The Missed Encounter. A disappointment, an ear, a shell, and a snail

The published version of a reading at the Freud Museum, London, from the conference Surrealism & Psychoanalysis: Conquest of the Irrational? In 1938 Dalí met Freud in London, bringing with him his painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus and a new article about his ‘paranoiac-critical’ method, first described in his book Conquest of the Irrational. InThe Missed Encounter another Surrealist prepares to visit Freud, then recounts his disappointment to his wife over coffee and cakes in Vienna; Freud writes disparagingly of the visit to Ernest Jones, and later, of an unpleasant vexation with the same Surrealist; Freud’s capacity for listening is admired; there are a numbers of extracts from Freud’s papers, including a dream and a recipe; and finally, two drawings that may be of significance for scholars of psychoanalysis are published for the first time.