communication +1

Volume 4
Issue 1 Occult Communications: On Article 10
Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology

September 2015

The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of

Automatism in Early Surrealism
Tessel M. Bauduin
[email protected]

Abstract
In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism surrealist leader André Breton (1896-1966) defined Surrealism
as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state,’ positioning ‘psychic automatism’ as both a concept and a
technique. This definition followed upon an intense period of experimentation with various forms of
automatism among the proto-surrealist group; predominantly automatic writing, but also induced
dream states. This article explores how surrealist ‘psychic automatism’ functioned as a mechanism
for communication, or the expression of thought as directly as possible through the unconscious, in
the first two decades of Surrealism. It touches upon automatic writing, hysteria as an automatic bodily
performance of the unconscious, dreaming and the experimentation with induced dream states, and
automatic drawing and other visual arts-techniques that could be executed more or less automatically
as well. For all that the surrealists reinvented automatism for their own poetic, artistic and
revolutionary aims, the automatic techniques were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism,
psychical research and experimentation with mediums, and the article teases out the connections to
mediumistic automatism. It is demonstrated how the surrealists effectively and successfully divested
automatism of all things spiritual. It furthermore becomes clear that despite various mishaps,
automatism in many forms was a very successful creative technique within Surrealism.

Keywords
Surrealism, automatism, André Breton, spiritualism, automatic writing, automatic drawing, Philippe
Soupault, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism
Cover Page Footnote
Acknowledgement This article incorporates some material previously published in Bauduin,
Surrealism and the Occult.

This article is available in communication +1: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol4/iss1/

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Bauduin / Automatism in Early Surrealism

Introduction

In 1924 André Breton (1896-1966) published the Manifesto of Surrealism,

thereby formally positioning a group of young aspiring poets and artists who had
been undertaking collective creative experiments since 1919, as an avant-garde
movement. In this first manifest, he provided two definitions of Surrealism;
defining it, to begin with, methodologically, as ‘psychic automatism.’
Subsequently, he formulated it along the lines of a religious creed, elucidating that
as a psychic mechanism or state of mind, Surrealism served as a solution for the
problems of life. Moreover, in Surrealism the reality of dreams, ‘neglected
associations,’ and the play of thought were to be considered superior.

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one

proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any
other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in
the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic
or moral concern.

ENCYLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the

superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in
the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends
to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself
for them in solving all the principal problems of life [...].1

‘Psychic automatism’ was formulated and constructed as both concept and

technique in response to a particular problem: how to express ‘thought’ as it was
‘actually functioning?’ That is to say, thought as it was assumed to run purely and
free in the unconscious, unfettered and unrestricted by reasonable, moral, or
aesthetic concerns. The desired automatism is psychic and not psychological,
because it is neither necessarily logical nor, more importantly, in any way
pathological. As Breton had enough of a background in medicine that he could
also have opted for a psychiatric career rather than one in literature,2 we can be
1
Breton, André, Manifestoes, Seaver, Richard and Helen R. Lane (trans.), USA:
University of Michigan Press, 1972 (1969), 26.
2
Ellenberger, Henri F., The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of
Dynamic Psychiatry, London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1970, 837.

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certain the adjective ‘psychic’ was chosen very carefully. His background
accounts too for the other part of the mechanism: automatism. This technique was
well known and frequently used in psychiatric research and treatments during the
later decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, in French
psychiatry particularly but abroad as well. Around the middle of the nineteenth
century automatism had been appropriated by psychiatrists from Spiritism, the
French current of Spiritualism. Breton was well aware of this, as he also kept
abreast of parapsychological studies. His relatively frequent scathing remarks
about the possibility of communication with the dead or spirits indicates his
awareness of a spiritist subtext clinging to the term ‘psychic.’
The 1924 definitions of Surrealism followed upon an intense period of
experimentation with different forms of automatism, predominantly automatic
writing, which had begun in 1919. Indeed, even though 1924 is canonically
considered the beginning of Surrealism, there is no doubt that Breton’s Manifesto-
definitions were the outcome of the automatism experiments that took place
during the very formative years 1919-1924. The surrealists continued their
experimentation during the second half of the 1920s and several automatic
techniques were further developed — with varying success. In the 1933 essay
‘The Automatic Message’ Breton returned at length to the subject of automatism.
‘I am not afraid to admit that the history of automatic writing in Surrealism is one
of continual misfortune,’ he wrote.3 Those misfortunes were many, and have to do
with quality, quantity and authenticity of automatism, among other things. For all
that, though, Breton stuck by automatism—that is, predominantly, automatic
writing — as the core practice of Surrealism until the end of his life, continuing to
practice it on many occasions. For many others, not least fellow writer and poet
Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), and artist Max Ernst (1891-1976), both of them
surrealists of the first hour, automatism in one form or other also remained a
fundamental technique throughout their long careers.
Here I will explore how ‘psychic automatism’ functioned as a mechanism
for communication or expression of thought through the unconscious.4 Taking my
cue from Breton’s comment about automatic writing’s misfortune, I will explore
various forms of automatism, in various settings and in various ways, over the

3
Breton, André, ‘The Automatic Message’, Melville, Anthony (trans.), in: Breton, André,
Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, The Automatic Message - The Magnetic Fields -
The Immaculate Conception, Gascoyne, David, and Anthony Melville (eds.), Idem, and
Jon Graham (trans.), London: Atlas, 1997: 11-36, 18.
4
In Bretonian Surrealism spoken thought in the unconscious resides emphatically in the
interior. It is still something entirely different from — indeed directly opposed to — the
interior monologue many of the canonized modernist writers explored. Hutchinson,
Ben, Modernism and Style, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 235.

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course of the 1920s (or early Surrealism), and their possible successes and failures:
in other words, the problems encountered during surrealist experimentation with
automatisms. I will tease out the considerable extent to which early Surrealism
was indebted to concepts and ideas from dynamic psychiatry, while also
highlighting the few but essential ways in which surrealist automatism was
different. As I will show, under leadership of Breton the surrealist group around
him — or, ‘Bretonian surrealists’— appropriated the technique of automatism as
well as its object of investigation, the unconscious or subliminal. In the process
they reinvented both technique and object in an original and far-reaching way.
Below, automatism will be discussed in three sections, proceeding from
the three states of mind Breton professed faith in in his Manifesto: the ‘superior
reality’ of ‘neglected associations;’ ‘the omnipotence of the dream;’ and ‘the
disinterested play of thought.’ Red thread is the declaration that psychic
automatism expresses something ‘verbally, by means of the written word or in
any other manner;’ that is to say, in different forms of automatism. To begin with,
I will explore disinterested thought and automatic writing, focussing on the first
official surrealist automatically written work, The Magnetic Fields (1919), the
characterisation of the surrealists as ‘modest recording instruments’, and the
appreciation of hysteria as automatism of the body. Subsequently, I will turn to
the ‘omnipotent dream:’ discussing the sessions the surrealists organised with the
aim to dream lucidly, and the foundation of Surrealism as a serious branch of
psychical research, with its own bureau and journal. Finally, we will come to the
‘neglected associations,’ which will serve to discuss forms of automatism in the
visual arts, clairvoyance, predictions of the future, the role of simulation, and
another masterpiece of surrealist automatic writing, The Immaculate Conception
(1930).

