fall of Icarus—an image of the mythic hero’s failed aspiration and descent into the water. But this descent into water assumes a positive aspect in the context of the other image of the painting, the Pisces. The painting alludes to an alchemical imagery: the heavenly twins are ruled by Mercury and, as fish, are a symbol of a stage of the alchemical process. The overall somber greyness of the mural, in contrast to the bright colors of the other murals, may represent this stage, with the fish immersed in the corrosive mercury water. Ernst could have found this symbolism in almost any alchemical text. It is illustrated as two fish in the ocean in the famous emblems of the German “Book of Lambspring”…the twins in Ernst’s mural, both as fishes and as men, float in tanks, not in the sea…fish are dissolved in the philosophical vessel.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

diagrammatic images of hysterical anaesthesia.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

diagrammatic images of hysterical anaesthesia.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

hysteria has passed into the category of myth.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

…hysterical symptoms…are representational of repressed erotic emotion: hysterical crises are an erotic wish fulfillment…if the zones marked on the woman’s body in “Enter, Leave” are hysterical symptoms, they are also representations of an erotic wish…source of new hallucinatory realities, a homage to sexual inspiration.

…the glove or sock of hysterical dysaesthesia (a disruption of sense perceptions caused by a purely mental disorder) could be a most apt diagrammatic equivalent of the Rimbaldean “disrutpion of the senses” sought by Ernst and Breton.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

…hysteria represents a kind of withdrawal into visionary blindness, a theme of importance to Ernst…conscious “blindness” through “spectacles of anaesthesia”…in spite of Janet’s interpretation of hysteria as a restriction of perception, it could serve as a model for a purely mental, Rimbaldean “disruption”, or modification of the senses away from utilitarian applications…eliminating the therapeutic or clinical judgements, which they considered irrelevant to their poetic purposes. Hysteria, as the ability not to perceive reality in a functional way, might well serve as the muse for the Surrealist breaking down of barriers between the real and the imagined…poetic value of hysteria.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

…fetishistic preoccupation…lizard catcher…

…an element of male passivity, and even masochism, in the lizard-like willingness of man to be caught in the woman’s snare…”(Ernst) the wish to be taken captive by the girl he loved, to fall in with her wishes and to be subjected to her—for so may we construe the wish behind the situation of lizard-catching—was in fact of a passive masochistic character.”

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

…several passages suggest major scenes from the Gradiva story:

“A fly on her hand. The sun, in order to prevent it from flying away, sticks needles around it.”

Just this event—a fly landing on the hand of Zoë/Gradiza—is a turning point in the Jensen story. It provides a critical moment when Hanold has his first opportunity of touching Gradiva and of establishing her physical reality.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989

Another aspect of the commentary on the “Emerald Table” is a discussion of the role and nature of the ‘thélème’, the energy of the universe. This energy is the solar semen condensed into earthly matter and then released as part of a perpetual upward and downward movement of the cyclic creation myth. The ‘thélème’ is commonly associated in occult writings with solar wind or divine breath. The equation of the solar semen with divine breath or wind may be a clue to the nature of Ernst’s “little whistle” that rises to the sun. The whistle, as a wind instrument, is an appropriate channel for the divine breath or wind. The whistle of Ernst’s poem is an aspiring solar phallus as it tries to rise, a necessary contributor to the fertilizing operation of the sun. The earth, which should be the receptacle of the sun’s fertilizing rays, assumes, as Ernst’s poem points out, the “significance of a sexual organ”. This is also consistent with the hermetic sexual creation mythology in which the solar semen activates the earth.

-on “of this men shall never know”

hermetic=hermes=mercury

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989
with note by myself

Unfortunately, human effort, which tends to endlessly vary the arrangement of existing elements, cannot be applied to the production of a single new element. A landscape in which nothing terrestrial enters is not within the grasp of our imagination. (Breton)

…dreams are the product of an assemblage and mutation of existing elements, rather than entirely new creations…

…symbolism of alchemical transmutation of ordinary matter is central to…a view of a mythology of the unconscious based on the metaphoric identities of things.

Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources
Elizabeth M. Legge
U.M.I. Research Press
1989