couldn't understand. Like an out of body experience, I felt disoriented and weak, my arm went numb and everything seemed as if I were looking through broken glass. Then came the pain. The awful throbbing pain that lasted for two days with no relief. I was sure it was brain tumor, so I went to a neurologist who, after much testing, told me I suffered from classic migraine."

(Diane Meredith Bentley, Introduction to "A Migraine Sufferer's Cookbook", http://www.trafford.com/ 4dcgi/view-item?item=2292&222195649-28665aaa, September 1, 2004)

Critical Paranoia, or how to decisively split your vision in new directions...

By James Sebor

Salvador Dali developed the concept of Critical Paranoia for establishing a creative state of self-induced psychosis. Andre Breton often maligned him for its uses, a sign of its relative importance and usefulness.

Consider the process akin to forcing a waking dream, a conscious transformation led by paranoid scrutiny of what presents itself in the surroundings. The simplest version, hardly critical, hardly paranoid, begins with the child's game of staring into banks of clouds, looking for the chariot riders, the giants and other fantasms of humidity. Elementary exercises can also be practiced through prolonged staring at ink blots, scribble drawings and the array of optical illusions that sell themselves in one of many new-age, self-help manuals designed to prove that you are on your way to a happier existence.

Those cracks in the sidewalk, they look like an outline of the west coast of Mexico.
Those cracks in the sidewalk, they are the west coast of Mexico.
Those ants in the middle, they are eating the Yucutan.
Someone has stepped in Panama. They have left smudges in the Pacific.

More advanced practitioners will find the intricacies of television static a delight to behold. The onset of migraine headaches a resounding flourish.

(James Sebor, Critical Paranoia, http://www.seaboarcreations.com/criticalparanoia.htm, September 1, 2004)

Inspiration, mediumship, surrealism: The concept of creative dissociation (excerpts)

By Michael Grosso

Salvador Dali developed something he called "paranoic critical activity," the main idea being to try systematically to concretize one's obsessions. Dali's were with putrefaction, masturbation, time, death, hell, and so on. Paranoiac critical activity is similar to Victor Frankl's paradoxical intention. Instead of denying or repressing the negative, we affirm and express it; we force ourselves to look at it in a concrete way. We exaggerate, make it monstrous, as Rimbaud said. We get the paranoia out of our system, so to speak, and at the same time, transform it into something artistically engaging or therapeutically helpful. This "activity" seems to me part of the healing power of art. It must have worked for Dali, who said, "The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad" (Bosquet, 1969, p. 83)...

Surreality - my candidate for the advanced development of creative dissociation - was an attempt to revive the cult of the Muses... For Breton, de Chirico, Dali, and company, dissociation was the basis of a cultural revolution, a kind of post-religious eschatology that preached the necessity for disengagement from and destruction of the prevailing reality principle.

(Cited from Grosso, Inspiration, mediumship, surrealism: The concept of creative dissociation, 1998, www.nidsci.org/pdf/grosso.pdf, January 7, 2005)