1. The disinterested play of thought: automatic writing, hysteria

Automatism, as a concept and as a practice, made its way into Surrealism by way
of dynamic psychiatry, the medical discipline that would give rise to modern-day
psychiatry, psychology, psycho-analysis, and psychical research (or
parapsychology). A veritable “doctor’s club” formed the core of the surrealist
group, as several of its earliest members had a background in medicine. Louis
Aragon (1897-1982) and Breton had studied medicine and trained in psychiatric
wards during the First World War. Max Ernst had taken courses in psychology in
Bonn, Philippe Soupault’s (1897-1990) father was a medical doctor, and
photographer Jacques-André Boiffard (1902-1961), for instance, had been

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studying medicine until his introduction to the surrealists in 1924. 5 Free

association and/or automatism, usually in the form of writing, was used in the
psychiatry of the day and the young surrealists would have been familiar with the
method in practice as well as the various theories behind it.
In 1919 Breton and Soupault, still two aspiring poets, were reading
L’Automatisme psychologique (1889) by eminent French psychiatrist Pierre Janet
(1859-1947). 6 Struggling with problems of originally, authenticity, poetic
spontaneity and the seat of creativity—issues that plagued many, if not all,
Modernists and avant-gardists—they wondered if automatic writing might not be
a solution, as Soupault recounted later.7 Breton himself provided another, more
poetic version of their discovery of automatic writing at the time. One afternoon
in 1919 (or so he informs his readers), he found himself on the verge of falling
asleep. Suddenly, ‘phrases of varying length’ sprung to mind. ‘These sentences,
which were syntactically correct and remarkably rich in images, struck me as

5
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of psychoanalysis in France,
1925-1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 5. In the first half of the
1930s psychiatrist Jacques Lacan moved in circles close to Surrealism, and was in
contact with Salvador Dalí, for instance, for a time. In the same decade several of the
surrealists from the Bataille-group had themselves analysed. In other words, the links
between Surrealism and psychiatry and psychoanalysis were many, varied, dynamic,
and continued well into the 1930s and beyond. See further, besides sources mentioned
below, Chevrier, Alain, ‘André Breton et les sources psychiatriques du surréalisme,’ in
Béhar, Henri (ed.), Mélusine XXVII : Le Surréalisme et la Science (Lausanne: L’Âge
d’Homme, 2007), 53-76; and Hulak, Fabienne (ed.), Folie et Psychanalyse dans
l'Expérience Surréaliste (Nice: Z’éditions, 1992).
6
The (possible) influence of Janet upon Bretonian Surrealism has been contested, but is
increasingly more accepted. See, for instance, Bacopoulos-Viau, Alexandra,
‘Automatism, Surrealism and the making of French psychopathy: the case of Pierre
Janet,’ History of Psychiatry 23, 3 (2012): 259-276. Also, Haan, Joost, Peter J. Koehler
and Julien Bugousslavsky, ‘Neurology and Surrealism: André Breton and Joseph
Babinski,’ Brain 135 (2012): 3830-3838. In fact, the reception of works and ideas in
Surrealism has in the past been a contested issue with regards to many great (white
male) heroes of dynamic psychiatry, including Sigmund Freud, Jean Martin Charcot,
Joseph Babinski, William James, and Frederic Myers; recent studies are making it clear
that all of these and a great many more can certainly claim some sort of afterlife in
Bretonian Surrealism. The classic study is Starobinski, Jean, ‘Freud, Breton, Myers’, in:
Idem, L’Oeil Vivant II: La Relation Critique (Paris: Gallimard, 2001): 381-403;
particularly insightful are also the detailed commentaries of Marguerite Bonnet and
others in their four editions of Breton’s Collected Works.
7
Soupault, Philippe, Vingt mille et un jours. Entretien avec Serge Faucherau (Paris:
Pierre Belfond, 1980), 63-4.

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poetic elements of the first rank.’ 8 First only jotting them down, Breton and
Soupault subsequently decided to ‘voluntarily’ re-create in themselves ‘the state
in which they took form:’ ‘all [they] had to do was shut out the external world.’
Thus suspended in an extended moment of slumbering or almost-falling-asleep,
they quickly and immediately wrote down sentences, without apparent thought or
pause for re-reading or editing. 9 The resulting co-authored work, composed
entirely of — and by means of — automatic writing, was published in 1920 as
The Magnetic Fields and is considered a milestone in surrealist exploration of
automatic writing; indeed, a milestone in the history of automatic writing in
modern literature generally.10
The Magnetic Fields is composed of ten sections, and includes narrative-
like sequences, poem-sequences, and conversation-like sequences that read as an
absurd dialogue. Several passages have a sad or depressing subtext, indicative of
the war just past and its formative effect upon the two poets.

Prisoners of drops of water, we are but everlasting animals. We run about

the noiseless towns and the enchanted posters no longer touch us. What’s
the good of the fragile fits of enthusiasm, these jaded jumps of joy? We
know nothing any more but the dead stars; we gaze at their faces; and we
gasp with pleasure. Our mouths are as dry as the lost beaches, and our
eyes turn aimlessly and without hope. Now all that remains are these cafés
where we meet to drink these cool drinks, these diluted spirits, and the
tables are stickier that the pavements were our shadows of the day before
have fallen.11

8
Breton, André, The Lost Steps, Polizzotti, Mark (ed.) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1996), 90.
9
Breton, The Lost Steps, 90-1.
10
Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault, ‘The Magnetic Fields,’ Gascoyne, David (trans.
& intr.)., in: Breton, André, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, The Automatic
Message - The Magnetic Fields - The Immaculate Conception, Gascoyne, David and
Anthony Melville (eds.). Idem, and Jon Graham (trans.) (London: Atlas, 1997): 37-145.
See Bonnet’s commentary, Breton, André, Œuvres complètes I, Bonnet, Marguerite,
Philippe Bernier, et al. (eds.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1121-1146; and Gascoyne,
David, ‘Introduction,’ Breton, André, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, The
Automatic Message - The Magnetic Fields - The Immaculate Conception, Gascoyne,
David and Anthony Melville (eds.), Idem, and Jon Graham (trans.) (London: Atlas,
1997): 39-54.
11
Breton & Soupault, ‘The Magnetic Fields,’ 59 (first paragraph of the first section, ‘The
Unsilvered Glass’).

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During the writing process phrases and sentences sprung to their mind
with such speed that the authors had to ‘resort to abbreviations’ in their notation,
or so Breton reported. Variations in stylistic effect were only caused by ‘a change
in velocity,’ he continued, and ‘each chapter had no other reason for stopping than
the end of the day on which it was composed.’12 These are classic characteristics
of automatic writing: speed, no clear beginning or end, and (seemingly) a lack of
narrative and of style.
Automatic writing is a magic dictation, wrote Breton in a 1922 essay, and
it is thought that dictates from the unconscious. He refers to ‘heeding’ the voice of
one’s own unconscious also;13 while in the 1924 Manifesto he declared that the
aim was to obtain from himself a monologue ‘akin to spoken thought.’14 A poet’s
obsession with words and in particular the spoken word shines through. The
unconscious speaks – if only one knew how to listen! This brings us to one of the
main threats to surrealist automatic writing: heeding other voices, thereby risking
‘compromising this self-murmur in its essence.’ 15 We can connect such
misfortune, as it were, directly to the first definition of 1924, where Breton
emphasizes again that thought dictates. As he adds, this happens ‘in the absence
of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral
concern.’16 Reason, aestheticism, and morality can be considered other voices, I
suggest, which interfere with heeding the correct one of ‘essential self-murmur.’
The connection to speed is clear: one has to write quickly not only to keep up with
thought’s velocity, but also to keep from listening to the voices of reason,
aesthetics or morals.
Automatic writing should also be done quickly to keep from going back
over one’s text, another possible pitfall. Describing the method for automatic
writing in his Manifesto, under the telling heading ‘Secrets of the magical
surrealist art,’ Breton notes: ‘[w]rite quickly, without any preconceived subject,
fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to
reread what you have written.’17 Although it remains implicit, the understanding
is that rereading will lead to revision and editing—the very (considered and
rational) intervention in the literary creative process that surrealist automatism
was supposed to avoid. This exposes the double function of automatic writing in
Surrealism: to access the unconscious, of course, but the very method itself is
framed as an attack on established literary practices as well. Describing his and

12
Breton, The Lost Steps, 90.
13
Breton, The Lost Steps, 91.
14
Breton, Manifestoes, 23 (emphasis original).
15
Breton, The Lost Steps, 91.
16
Breton, Manifestoes, 26.
17
Breton, Manifestoes, 29-30.

