In the 1920s, when Salvador Dalí was a student in Madrid, he pored over Sigmund Freud’s writings, learning about sexuality, dreams, and the unconscious. In particular, it was the groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams that struck the young artist, who once described fantasizing that Freud “stayed all night clinging to the curtains of my room in the Hotel Sacher.” Despite Dalí’s multiple attempts to meet Freud, the two did not manage a meeting until 1938, when Freud was 81. Old and sick, he had little interest in what the younger man had to say. Nevertheless, a psychoanalytical subtext remained present in the Spaniard’s work. This exhibition focuses on Freud’s influence on Dalí and the Surrealists. —E.C.