Salvador Dalí met Sigmund Freud in London in 1938.
The meeting took place after Dalí visited Freud with the assistance of the writer Stefan Zweig and the poet Edward James. Dalí greatly admired Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious, which had influenced Surrealist thinking and his own artistic method.
Dalí made a drawing of Freud during the encounter and later recalled the meeting as deeply important. Freud, however, was not initially persuaded that Dalí represented the kind of unconscious expression associated with Surrealism. Their conversation occurred after Freud had fled Austria following the Nazi annexation.
The date is often confused with Dalí’s first contacts with the Paris Surrealist circle, which occurred earlier, or with his later move to the United States. The London meeting is specifically dated to 1938, one year before Freud’s death.