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Soupault’s writing process for The Magnetic Fields once more, now in the
Manifesto (Breton was nothing if not thorough in making his contribution to the
literary revolutionary cause quite clear), he notes that they wrote quickly, easily,
and with ‘praiseworthy disdain for what might result from a literary point of
view.’18
Listening to the voices of reason, morality or aestheticism is one
misfortune that may befall psychic automatism in its written form; another is
giving in to rereading and redaction and similar concerns from the ‘literary point
of view’ that ought to be disdained. I would posit as a third listening to voices
outside of one’s self. Automatism and automatic writing in particular were
techniques that were central to Spiritism, after all, where spirits ‘from the other
side’ (of death) or otherwise disembodied agencies might communicate with the
living by speaking or writing though a spiritist medium.19 The bereavement of
many on account of the war just past had led to a renewed surge of Spiritism in
French bourgeois circles, spilling over into the media and popular culture.20 Still,
listing to such external voices is not something that would befall a Bretonian
surrealist, apparently: Breton and others categorically rejected and ridiculed the
beliefs of Spiritism on several occasions. Nevertheless — and as their insistent
rejections indicates — they were cognisant of spiritist automatism and its
popularity. In several respects, surrealist practices rather resembled those of
Spiritism, particularly on first glance. Instruments such as the planchette or Ouija-
board were never used in Surrealism, possibly to avoid any suggestion that
outside voices might be dictating. The hand always remained directly connected
to the surrealist body. Indeed, because of the focus upon one’s own inside voice,
the surrealists themselves in fact became the instruments. Writes Breton,

But we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works
have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest

18
Breton, Manifestoes, 23.
19
More on the development of Spiritism in France in Lachapelle, Sophie, Investigating
the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and
Metaphysics in France, 1853-1931 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011);
and Monroe, John W., Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in
France (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2008). See further automatism’s
history in psychiatry and in, and in relation to, Spiritism, in Crabtree, Adam,
‘“Automatism” and the emergence of dynamic psychiatry,’ Journal of the History of
the Behavioral Sciences 39, 1 (2003): 51-70.
20
This also led to a resurgence in popular culture of belle époque themes such as ghosts
and hauntings, (stage-)hypnotism, (stage-)spiritism, and stage magic, as well as to an
aesthetic of the disembodied, fluid and ghostly.

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recording instruments who are not mesmerized by the drawings we are

making, perhaps we serve an even nobler cause. Thus we render with
integrity the “talent” which has been lent to us. You might as well speak
of the talent of this platinum ruler, this mirror, this door, and of the sky, if
you like.21

The phrase ‘echoes’ implies sound and the possibility of a voice to be

heard. The surrealists-as-recording-instruments may be taking down sound waves,
namely those of their (speaking) subliminal. As befits instruments, they do not
filter. Their talent is that they have no talent — or rather, the talent lies in making
themselves an instrument, a mere device, just as talentless as a device that
measures, and one that reflects; at the same time, as talentless as particular
gateways (door, sky), poetical metaphors indicating the limen of the subliminal
and supraliminal. The surrealists becoming instruments and their lack of talent
constitute a further attack on the literary status quo — psychic automatism is not
only quick and easy, but talentless and instrumental to boot; all characterisations
existing in radical opposition to the notion of the inspired literary genius.
Spiritist mediums too were instrumentalised (even captured in the actual
phrase, ‘medium’). However, Breton’s emphasis that the surrealists-as-instrument
are ‘not mesmerized by the drawings [they] are making’ serves to clearly
distinguish them from those who are: mediums as well as psychiatric patients,
who, other than the surrealists, do not know whence their automatisms originate
(and that they are thought’s dictation). In their case, their doctors know, be they
psychiatrists or psychical researchers. Taking Surrealism’s thorough grounding in
psycho-dynamic studies into account, I am certain this was the surrealist view as
well.22
In these early days of Surrealism, 1919-1923, those aiming to act as a
‘receptacle’ for the echoes of their subliminal were in the main (aspiring) poets
and novelists; it is therefore hardly surprising that they took so much to automatic
writing, and that they conceptualised their subliminal as the voice of thought. The
young surrealists would turn to automatic speaking as well, as I will discuss

21
Breton, Manifestoes, 27-8 (emphasis original).
22
The term ‘mesmerized’ here is decidedly not neutral and is again revealing of a subtext
indicating Breton’s knowledge of the history of dynamic psychiatry, which originates,
together with Spiritism, in the eighteenth-century semi-medical, semi-esoteric practice
of Mesmerism, as I have traced in Bauduin, Tessel M., The Occultation of Surrealism:
A Study of the Relationship between Bretonian Surrealism and Western Esotericism
(PhD dissertation, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2012), 67-80. See further the
studies of Ellenberger, Crabtree, and Monroe.

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further below. But what about those did not use words in expressing their
unconscious?
In one of his seminal works on the mind, British psychiatrist Frederic
Myers made a distinction between passive, or ‘sensory automatism,’ and active
‘motor automatism:’

[P]roducts of inner audition or inner vision [are] externalised into quasi-

percepts
[sic]—these form what I term sensory automatisms. The messages
conveyed by limbs or hands or tongue, initiated by an inner motor impulse
beyond the conscious will—these are what I term motor automatisms. …
They will be seen to be messages from the subliminal to the supraliminal
self….23

Sensory automatism is perceived with senses such as hearing or vision,

albeit here inner, and is passively experienced. Examples are dreaming and
hallucination. Writing, speaking and other physical movements, including
walking, are active sensory automatisms.24 All are messages from the subliminal,
and, at least as far as the surrealists were concerned, all are meaningful in
themselves because of that. One of the more famous expressions of motor
automatism was hysteria, which could be considered a form of automatic
‘subliminal uprush’ according to Myers’ theories.25 This was enough of a criterion
to reinvent hysteria as a creative act in Surrealism. In 1928, when it had become
quite obsolete medically, Breton and Aragon celebrated hysteria as poetical
expression in an article on the fiftieth anniversary of its ‘invention’—a
characterisation indicating both authors’ familiarity with the trajectory of hysteria
from serious (women’s) illness, to mass affliction, to invented disease
hypnotically induced in apparently fraud-prone patients. The ‘dismemberment of
the concept appears to be complete,’ the authors noted; which allowed them to
divest the concept of pathology, insist that it existed independently from the

23
Myers, Frederic William Henry, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death,
Part 1 (New York: Longmans, Green &co, 1954): 222 (emphasis original).
24
On ambulatory automatism or the fugue, see Hacking, Ian, ‘Automatisme Ambulatoire:
Fugue, Hysteria, and Gender at the Turn of the Century,’ Modernism/Modernity 3, 2
(1996): 31-43.
25
Myers, Human Personality, I: 222.

