Dali was deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, contending "The only difference between immortal Greece and contemporary times is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely platonic in the Greek epoch, is nowadays full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is capable to open." The artist was especially interested in Freud's interpretation of William Jensen's Gradiva, a 1903 novel about an archaeologist's obsession with an ancient relief; this curiosity coincided with his first explorations on the theme of cabinets - works such as the intimately scaled Atmospheric Chair (1933), in which a small cabinet seems to give birth to a maelstrom of vaguely human body parts.