Psychoanalysis And Surrealist Art: What Relationship Do They Have?

Psychoanalysis and Surrealist Art: what relationship do they have?

The connections between surrealism and psychoanalysis are, in general, quite clear. André Breton himself, the founding father of the surrealist movement, thanked in the First surrealist manifesto (1924) Sigmund Freud’s discoveries on the unconscious and dreams, and during his youth he was a staunch admirer of the Viennese psychoanalyst.

However, what many people may not know is that Freud never understood (and never tried to understand) surrealism, despite the many attempts that Breton and company made to approach it. In a famous letter written in December 1932, Freud comments to Breton that, despite constantly receiving expressions of gratitude from the surrealist group, he cannot understand what exactly it is, nor what it intends.
What relationship, exactly, do surrealism and psychoanalysis have? In this article we are going to try to find out.

The principles of the relationship between surrealism and psychoanalysis

In 1916, World War I is in full swing. A very young André Breton (who was twenty years old at the time), a medical student, is mobilized and assigned to the Second Army Psychiatric Center, in the French city of Saint-Dizier. The center was the destination of the hundreds of soldiers who returned from the front suffering from a “war neurosis”, a syndrome already described during the American Civil War by the military doctor Jacob DaCosta and which consisted of a series of non-organic symptoms such as palpitations. or tightness in the chest.

During his stay at the center, Breton was able to apply the recent theories of psychoanalysis described by Freud to the patients he observed on a daily basis. Later, the father of surrealism commented that The mentally ill patients in the sanatorium made apparently meaningless speeches or strung together words that, in the opinion of the psychiatrists, were the result of delirium and alienation However, for André Breton they were something else. It was the greatest discovery of his life, which a few years later would give rise to the surrealist movement.

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    Psychoanalysis and the “free association of ideas”

    What for the doctors at the center were mere meaningless words, for Breton was an authentic “poetic work.”

    André Breton

    It was through the parliament of the sanatorium patients that he certified what he had already heard in Freudian theories: that there was an obvious connection between that chain of words that psychiatrists ignored and the needs and fears of the patient.

    In other words; There was an obvious relationship between the unconscious world of those poor soldiers and what they said. This experience inspired Breton to give free rein to his own conception of what “art” should be: something automatic that flowed freely from the most hidden corners of the mind, without the constant interruption of judgment, morality and reason. .

    This “free association of ideas” evidently drew on Freudian theories of the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams and also, we must not forget, the postulates of the psychologist and neurologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947), whose work Psychological automatism He had a lot to say on the subject. In any case, this free association gave rise to the so-called “automatic writing”, which Breton and his surrealist colleague Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) materialized for the first time with the work The magnetic fields. Both dedicated themselves to collecting their own thoughts without filters, and published them without any correction in 1920. The magnetic fields It has been considered the first work of the surrealist movement, although, in 1919, Breton already published an “automatic text”, Ursinein the magazine Literature.

      Psychoanalysis in France

      It is evident that, without Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, surrealism would not have existed. The same “automatic writing” is based, as we have commented, on a constant flow of the unconscious, without any rational, moral or social obstacle that intercepts it. However, the relationship of the surrealists with the father of psychoanalysis was not always fluid or good.

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      We have already said that the young André Breton, during his stay in Saint-Dizier, was a fervent admirer of Freud. In a letter from the time addressed to his friend Theodore Fraenkel, Breton confesses that the Viennese’s theories have impressed him In those years, Freud’s works had barely reached France (the first translation into French was made in 1921 in Geneva), so Breton was truly privileged to have had contact with his work already in 1916.

      The psychoanalyst and historian Élisabeth Roudinesco (1944) established two routes through which psychoanalysis penetrated France. The first consisted of an absolutely medical path, in which the cure of the patient took precedence over everything else. This therapeutic route is what was promoted by psychology and psychiatry based on the psychoanalytic method.

      The second route of penetration is what Roudinesco calls the “intellectual route”, in which not only the therapeutic objective (and, therefore, the cure of patients) took precedence, but also the artistic and intellectual. It is in this area that we must insert Breton and his group of surrealists.

      In fact, The position of the members of the surrealist movement became radicalized with respect to the medical path of psychoanalysis Both Breton, Aragon and Artaud, the other two founding members of the group, are firmly opposed to the exclusive use of psychoanalysis in the field of therapy. In April 1925, Antonin Artaud published in The Surrealist Revolutionthe vehicle of the movement, a harsh criticism against psychiatry, for its desire to classify mental illnesses, among other things.

        Sigmund Freud: a story of love and hate

        And it will be the early twenties that will dig an almost unbridgeable abyss between the surrealists and the psychiatric branch of psychoanalysis, including its illustrious founder, Sigmund Freud. Because, although André Breton, carried away by his ardent youthful admiration, tried to approach the psychoanalyst, his attempts fell on deaf ears.

        The two corresponded for a time (among their correspondence we have Freud’s famous statement, already cited in this article, that he does not understand what surrealism is about and what it intends). At the end of 1921, Breton managed to meet him at his home in Vienna. His objective, in addition to finally meeting his “idol,” was to introduce him to the surrealist movement and bring him closer to the “cause.”

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        It seems like, The interview was not at all satisfactory, neither for Breton nor for Freud The latter was not at all impressed, and locked himself into his position of “anti-avant-garde”, which he considered the end of art. As for Breton, we can deduce his disappointment if we take a look at the article that he wrote about the meeting, published that same year in the magazine Literature; Among other niceties, he said that the father of psychoanalysis lived in a “mediocre-looking” house in a “lost neighborhood of Vienna.”

        Why were the positions of Freud and the surrealists irreconcilable? To begin with, Sigmund Freud considered psychoanalysis a work tool, whose sole objective was psychiatry. The surrealists, for their part, saw the method as the basis of future artistic creation, from which they took the interpretation of dreams and the free association of ideas

        But there is also a purely theoretical reason. And the fact is that, while Freudian psychoanalysis considered the mind as something made up of a series of compartments (and the dream as a connecting element between them), the surrealists saw sleep and wakefulness as a unit. They were the “communicating vessels” (if we paraphrase the title of the work that Breton wrote in the 60s defending this idea), vessels that shared information and transmitted it constantly. That is, in truth, the goal of surrealist art: the final union of two apparently irreconcilable worlds and the creation of a “suprareality” where such a dichotomy no longer existed.