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medical establishment, and grant it aesthetic rebirth as a poetical performance.26

They celebrated it as an example of bodily automatism, a point perhaps made less
explicitly in their text but put forward by their choice to illustrate it with
photographs of hysterical and erotically suggestive poses performed by a night
dress-clad Augustine (image 1; Louise Augustine Gleizes, 1861-?), a renowned
hysterical patient of the inventor of hysteria, Parisian neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot (1825-1893).27
The appropriation of an originally medical condition as creative, erotic,
and subversive illustrates, in my view, Surrealism’s treatment of the phenomena,
sources, language, and methods of dynamic psychiatry: subverting and
fundamentally repositioning particular concepts as creative and possibly aesthetic.
I would summarise the surrealist agenda as: radically reinventing psychiatric
concepts as art as well as reinventing art itself by means of these (originally
psychiatric) practices and methods, even while 1) simultaneously retaining a
medical-scientific sheen, 2) appealing to popular culture’s fascination with the
unconscious, mediumistic phenomena and psychical research, and 3), criticising
medical practices from the insider’s position Surrealism assumed for itself. It is an
impressive feat and early Surrealism managed to pull it off frequently.
Importantly, the surrealists removed pathology entirely from the equation:
‘Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and may in all respects be considered
as a supreme means of expression.’28 Considering the rather tragic life stories of
Augustine and other patients, this might seem rather insensitive. Yet at the same
time, the surrealists triumphed not only in wresting the unconscious and its
expressions from medicine and the medical establishment’s desire to pathologize
it, but likewise in establishing it as a serious seat or source of independent
creativity. The misfortune of hysteria within medicine, became the source of its
success in Surrealism. Perhaps one might go so far as to say that the personal
misfortune of Augustine and others — to be locked up in mental institutions, to be

26
Aragon, Louis and André Breton, ‘The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria,’ in Breton,
André, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Rosemont, Franklin (ed.) (London:
Pluto Press, 1978): 320-321, 321. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 23; also Rabaté, Jean-
Michel, ‘Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid
Modernism,’ Journal of Modern Literature 25, 3/4 (2002): 58-74, 64-5.
27
Ellenberger, The Discovery, 89-101. Crabtree, Adam, From Mesmer to Freud:
Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven [etc.]: Yale
University Press, 1993), 164-5. More on the construction of hysteria as a spectacle in
Didi-Huberman, Georges, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Alisa Hartz, Invention of Hysteria:
Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge [etc.]: The
MIT Press, 2003).
28
Aragon & Breton, ‘The Fiftieth Anniversary,’ 321. Originally ‘Le Cinquantenaire de
l’hystérie, 1878-1928,’ La révolution surréaliste 11 (1928): 20-22.

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an object of study — was partly avenged by the surrealists. In Surrealism

expressions of the subliminal, considered to be expressions of unrestrained
creativity, in whatever form, means or context, were always framed as poetical.
With the reframing of hysteria as an invented disease, its performative qualities
only increased.
Moreover, with an overwhelming majority of hysterics, patients, and
mediums being women, one should also not underestimate the importance of the
surrealist validation of such traditionally feminine (and therefore, perceived as
weak) faculties as intuition, imagination, hallucination, the dream, and the
subliminal generally, as relevant, creative and authentic. In the surrealist
assumption of the passivity of automatism, there is a certain amount of gender-
bending going on.29
Still, with respect to automatic writing, its inherent passivity courted
misfortune in Surrealism. For all the success of The Magnetic Fields and the
enthroning of automatic writing as essential surrealist practice in the first
Manifesto, it was a success hard to repeat: ‘[n]evermore after [The Magnetic
Fields], on the occasion when we awaited this murmur in hopes of capturing it for
precise ends, did it take us very far.’30 One had to wait, and hope to be graced by
the voice of one’s unconscious. This passive approach as practiced by Breton and
Soupault during the conception of The Magnetic Fields was perhaps exhausted
after a time. Eventually, apparently, the voice of consciousness came to intrude
constantly during automatic writing. Perhaps a solution might be found in another
(passive) mental state, one in which ‘incursions of conscious elements’ 31 were
considerably reduced and possibly even absent: the dream.

29
Note: this does nothing to diminish Surrealism’s misogyny in (many) other areas. For
all the positive validation of automatism and feminine qualities, the surrealists
appropriated those for themselves as men.
30
Breton, The Lost Steps, 91.
31
Breton, The Lost Steps, 91.

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Figure 1. ‘Les attitudes passionelles’ (1928), in: La Révolution Surréaliste 11

(1928): 20-2.

2. The omnipotence of the dream: the sleeping sessions and the

Bureau of Surrealist Research

Psychiatric studies and practice did not only introduce Breton and others to
automatism and free association, but also to the dream. And in particular, to the
idea that dreams can be considered another gateway to the subliminal. One
experiences sensory automatism in dreams. It should be noted that the surrealist
fascination with dreams is in part a legacy of an interest in dreaming that
permeated two of Surrealism’s (grand-)parental movements, fin-de-siècle
Symbolism and nineteenth-century Romanticism. Early Surrealism’s captivation
with the dream as a source of creative expression was fuelled further by Freudian
theory, which fermented the notion that dreams served as direct portals to the

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subliminal.32 Indeed, in a definition predating the first Manifesto Breton wrote

that Surrealism ‘designate[s] a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather
well to the dream state.’33 Psychic automatism, then, while not a dream (or state
of dreaming) per se, can still lead to such a state.
The fascination for dream work, dream states, and dream narratives
prevalent in early Surrealism found its expression in specific paintings, for
instance by Ernst, but more prominently in dream descriptions. Individuals would
write dreams down and circulate them in the surrealist group. Many such
descriptions would eventually be published, in surrealist journals or in the poetry,
a novel or collected works of a specific surrealist. The surrealists would further
recount their dreams to each other at nightly meetings. From the outset obstacles
were encountered. Many surrealists, Breton and Ernst most prominently among
them, worried about the issue of remembering dreams correctly. Moreover, upon
waking the dream did not only need to be remembered but also to be written
down — creating ample opportunity for further interventions, intended or not.34
Thus misfortunes such as revision and editing that dogged automatic writing
reared their heads here too. The group therefore searched for a way to access the
dream-state as directly and immediately as possible. Starting in September 1922,
they undertook a series of séance-like sessions, the goal of which was to dream
lucidly. 35 More specifically, the aim was manifesting the dream as a creative
product in itself — which, as an aside, runs rather counter to the Freudian
understanding and objective of dream work.
The sessions were generally called the ‘sleeping sessions,’ while the entire
period during which they took place (September 1922-February 1923) became
known as the époque de sommeils or time of slumbers. The impetus was provided
by René Crevel (1900-1935), who had participated in a few spiritist séances
during his holidays and was therefore familiar with spiritist techniques for

32
Although it should be noted that only Ernst could read Freud in the original. The
majority of the surrealist group had to make do with partial French translations and
abridged editions, which presented a somewhat distorted interpretation of Freudian
theory. Freudian influence upon Surrealism is frequently overestimated, therefore.
33
Breton, The Lost Steps, 90 (my emphasis).
34
Gee, Malcolm, ‘Max Ernst, God, and the Revolution by Night,’ Arts Magazine 55, 7
(1981): 85-91, 85-6. Breton, The Lost Steps, 91-2. Breton was well versed in unedited
dream-description, but still he distrusted his own efforts, let alone those of others.
35
See also Ades, Dawn, ‘Between Dada and Surrealism: Painting in the Mouvement
Flou,’ in Neff, Terry Ann R. (ed.), In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism (Chicago:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986): 23-41, 36. Carr, Adrian N., and Lisa A. Zanetti,
‘The Emergence of a Surrealist Movement and its Vital ‘Estrangement-effect’ in
Organization Studies,’ Human Relations 53, 7 (2000): 891-921, 893.

