Madrid's Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza opened The Freudian Universe of Dalí on October 20, 2026, an exhibition that treats Sigmund Freud not as a footnote to Salvador Dalí's career but as its shaping force. The show runs until January 24, 2027, and brings together 62 works covered by a Spanish state guarantee of nearly 312 million euros. Curated by art historian Jaime Brihuega, it is arranged in six chronological sections that follow Dalí from his family childhood in Figueres through his late work in Catalonia, with the 1938 London meeting between the painter and the exiled psychoanalyst as its central thread. Dalí first encountered Freud's writings in the early 1920s while living at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, the student residence where he befriended the poet Federico García Lorca. Freud's ideas about dreams, hidden desires and the unconscious gave the young painter a new way of thinking about images, and the exhibition argues that this reading stayed with him for life. From the mid-1920s his work moved toward Surrealism, and his most original contribution, the paranoiac-critical method, grew directly out of that reading: a way of seeing in which a single image can turn into several others depending on how the viewer looks at it, producing the double images for which he is famous. The show deliberately refuses to present Dalí alone. Each section pairs his work with figures from his artistic and intellectual world, including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and Jean-François Millet, alongside drawings by the Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal and material connected to Freud himself. The Thyssen's own celebrated Dalí, the 1944 Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening, features prominently as an example of dream theory turned into precise imagery. The museum notes that Freudian elements remained visible even in Dalí's later mystical-nuclear period, when atomic physics and religious themes entered his work. Guided tours run on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, with a lecture series from October 28 to November 25, and Saturday evening entry is free under the museum's Thyssen Nights programme.