Sunday Dalí: The Great Masturbator.

The head is painted “soft,” as if malleable to the touch; it looks fatigued, sexually spent: the eyes are closed, the cheeks flushed.  Under the nose a grasshopper clings, its abdomen covered with ants that crawl onto the face where a mouth should be.  From early childhood, Dalí had a phobia of grasshoppers and the appearance of one here suggests his feelings of hysterical fear and a loss of voice or control.  The ants symbolize death.

Emerging from the right of the head, a woman moves her mouth toward a man’s genitals. The man’s legs are cut and bleeding, implying a fear of castration.  The woman’s face is cracked, as though the image that Dalí’s head produces will soon disintegrate.  To reiterate the sexual theme, the stamen of a lily symbolizes the woman’s purity, while tongue of a lion represents sexual desire.

Beneath the head and grasshopper, a man embraces an outcropping of rock in the shape of a woman, near an egg symbolizing fertility.  To contrast that another figure is shown in the distance, alone.  The fishhook that pierces Dalí’s head signifies family ties, while the piece of flesh that hangs off it is a woman’s vagina.  The seashells in his earhole represent Dalí’s childhood in a coastal town in Spain as part of this painting is attributed to a “false memory” Dalí had about his mother performing felatio on him.