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entering an alternate state. Standard procedures were followed in the surrealist

sessions, as the lights were dimmed and the participants would sit around a table
holding hands. 36 After a certain amount of time, one of the participants would
enter a light trance or sleep-state, and start speaking, sometimes on their own,
sometimes in response to questions (mostly concerned with the future: when will
someone die? where will someone be a couple of years from now? etc.).37 Often
the entranced person would be given paper and pencil, and start writing and/or
drawing. From the outset, therefore, the surrealists courted not only the passive,
sensory and hallucinatory automatism of dreaming, but combined it with motor
automatisms like speaking, writing, and drawing.
The surrealists called the trance state one of ‘hypnotic slumber,’ 38 a
designation that reveals not only the core group’s psychiatric background
(hypnosis having just been discovered in dynamic psychiatry), but also that the
motif of slumber — a state similar to sleep, that is to say to that of the
somnambulist, with whom Romantic medicine from Mesmer onwards had been
obsessed with 39 — is key to understanding these sessions. In two published
descriptions of events, Breton’s ‘The Mediums Enter’ (1922) and Aragon’s ‘A
Wave of Dreams’ (1924), terms such as ‘dream,’ ‘sleep’ or ‘slumber’ are
prominently present.40 In fact, ‘The Mediums Enter’ is the same essay in which
Breton tells the brief anecdote about how he “discovered” in 1919 the poetic
potential of automatic writing when on the point of falling asleep or slumbering
(discussed earlier). This anecdote is preceded by the definition of psychic
automatism as corresponding to the dream state, and followed by a lamentation on
the deficiency and unreliability of memory when it comes to remembering one’s

36
Warlick, M.E., Max Ernst and Alchemy (Austin: University of Texas, 2001), 64.
37
See also commentary of Bonnet in Breton, OC I, 1302, 1304.
38
Breton, The Lost Steps, 92. Originally, ‘Le lundi 25 septembre, à 9 heurs du soir, en
présence de Desnos, Morise et moi, Crevel entre dans le sommeil hypnotique…’ Breton,
OC I, 276.
39
See also Méheust’s excellent two-part study Somnambulisme et mediumnité: Méheust,
Bertrand, Somnambulisme et médiumnité, 2 vols., I: Le défi du magnétisme. II: Le choc
des sciences psychiques (Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo pour le Progrès de la
Connaissance, 1998, 1999).
40
‘Entrée des mediums,’ Littérature (new series) 6 (November 1922), which also
included some transcriptions of sessions; ‘Entréé’ was later included in Breton, The
Lost Steps, 89-95. Cf. Breton, André, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism,
Polizzotti, Mark (ed. & trans.) (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1993), 59-78. ‘Une
vague des rêves’ appeared originally in Commerce 2 (1924). Aragon, Louis, ‘A Wave
of Dreams’, De Muth, Susan (trans.), Papers of Surrealism 1 (2010; original translation
2003; accessed 10 June, 2014). Descriptions of original sessions in Jean, Marcel (ed.),
The Autobiography of Surrealism (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 100-7.

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dreams; in other words, a sleep state, dreaming, automatism, the creativity of the
unconscious (accessed through dreams or automatic writing) and the problematic
issues regarding such access, are all intimately connected discursively in this
text.41 The recurring use of sleep-related terminology reinforces the understanding
that lucid dreaming, that is, verbal automatism, was the objective of these sessions.
For all the superficial similarities to Spiritism, the practical methodology
of the surrealist séance was very probably first and foremost inspired by practices
in psychical research. Psychiatrists-turned-psychical researchers like Théodore
Flournoy (1855-1920) had found that using the séance setting in their
experimentation with mediums was beneficial to their research of a medium’s
psyche. Flournoy suspected the medium — in his case, Hélène Smith (Catherine-
Élise Müller, 1861-1929) — to be much more at ease in a séance held at home
than in a laboratory environment, and the more at ease she was, the more all the
facets of her unconscious that Flournoy was so fascinated by might be
displayed.42 The frequent references to Smith herself, and her tales and glossolalia
(spoken words), writings, and drawings in Breton’s writings, in combination with
several surrealist art works celebrating her, testify to Bretonian Surrealism’s
familiarity with Flournoy’s research. The surrealists clearly adhered to William
James’ influential judgement that ‘[m]ediumistic possession in all its grades
seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality;’43 hence
Breton’s celebration of the diversity of Smith’s mediumistic expressions.
In any case, in his description of events during the time of slumbers,
Breton also took the occasion to reject Spiritism’s premises:

41
Breton, The Lost Steps, 90-2.
42
Shamdasani, Sonu, ‘Encountering Hélène: Théodore Flournoy and the Genesis of
Subliminal
Psychology,’ in Flournoy, Théodore, From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple
Personality with Imaginary Languages, Shamdasani, Sonu (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994): xi-li, xiiiff. Relevant publications of Flournoy are: From India
to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages,
Shamdasani, Sonu (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Idem, Nouvelles
observations sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalia (Geneva: C. Eggimann,
1902). Idem, Esprits et mediums. Mélanges de métapsychique et de psychologie
(Geneva: Librairie Kundig, 1911).
43
Cited in Shamdasani, ‘Encountering Hélène’, xvii. See also Micale, Mark S., ‘The
Modernist Mind: A Map,’ in Idem (ed.)., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine,
Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004): 1-19, 14.

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It goes without saying that at no time, starting with the day we agreed to
try these experiments, have we ever adopted the spiritualistic viewpoint.
As far as I’m concerned, I absolutely refuse to admit that any
communication whatsoever can exist between the living and the dead.44

In Surrealism, the voice of the dream, like the voice of automatism, can
only be one’s inner voice, residing in one’s own subliminal (and living) mind.
Initially, the sleeping sessions were very successful. Within ten days of
their starting the séances, even ‘the most blasé, the most self-assured among us
[i.e., the surrealist group] stand confused, trembling with gratitude and fear.’45
The young poet Robert Desnos in particular proved to be very successful at
entering a trance and uttering phrases, sentences and eventually, entire
spoonerisms. Breton may have mastered the art of writing down the dream
without editing, stated Aragon, but Desnos mastered the art of dreaming without
sleeping: ‘[h]e contrives to speak his dreams at will.’ 46 This judgement
underscores my interpretation of these sessions as attempts at lucid dreaming, that
is at speaking one’s dreams.
Besides speaking and writing, frequently in response to questions, some
dreamers would also start to draw automatically, and even move about, bodily
performing as it were parts of the dream or dream state. Monologues that seemed
like indictments or like crime stories would issue forth. Eventually — or so it is
reported — Desnos only needed to close his eyes to enter a dream state,
regardless of whether he was sitting in busy cafés or in the enclosed and silent
environment of Breton’s study. Breton lauded Desnos in the first Manifesto as one
who, more than any of the others, ‘has perhaps got closest to the Surrealist truth;’
who ‘speaks Surrealist at will,’ and who was ‘extraordinar[ily] agil[e] in orally
following his thoughts.’47 Both this last citation and Aragon’s characterisation of
Desnos (he ‘speaks his dreams’) highlight once more the recurring subject of the
oratory quality of the subliminal, the voice of thought. It show further that
Surrealism is, or to be surrealist is, to directly communicate one’s unconscious.
The sleeping sessions were a new line of surrealist experimentation with
automatism, not intended to replace but developed in parallel to automatic writing
in the passive sense as practiced during the composition of The Magnetic Fields.
Several elements differ, though. For one, the techniques diversified considerably,

44
Breton, The Lost Steps, 92.
45
Breton, The Lost Steps, 92.
46
Aragon, ‘A Wave of Dreams,’ 7.
47
Breton, Manifestoes, 29.

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I find, as automatic speaking, writing, and drawing, as well as bodily automatism

took place during these sessions, sometimes in succession during one session,
sometimes separately. More than just writing, the trances attained during the
sleeping sessions resulted in a variety of literary and artistic products, such as
spoonerisms, poems, stories, predictions of the future, drawings and performances.
Secondly and more importantly, rather than waiting for the ‘essential
murmur’ in automatic writing, the setting of the séances served directly to induce
an altered state in someone, indicated not least by the use of the phrase ‘hypnotic
slumber.’ Therefore, even though during the sessions themselves the group still
had to wait and see who would become entranced and what would happen, the
mere fact of their regular organisation indicates the surrealist group’s much more
active pursuit of automatisms — or perhaps more properly, their active creation of
automatism-facilitating conditions. Thirdly, these very conditions were to a large
extent structured, and to some extent also directed. During their heyday the
sessions were organised multiple evenings a week, while the asking of particular
questions and other signals provided some initial direction to the entranced person.
Finally, there was a notably democratic side to the slumber sessions. In
theory, anyone present could enter a slumbering state independent of their
membership of the surrealist group or even artistic aspirations.48 There is a clear
link here with automatic writing. Although surrealist automatic writing was
practiced more or less by surrealists alone, it was positioned as a technique that
was quick and easy, potentially available to all whether schooled or unschooled in
literature, and thereby ‘praiseworthily disdainful’ of established literary practice
and High Literature’s connotations of elitism. As said earlier, Surrealism’s
psychic automatism is a double edged-sword: a method, automatism, to access the
unconscious, but in that very methodology an attack on the literary/artistic status
quo. Along the same lines dreaming lucidly during a sleeping session was also
presented as quick, easy, and potentially possible for all.
Despite initial successes, misfortune eventually arrived. As the sleeping
sessions continued into the first months of 1923, they gradually became more
dark in tone — dreamers predicting illness and death — as well as violent.
Participants attacked one another; Desnos refused to wake up; an attempt at group
suicide was prevented just in time. Aragon:

48
Breton, Ernst, Éluard, and Morise never entered a sleeping state ‘despite their goodwill’
(Breton, The Lost Steps, 95) and neither did Aragon. However, some of the non-
surrealists attending did.

