The artistic movement of Surrealism dealt with the idea of dictating thought beyond the capacity of reason. Salvador Dali embraced this technique, and painted familiar objects in distorted ways, often with anthropomorphic qualities, to give them fetishistic significance. He was, in particular, fascinated with images of blood, decay, and excrement. In this painting Dali uses the image of the highly distorted skull to symbolize his inner turmoil and obsession with medical anomalies, specifically sexually transmitted diseases. The work is strangely void, save for the three main images, which Dali includes because he believes they are of great importance to expressing the message of personal turbulence the work is meant to display.