Although life in a strict Spanish family and education in a convent surely did involve numerous watchful eyes, it is also true that, for Remedios, the watching was as intensely imagined, as it was real. These are the watchful eyes of tradition and the past from which she is making a break, the restrictive scrutiny that had prompted her to bury her childhood fantasy stories, the intrusive spying against which she had guarded her doorway with sugar. Thus her female characters tense confrontations and ominous encounters with strange men are more frightening than funny.Ĭlutching her cloak protectively, the girl, so self-contained and seemingly alone, faces squarely away from the building but her eyes have rolled up like the identical pairs of eyes that follow her every move from the buildings arched windows. “I am hopelessly superstitious… so much so that when I go out, even to a nearby place, I return as quickly as possible to shut myself up in the house as if someone were following me.” As indicated in her work, Varo seems to have shared the recurring fears of women who, in peacetime as in war, face the threat of arbitrary violence. Yet she was known as a deeply anxious woman who harbored many fears. Her letters to unknown psychiatrists, filled with descriptions of ridiculous imaginary crisis, and pleas for help, were surely written in jest, as was her proposal for a psychoanalytic clinic in which one could choose either to live out ones own fantasies or to work against someone elses. Whether Varo herself ever sought psychiatric help is undocumented.

Collected Works Volume 4 – Freud & Psychoanalysisįrom Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys Janet Kaplan.

Collected Works Volume 3 – Psychogenesis of Mental Disease.

Collected Works Volume 15 – Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature.

Collected Works Volume 16 – Practice of Psychotherapy.

Collected Works Volume 8 – Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche.

Collected Works Volume 10 – Civilization in Transition.

Collected Works Volume 9(1) – Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.

Collected Works Volume 2: Experimental Researches.

Collected Works Volume 1 Psychiatric Studies.

Collected Works Volume 14 – Mysterium Coniunctionis.

Collected Works Volume 9 (2) – Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.

Collected Works Volume 18 – The Symbolic Life.

Collected Works Volume 17 – Development of Personality.

Collected Works Volume 13 – Alchemical Studies.

Collected Works Volume 12 – Psychology and Alchemy.

Collected Works Volume 11 – Psychology and Religion: West and East.

Collected Works Volume 7 – Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.

Unexpected journeys janet kaplan