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Those who submit themselves to these incessant experiments endure a

constant state of appalling agitation, become increasingly manic. They
grow thin. Their trances last longer and longer. They don’t want anyone to
bring them round any more. They go into trances to meet one another and
converse like people in a faraway world where everyone is blind, they
quarrel and sometimes knives have to be snatched from their hands. The
very evident physical ravages suffered by the subjects of this extraordinary
experiment, as well as frequent difficulties in wrenching them from a
cataleptic death-like state, will soon force them to give in to the entreaties
of the onlookers leaning on the parapet of wakefulness, and suspend the
activities which neither laughter nor misgivings have hitherto
interrupted.49

Aside from all this, accusations of faking and fraud were made. Breton,
acting as leader of the group, decided to finish the sessions once and for all.
Verbal (and other) automatism by way of collective lucid dreaming came to an
end.
The dark turn of events nevertheless did not lessen the interest in the
dream and the creative narrative potential of dream description. In fact the
sessions resulted in various successful new undertakings that were implement
immediately after, in 1924. To start with, as a surrealist counterpart to the
investigations of psychical research, the experimental sleeping sessions
successfully demonstrated the fruitful possibilities of more or less organized
experiments that were aimed at investigating a hidden part of the mind. In due
course, therefore, the Bureau of Surrealist Research (Bureau de recherches
surréalistes or BRS) was founded in October 1924. It was to function explicitly as
a central location for research into, experimentation with, and the gathering of
data about the hidden mind.50

Surrealism proposes a gathering of the greatest possible number of

experimental elements, for a purpose that cannot yet be perceived. All
those who have the means to contribute, in any fashion, to the creation of
genuine surrealist archives, are urgently requested to come forward: let
them shed light on the genesis of an invention, or propose a new system of

49
Aragon, ‘A Wave of Dreams,’ 6-7.
50
‘Ce bureau s’emploie à recueillir par tous les moyens appropriés les communications
relatives aux diverses formes qu’est susceptible de prendre l’activité inconsciente de
l’esprit.’ Breton, OC I, 481, 1451.

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psychic investigation, or makes us the judges of striking coincidences […]

or freely criticize morality, or even simply entrust us with their most
curious dreams and with what their dreams suggest to them.51

This press release abounds in language that is research and experiment-

oriented: ‘experimental,’ ‘archive,’ ‘invention,’ ‘system,’ and ‘investigation’ —
‘psychic investigation,’ no less, a referral both to psychical research and to
Surrealism’s own psychic automatism. Surrealism was of course not a science,
but many of its early members did have some medical training and knowledge, its
automatic methods were taken directly from medicine, and some of its avowed
goals make use of medical and scientific jargon and phrasing. As far as Breton
was concerned, he and his fellow poets and artists were ‘explorers of the hidden
mind,’ and he considered the surrealist undertaking to be similar to the studies of
Freud, for instance.52 Early Surrealism therefore has a para-scientific character at
least, drawing partly upon medicine and partly upon psychical research.
One finds in the BRS’ press release a reiteration of a democratic theme
that stands in radical contrast to literature’s elitism, already mentioned, but
likewise contrasts science’s and medicine’s exclusivity: all are invited to
contribute to surrealist research. ‘We are on the eve of a revolution,’ an 1924
advertisement for the BRS proclaimed, ‘you can take part.’ Surrealism was
proclaimed to not discriminate any (forms of) subliminals either, besides persons:
‘Surrealism lies within the reach of all unconsciousnesses [sic],’ a BRS-calling
card from the same period made clear. 53 To ensure proper documentation, a
journal was kept at the BRS, the cahier de la permanence, in which the dreams
and stories visitors to the Bureau contributed were entered, as well as timestamps
and details of their visits, besides furthermore dreams, poems, incidents, stories,
conversations, etc. of the surrealists themselves.54

51
Caws, Mary Ann, Surrealism (New York: Phaidon Press, 2004), 51; Breton, OC I, 481-
82.
52
Letter from Breton to Freud, cited in Polizzotti, Mark, ‘Preface: Steps Meandering and
Guided,’ in Breton, André, The Lost Steps, Polizzotti, Mark (ed.) (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1996): xi-xxi, xvii.
53
One of eight calling cards, from the personal collection of Breton, available online:
http://www.andrebreton.fr/fr/item/?GCOI=56600100788480# (accessed 9-12-2014).
54
The entire cahier is available in the Archives du surréalisme-series: Thévenin, Paule
(ed.), Bureau de recherches surréalistes: cahier de la permanence, octobre 1924-avril
1925, Archives du surréalisme 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

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Figure 2. La femme est l’être… (1924), in: La Révolution Surréaliste 1 (1924): 17.

A further instrument of surrealist research was founded: the journal La

révolution surréaliste (LRS), modelled upon journals such as La Nature and
Science. Its austere, two-column lay-out echoes those scientific magazines and
serves to emphasize the seriousness of the surrealist undertaking. It also, perhaps
unintentionally, reinforces the early surrealist obsession with the word as main
carrier of meaning. The journal further illustrates another successful outgrowth of
the sleeping sessions: the creative potential of the dream. For years dream
descriptions were published in the issues of LRS. In La révolution surréaliste’s
first issue, for instance, pages 3-6 are dedicated to ‘Rêves’ (dreams), namely one

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of Giorgio de Chirico, three different dreams of Breton, and one (rather long)
dream by Renée Gauthier, an active participant in the sleeping sessions and in
other early surrealist activities. This section of dream reports is followed by
twelve pages of ‘Textes surrealists,’ which includes texts by ten surrealists and
sympathizers, and some brief news clippings, besides small drawings by de
Chirico and Ernst (twice), an automatic drawing by André Masson (1896-1987),
as well as two photographs by Man Ray (1890-1976), and a photograph of a
Carnival-truck. Also, just as importantly, a photomontage of small portrait photos
of the young surrealists and a selection of their heroes, arranged around a central
photograph of the criminal Germaine Berton (image 2). It includes a citation of
Charles Baudelaire that unites the topic of the dream with that other obsessions of
the (overwhelmingly male) surrealists, the opposite sex: ‘Woman is the being who
casts most darkness or most light in our dreams.’55
Besides advertisements for surrealist works and several essays and
‘chronicles’ by surrealists, the issue also includes a section on ‘Suicides,’
newspaper clippings regarding self-inflicted death that were also treated (and
touted, even) as surrealist text. 56 For all the emphasis upon (automatically
generated) text, the pervasive presence of illustrations in LRS 1 claims a role for
the visual too. With LRS’s format of a rigorous scientific journal in mind, the
surrealist texts and images, be they automatic drawings or photographs, taken
together, testify to Surrealism’s serious research activities into the unconscious
and (and by way of) automatism. Secondly, it provides visible evidence of their
success (or at least, their efforts).
On the cover of this very same first issue a specific photo was reproduced,
together with two others, namely that of a sleeping session restaged at the
premises of the BRS (image 3). The photo shows Desnos speaking in trance,
while a large group of surrealists huddle around Simone Breton-Kahn (1897-1980)
at a typewriter. It functions, interestingly, not only as a historical document of this
session, which in itself is already a re-enactment of the actual sessions from 1922-
3; it also shows us Surrealism publicly being performed. That Surrealism was
positioned as a serious, investigative undertaking geared towards obtaining results
from closely monitored experiments with the subliminal is made clear by the
intensely concentrated focus upon Desnos’ spoken words and the simultaneous
transcription of that ‘magical dictation.’ What is further highlighted are the
‘researchers’ themselves. Their présence in the journal is already quite tangible

55
‘La femme est l’être qui projette la plus grande ombre ou la plus grande lumière dans
nos rêves.’ LRS 1 (1927), 17; taken from Baudelaire’s preface to Artificial Paradises
and cited in Eburne, Jonathan P., Surrealism and the Art of the Crime (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2008), 93.
56
LRS 1 (1924), 2-6, 7-18, 21.

