Psychoanalysis and Surrealist Art: what is their relationship?

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) the discoveries of Sigmund Freud in matters of 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 multiple attempts made by Breton and company to approach him. In a famous letter written in December 1932, Freud comments to Breton that, despite constantly receiving expressions of gratitude from the surrealist group, he is unable to understand what exactly it is, nor what he pretends. What relationship do surrealism and psychoanalysis have, exactly? In this article we will 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 for hundreds of soldiers who returned from the front suffering from a "shell shock", 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 oppression 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 mental patients in the sanatorium made apparently meaningless speeches or chained 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, the one that 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 words without meaning, for Breton it was a true “poetic work”.

It was through the parliament of the patients of the sanatorium 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. sick.

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 unleash his own conception of what "art" should be: something automatic. to flow openly from the recesses of the mind, without the constant interruption of judgment, morality, and reason.

This "free association of ideas” evidently drank from Freudian theories of the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams, and also, it must not be forgotten, 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 magnetic fields. Both dedicated themselves to collecting their own thoughts without filters, and published them without any type of correction in 1920. magnetic fields It has been considered the first work of the surrealist movement, although, in 1919, Breton already published an "automatic text", Ursine, in the magazine literature.

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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 between the surrealists and the father of psychoanalysis was not always fluid or good.

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 hardly reached France (the first French translation was made in 1921 in Geneva), so Breton was truly privileged to have had contact with his work already in the year 1916.

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

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

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

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Sigmund Freud: A Story of Love and Hate

And it is that it will be the first twenties that will dig an almost impassable chasm 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 manages to meet with him at his house 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".

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 in his position as "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 he wrote about the meeting, published that same year in the magazine literature; among other nice things, he said that the father of psychoanalysis lived in a house of "mediocre appearance" 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 in the method 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 it is that, while Freudian psychoanalysis considered the mind as something constituted by a series of compartments (and sleep 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 60 claiming this idea), some glasses that shared information and transmitted it to constantly. That is, in truth, the objective of surrealist art: the final union of two apparently irreconcilable worlds and the creation of a “surreality” where such a dichotomy no longer existed.