Unsatisfied Desires

Early October 2011. A rather chilly San Francisco night, the night was getting longer. 

6 P.M.

A man and a woman met at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

They came upon a painting.

"It's by Salvador Dali. I love Salvador Dali." She was happy with the discovery. She was excitable. On edge.

"He's always been my favorite." She repeated herself. He heard it the first time. But he did not interject. He was always polite.

The piece was the only Dali piece in the museum, as far as she could tell. It's titled Les Desirs Inassouvis (Unsatisfied Desires).

"What does it mean?" She was puzzled.

She failed to make the connection between the title and the art.

"You see, there is the penis, here is the vagina."  The man said, while pointing to the different parts of the art piece. His hand was strong, delicate and well manicured. he traced the fine lines of the art piece, up and down. His voice was soothing, calming, and non-emotional.

He was describing the anatomy of the man versus woman. He was being matter-of-factly, technical, accurate, and precise, as if it was a modeling exercise.

She wanted to know why the desires were unsatisfied. She had studied up on Dali - the artist was volatile and passionate. Since her twenties, she had loved Dali, she could relate: her desires, dark secret desires, often went unsatisfied as well, not unlike Dali.

Where the man saw the human anatomy, she saw the impending volcano eruption.

It was at that precise moment, the woman had a strange but daring thought. The thought that perhaps all of her unsatisfied desires, past, present and future, non-conventional, conventional, traditional, non-traditional, fantastical, whimsical, exhilarating and tantalizing - may be satisfied by this seemingly emotional detached man.

She was right.

That night, the woman's unsatisfied desires, satisfied.

Her world had decidedly changed since that night.

The man, calculating yet caring; sensitive yet removed, had taken her to places she'd never been before. She now, traveled freely between the land of fantastical and land of mundane. 

She still had not asked the man if his desires were also satisfied. 

She wanted to tell him, one day, when the moment was right, that she too wanted to satisfy every single desire this man ever wanted - known, or not known to himself.

You see, she had finally, found shelter. There, she built a nest: her emotions, no longer needed to be bottled up; her desires, no longer went unsatisfied. There, she would wait, patiently, for the man to come home.

One day, his hand holding hers, they'd visit the piece in the museum again. She'd ask him to explain to her what that piece meant. And in the end, she'd tell him: "Thank you, for taking care of me, all this time."

From PsyArt: http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/kovry-the_enigma_of_desire_salvador_dal_and_thhttp://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/kovry-the_enigma_of_desire_salvador_dal_and_th

It is striking that in all the paintings made in this period we can find the motifs of the lion or the roaring, maned lion’s head. On this subject Rodriguez says the following when talking about Unsatisfied Desires: Unsatisfied desires was the first painting inspired by his desire for her [i.e. Gala – Z. K.]. In this canvas appear mixed desires, fears and sexual phobias, represented by lion jaws Dalí’s fears of sexual encounter with a woman.”(Rodriguez, op.cit. 40.). I would like to add to this legitimate statement that the lion’s head is probably the indirect representation of the vagina dentata as a universal symbol: the mane may stand for the pubic hair and the open mouth could be the toothed vaginal orifice. It may seem contradictory that we can see male lions in the paintings still we are talking about a female symbol; but on the one hand, with Dalí the masculine and the feminine were never completely separated (see the question of androgyny), and on the other hand, the vagina dentata refers to the ”phallic”, aggressive aspects of femininity. In the painting The Accommodations of Desire, in the top right hand corner there is a white stone on which we can see a female lower body and in its lap there is a white patch that forms the silhouette of a mane, with a lion’s open mouth in the centre. This symbol perfectly illustrates Dalí’s controversial relationship with women and femininity, thinking of either his mother or his wife Gala. The ambivalent female lap – according to a Hungarian writer, Menyhért Lakatos: “the big, greedy beast” (Lakatos, 1975)Â – is the object of desire, but at the same time also the source of the deepest anxiety. This is the place where Eros and Thanatos meet.

The vagina dentata is a universal symbol frequently occurring in the religions and myths of the world (Hoppál, Jankovics, Nagy, Szemadám, 1994). This symbol of aggressive female sexuality and devouring maternity expresses feelings and anxieties related to the castration complex, and in a broader sense to the intertwining and universal questions of sexuality, birth and death, both on a personal (dreams, fantasies, works of art) and collective (myths, initiation rites) level. According to the entry in International dictionary of psychoanalysis (Mijolla, 2005) the phenomenon originates from the infantile sexual theories which presume the equation of the mouth and the vagina. Depending on the assumed underlying psychodynamic events, different psychoanalytic approaches attribute diverse meanings to the  fantasies of fear of the mother, women and castration. Thus their appearance may be induced by, among other things:

1. the projection of oral-sadistic drives
2. the fear of punishment for a desire for fusion with the mother, which is an incestuous bond
3. anxiety caused by a desire for coitus as an intrauterine regression (after Ferenczi)
4. a sadistic interpretation of the coitus, the primal scene
5. the fantasy of incorporation during coitus (Melanie Klein)
6. the fear of vengeance because of the woman/mother’s own castratedness (René de Mondry)
7. but it can also represent the persecutory Object (Hanna Segal)
8. while being devoured by the genitalia could also represent bisexual desires.