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because we are reading their dreams, their automatic texts, looking at their
drawings — in other words, the reader is being spoken to by the voices of each
surrealist’s unconscious. Alongside that, the surrealists are visibly manifested as a
collective on the cover of the very journal documenting their efforts, even as they
are caught in the act of surrealist psychic research. Although the experiments with
lucid dreaming ended in violence and misfortune, perhaps, they can hardly be said
to have failed; besides being the impetus for Surrealism being positioned even
more seriously as para-scientific research including a journal, and resulting in a
series of creative products as such, the sessions furthermore bound the group even
tighter together socially, and thereby proved their worth for the true formation of
the surrealist collective.
Finally, the sessions proved definitively that the subliminal as filtered
through the dream state, i.e. the actual content of dreams and the structure of
dream logic, were very fertile ground. Dream descriptions and dream narratives
formed the core of regularly published surrealist writing for several years. Indeed,
several automatically written novels and narratives were published immediately
after the time of slumbers, testifying to the fact that the sessions not only provided
new source material but also boosted authors’ individual sessions of automatic
writing. These include Breton’s Soluble Fish (1924), many of Péret’s stories
collected in The Leg of Lamb (only first published in 1957), and works by Robert
Desnos, such as Mourning for Mourning and Liberty or Love! (both 1924).57 As
Surrealism continued to grow and develop over the next decades, dreams still
continued to be an inspiration. Indeed, bringing the dream itself into one’s
conscious life and experience remained one of Surrealism’s main objectives. In
Communicating Vessels of 1932, Breton noted that dreams form ‘a conduction
wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior
reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for
life and the revolution, and so on.’58 One should live a dreamed life, even. In 1937
Breton edited an anthology of dream tales and narrated dreams, Trajectoire du
Rêve (1938). He invited Freud to contribute a dream as well, who answered that
he did not see why he should, as he considered the ‘superficial’ aspect of dreams

57
Breton’s Soluble Fish is included in the Manifestoes. Péret, Benjamin, The Leg of
Lamb: Its Life and Works, Lowenthal, Marc (trans.) (Cambridge: Wakefield Press,
2011); on the dating of his stories see Lowenthal, Marc, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in
Péret, Benjamin, The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, Lowenthal, Marc (trans.)
(Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2011): ix-xxiv, xiii. Desnos, Robert, Liberty or Love!
and Mourning for Mourning (London: Atlas Press, 2013).
58
Breton, André, Communicating Vessels, Caws, Mary Ann (ed.), Idem, and Geoffrey T.
Harris (trans.) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 86.

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(that is, their retelling and positioning as a literary product) uninteresting.59 For
Freud, dreams serve only to be interpreted. For the surrealists, interpretation and
analysis only serves bourgeois morals; rather, the dream should be narrated as a
creative product in itself and, ideally, it should be lived. The difference between
their two positions could not be more pronounced.

59
Letter from Freud to Breton, 6 December 1937, Breton, André, Trajectoire du rêve
(Paris: G.L.M., 1938), 127. Freud wrote that ‘a collection of dreams without association
does not tell me anything…’ and ‘it is hard for me to imagine what it can mean to
anyone else.’ This is only the continuation of a relation that was unfortunate from the
outset. Breton visited Freud twice, each visit being a considerable disappointment.
Breton, The Lost Steps, 70-1; and Communicating Vessels, appendix.

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Figure 3. La Révolution Surréaliste 1 (1924), cover.

3. Neglected associations: automatism in the visual arts, mediums, and the

future

During the sleeping sessions the group experimented among other things with
automatic drawing. In this case, the success-misfortune story runs the other way
around: deemed a failure at the start, it was eventually considered and proven to
be a great success.

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In 1925 Pierre Naville (1904-1993) stated in La révolution surréaliste that

‘there [was] no such thing as surrealist painting.’60 The familiar obstacle of speed
would get in the way here too: the risk of not keeping up with unimpeded thought
already being significant in automatic writing, the process of painting was
assumed to be several bridges too far, involving just too many conscious
decisions (regarding composition, colour and similar matters). Paintings of
Giorgio de Chirico, for instance, were considered to be surrealist in image, but not
in expression.
However, as soon as one takes ‘painting’ to include visual arts-practices
more generally, the picture changes (and Naville’s essay appearing in LRS, which
had been illustrated from the journal’s first issue, partly belies his claim too).
Desnos had been drawing automatically during the sleeping sessions. Masson had
been steadily building his oeuvre of automatic drawings since 1923. Early
Surrealism’s psychiatric background further makes it probable that several
surrealists knew that some patients and mediums, both within and outside of
medical institutionalised settings, had been making automatic drawings already
since the late nineteenth century.61
During the second half of the 1920s several visual arts-techniques were
experimented with and developed in Surrealism, with the express objective to
introduce elements of chance, and to facilitate automatism and free association in
the creation process. These include, besides automatic drawing, sand-painting,
decalcomania or ink-blotting, frottage or rubbing of a textured surface, grattage
or scraping of paper or canvas, and fumage or smoke-staining. The practice of
collage is often included in this list as well, but although it is an artistic technique
taken to new heights in Surrealism, particularly in the work of Ernst, I find it
questionable how much automatism is involved in putting surrealist collages
together. In the case of Ernst I find it more fruitful to use concepts such as
dissociation and free association in any case; he would use frottage of wood
grains and strings, for instance, sometimes combining that with ink blotting or
grattage, to create initial forms. These he would subsequently embellish or fill in,
as it were, by means of free association. In 1925 — immediately after Naville’s
statement that ‘there’s no surrealist painting’ — Ernst started experimenting with
frottage. Where automatic drawing is very similar to automatic writing (quick,

60
Naville, Pierre, ‘Beaux-Arts,’ La Révolution Surréaliste 3 (April 1925): 27.
61
As discussed by Will-Levaillant, Françoise, ‘L’analyse des dessins d’aliénés et de
médiums en France avant le Surréalisme,’ Revue de l’Art 50 (1980): 24-39. More on
Surrealism’s encounter with outsider art of patients in Röske, Thomas, ‘Inspiration and
Unreachable Paradigm: L’Art des Fous and Surrealism,’ in Beyme, Ingrid von, and
Thomas Röske (eds.), Surrealismus und Wahnsinn/Surrealism and Madness
(Heidelberg: Sammlung Prinzhorn, 2009): 10-18.

