Down Below

A few weeks ago, I saw Leonora Carrington’s exhibition ‘The Symptomatic Surreal’ at the Freud Museum. I knew her work from before, and her associations to the Surrealist movement but I was not aware about her breakdown, aged 23.

She spent 6 months at Morales Sanatorium (also known as Peña Castillo) in Santander, Spain. Where her consultant, Dr. Morales administered Cardizol shock therapy while encouraging her to sketch.

The exhibition, at the Freud Museum, consists of those sketches and some letters from 1938 to 1941, following Carrington’s flight from Nazi occupied France, her hospitalisation, and her journey through Madrid to New York, where she was reunited with the Surrealists in exile in 1941. 

The exhibition is anchored by the presentation of Down Below (1940), a painting created when Carrington was hospitalised. Down Below is also the title of her autobiographical memoir, recounting her flight to Spain following the arrest of her lover Max Ernst, and her subsequent confinement in a Spanish mental asylum. This book is structured as an alchemical journey, allying personal trauma with surrealist myth and an alchemical rebirth. The title refers to a room beneath the asylum that she believed was the epicentre of the cosmos.

But before we dive down there, perhaps it would be good to know a bit more about how Leonora arrived at the point where inner and outer realities merged, and an alchemical rebirth was begotten.

Leonora had a real fascination for Celtic culture and folklore. This was primarily inspired by her Irish mother, grandmother and nanny. Growing up, she was immersed in tales of Celtic mythology, the Sidhe (fairy people), and the Tuatha Dé Danann. These fantastic stories taught her to view animals and nature as forces of harmony, magic, and rebellion.

At age ten, Leonora saw her first Surrealist painting and later became familiar with the movement by reading Herbet Read’s book, Surrealism.

Surrealism was a cultural and artistic movement, developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. You could say that it helped artists process the trauma of the War. Most of them believed that the cause of the war was the rational, capitalist, and political systems, so they sought to side-step rationality and express the unconscious mind through dreams and automatism. The intention was, in Breton’s words: to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality" (1969), or surreality.

Leonora was born into a Roman Catholic family. Her father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, and her mother was from Ireland. Her father opposed her making a living as an artist, and even though her mother may have encouraged her, she received little support from her family to forge an artistic career. In 1937, Carrington met Max Ernst at a party in London. The artists fell in love and moved to Paris together. In 1938, they settled in Saint-Martin-d’Ardeche.

Ernst, who was German, was imprisoned by French authorities at the outbreak of World War II for being a "hostile alien." With the mediation of friends, he was released a few weeks later but soon after the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo due to his art being considered "degenerate”.

The loss of her lover and the invasion of the Nazis were the catalyst for Carrington’s journey into Down Below. She was in shock; these events had a profound emotional impact: the loss of what she later referred to as “her happiest time”.

Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded Analytical Psychology, found himself in a similar situation, a few years earlier. In 1913 his prolific relationship of six years with Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, came to an end.

This separation deeply affected Jung, he withdrew from many of his professional activities to reassess his personal and professional path. He viewed this period as a "creative illness". He produced Liber Novus, which is an illustrated manuscript, in which he recorded his visions and conversations with characters of his psyche between 1914 and 1930. Jung, like Carrington, experienced a war whilst going through this journey, in his case it was World War I.

Jung thought of alchemy as a symbolic map of the human psyche and it was this map that guided Leonora through her ‘journey’. Jung thought of the alchemical journey as a confrontation with one’s unconscious. Unconscious means a space for experiences that have been stored away because they were too challenging. Jung thought that: “the realization of the hidden in the unconscious signifies reunion with the unconscious laws of our being, and the purpose of this reunion is the attainment of conscious life” (Jung, 1967, p.20).

In other words, “self-realisation requires the psyche to turn round on itself and confront what it produces” (Stevens, 1994, p.38). This is a lifelong process, of overcoming inner dualities, and achieving psychic balance.

Jung mapped this psychological transformation by using the different stages of alchemy: Nigredo or state of depression; Albedo, a stage characterised by the gain of insight and clarity. Citrinas, where the light of consciousness emerges to transition towards wisdom; and the last stage, Rubedo, the stage of integration and synthesis. This points to a psychic capacity to expand consciousness, where unconscious components are integrated into consciousness.

For Carrington, this process ended in her moving to Mexico. Her journey took her from being a femme-enfant for Max Ernst and the surrealists, to becoming a pivotal figure in Mexican surrealism and a founder of its women's liberation movement. By the way, in case you wonder what does femme-enfant means, it is an archetype of a woman who retains a youthful, innocent, and playful disposition, without ever fully leaving her childhood spirit behind.

I invite you to consider, what if a diagnosis or a mental health problem is actually a door into the depths of yourself, a journey into the unknown, and an expansion of consciousness and possibilities. Existential psychotherapy certainly provides the space to hold those thoughts and navigate what appears to be unsurmountable.

“One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever.”

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Interested on reading the real stuff:

Breton, André. "Manifesto of Surrealism." Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 1–47

Carrington, L. (2017). Down Below. New York Review Books.

Jung, C.G. (1968) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 13) Alchemical Studies (ed.) Read, H., Fordham, M., Adler, G. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Read, H. (Ed.). (1936). Surrealism. Faber & Faber.

Stevens, A. (2001) Jung: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.