In 1930, Edvard Munch was affected by an eye problem that temporarily blinded him in one eye. During this period, he made a series of abstract and symbolic works inspired by the images the disease produced on his retina. In the book The Savage Eye, these works form a bridge between two radical art movements, Symbolism and Surrealism, both of which explored the idea of the unconscious.

Munch is often associated with Symbolism, a movement in literature and the visual arts that emerged in the 1880s. Influenced by the contemporary interest in spirituality and psychology, and in protest against naturalistic depictions of the real world, Symbolist artists turned their attention towards spirituality and the unconscious.

Some decades later, in 1924, the French poet Andre Breton wrote his "Manifesto of Surrealism", in which he argued that art should transform society by uniting the worlds of dreams and reality. In order to succeed, wrote Breton, artists must free themselves from rational and moral concerns, and seek to tap into the revolutionary power of the unconscious mind. This would open the way to a new understanding of personal experience and identity.