Sigmund Freud first introduced the term “Oedipus complex” in a 1910 paper
titled "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men”—describing the psychological
phenomenon in which sons have erotic feelings towards their mothers while simultaneously
viewing their father with hostility as a rival. This text was subsequently translated
into Spanish in the early 1920s, during Dalí’s student days at the Real
Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where the artist was an early
reader of and advocate for Freud’s psychoanalytical theories.



Dalí’s 1930 pastel, Oedipus Complex, shows a large yellow rock with
seven shallow cavities carved out —each evocatively inscribed ma mère—the
French word for mother. The artist’s own mother had died when he was only a
teenager, with his father going on to remarry his deceased wife’s sister. The
ballon-like rocks which refer to the landscape of the artist’s native
Catalonia first appeared in the late 1920s, including in The Enigma of
Desire (1929) which also bears the heartrending inscription of ma mère
throughout.

In Oedipus Complex, congregated near the center of the form are a swarm of ants,
alluding to Dalí’s ever present fear of death and decay. The scene is further
populated by a mysterious white figure who stares out at the sea, while an
ocean line billows out plumes of smoke in the far distance. A solitary plant
is overturned in the foreground, discordantly placed in a domestic vase but adrift
in a barren landscape. The present work is world unto itself populated with hallucinatory
objects.