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easy, no training required) in that the pen or pencil moves about the paper quickly,
without apparent thought and hardly leaving the paper’s surface, frottage is even
simpler as no words or shapes need to be formed. Rubbing a pencil over paper
laid upon a table with heavy wood-grain, for instance, already immediately
provides results in the form of patterns. Some extra lines might be added, or some
colour, parts might be erased afterwards. The simplicity and ease of material and
manner and possibility of quick execution led Ernst to create hundreds of frottage
images over the course of several months. He published a selection in 1926 as
Histoire Naturelle.62 In the early 1930s Ernst created series of works depicting
cities and forests by means of frottage, experimenting further with the technique’s
possibilities with regards to various mediums, as well as to such issues as style
and abstraction, and iconography. Even as automatic writing seemed seriously on
the wane after 1933, automatic visual arts-techniques were proving very
successful in unlocking new heights of creativity — and also, in acquiring large
public recognition for Surrealism, thereby hastening its embourgeoisement
(certainly a misfortune, for an avant-garde movement), and firmly entrenching it
in public opinion as a visual arts movement, regardless of its decidedly literary
origins. Ernst would use all the mentioned techniques throughout his career, and
many of his works that are considered ‘masterpieces’ incorporate them
prominently. For instance, Europe after the Rain II (1940-1942), created by
means of decalcomania. As an aside, many of Ernst’s works exemplify an
essential and insurmountable paradox of surrealist automatic techniques: while
proclaimed as easy and available to all, it is in fact the (trained) artists and writers
of Surrealism who turn them into an artistic, not to say aesthetic, successes.
Without a doubt Breton considered the expression of automatism in visual
art forms by 1933 as successful as, if not more so than, in writing. His essay ‘The
Automatic Message’ (1933), in which he deplores the continuing misfortune of
automatic writing, is notably richly illustrated.63 Note, however, that rather than
works by surrealists, the overwhelming majority of illustrations are drawings and
paintings made by mediums. In other words, works that Breton and his fellow
surrealists would consider to have been automatically made. In this essay, as he
and others had done elsewhere and earlier already, Breton conflates patients of
mental institutes and hospitals (or aliénés), spiritist mediums, and outsider (or
‘naïve’) artists into one category; while not explicitly named as such, they are all
automatists. This very understanding of patients and mediums, extended to

62
Legge, Elizabeth, ‘Zeuxis’s Grapes, Novalis’s Fossils, Freud’s Flowers: Max Ernst’s
Natural History,’ Art History 16, 1 (1993): 147-172, 147-9.
63
Note, too, the quite obvious reference in the essay’s title to Myers and his theory
detailing the various automatisms by means of which the subliminal sends messages
(see above).

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include clairvoyants as well, as automatists, allowed him and other surrealists to

refer frequently to them, their practice, writings, and artistic works in a general
way. Surrealism’s understanding here overlaps entirely with that of dynamic
psychiatry: all automatic communications originate only from one’s hidden,
subliminal mind. This means that, whether it be because of illness, beliefs,
delusions, particularly developed faculties of mind, weakness of character, or of
their being female in general, hysterics, aliénes and (self-claimed) mediums and
clairvoyants were able to enter altered states of mind, were perhaps even
continuously in such states, and hence, they were automatists. From a surrealist
point of view, patients and mediums occupied a position similar to children, the
‘naïve,’ and the so-called ‘primitives,’ or tribal peoples, all of whose assumed
childishness, lack of education, of civility, and of the ability for rational reasoning,
and whose irrational mind, insanity, or innate excess of femininity, meant that
their mind worked differently than that of the rational, educated, sane, bourgeois
(French) man. Collectively, they are the West’s Others: externally and exotically
so in the case of the group traditionally labelled ‘primitives;’ internal Other to
Western society in the case of children, patients, and mediums.
Primitive of mind, and therefore automatists, they were however not
surrealists and could never be. Their words were considered automatically
generated. All automatic text is surrealist text, and hence their texts (and drawings,
etc.) potentially were too. Yet to be not just an automatist but indeed a surrealist
requires something more: will, sanity, and the mental facility to re-produce or
simulate, as I will argue further below.
Breton and co. admired mediums and patients for their automatic writing
and drawing, but certainly also, and perhaps initially even more so, for their
irrational associations. The logic of the claims and predictions of mediums and
clairvoyants was thought to operate in a manner similar to dream narratives:
irrational, strange, absurd and marvellous, and adhering to an inner logic that lies
outside of accepted (bourgeois) boundaries of rationality and coherence but may
be experienced as logical all the same. An example will serve to explain. During
the 1920s Breton, Ernst and others visited the parlour of a clairvoyant, a certain
Mme Sacco, to have, among other things, their futures foretold. Breton’s future
included leadership of a political party, living in China for twenty years, a drastic
change around 1931, and death — and his dying and Chinese travels were
forecast to occur around the same time. 64 Enthusiastically he addressed the
clairvoyant and others like her: ‘I do not think that it must be one way or the other
[i.e., dying or China]. I have faith in everything you have told me. I would not try

64
Polizzotti, Mark, Revolution of the Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995),
244.

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to resist the temptation you have aroused in me, let’s say to wait for myself in
China, for anything in the world. For thanks to you, I am already there.’65
The clairvoyant’s prediction led to Breton considering going to China in
his imagination—in other words, it caused him to go there in thought.66 And in
Surrealism thought is real. One of Surrealism’s most cherished and important
dogmas is the belief in the superiority of the mind and supremacy of thought. This
in part based upon Freud’s view that nothing in the mind is arbitrary. In Louis
Aragon’s words: ‘once something has been thought, it exists.’67 Aragon preceded
this sentence with a rhetorical question: ‘Is simulating something any different
than thinking it?’ As he wrote this in ‘A Wave of Dreams,’ his essay about the
sleeping sessions, he is clearly referring to — and undermining — the allegations
of fraud made during the later stages of the time of slumbers. As Man Ray also
pointed out when discussing Desnos’ performances then, even if certain events
during the sessions had been ‘previously practiced and memorised,’ they were
‘miraculous’ still. 68 Simulation, too, still requires thought, and once something
has been thought, it has become real.
Just as dreams blur the boundaries between ‘distant worlds of waking and
sleep, exterior and interior reality,’ clairvoyant predictions blur what is and what
might be, reality and imagination, the possible, probable and factual. ‘It is your
role, Mesdames,’ Breton addressed mediums and clairvoyants in his 1925 ‘Letter
to Seers,’ ‘to make us confuse the accomplishable fact and the accomplished
fact.’69 The resulting confusion in the mind is superior, and sur-real. As indicated
in the 1924 Manifesto, ‘Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of previously neglected associations.’70 Mediums were appreciated
in Surrealism for many things, not least for the effect of their predictions, stories
and other automatisms upon the mind of the surrealist, where unusual and
particular associations could suddenly be sparked: ‘Everything that is revealed to
me [Breton] about the future falls in a marvellous field which is nothing other
than that of absolute possibility.’71 Such marvelousness of absolute possibility is
very probably also one of the reasons why the questions that were asked during
the sleeping sessions were frequently future-related.

65
Breton, Manifestoes, 201.
66
Breton, Manifestoes, 201.
67
Aragon, ‘A Wave of Dreams,’ 7.
68
Cited in Conley, Katherine, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in
Everyday Life (Lincoln [etc.]: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 21.
69
Breton, Manifestoes, 201 (my emphasis).
70
Breton, Manifestoes, 26.
71
Breton, Manifestoes, 200.

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There is mention of the mediums’ misfortunes or even ‘disgrace:’ the

cases of fraud they had — apparently — let themselves be caught in. 72 Those
ostensible instances of fraud did not bother Breton much, who instead took the
medical-academic establishment to task for applying unsuitable methods to the
‘mediums, whom people immediately wanted to submit to the observation of
doctors, “scholars”, and other illiterates.’73 We encounter here another side of the
typically, and originally, surrealist reinterpretation and repositioning of concepts
from dynamic psychiatry and science. Just Surrealism foregrounds the
subliminal’s expressions as creative and discards pathology, diagnosis, and
interpretation and analysis, it also does away with veracity claims and truth-
determining methods. Those are irrelevant. That which occurs in the mind (i.e.,
has been thought, even if that was with the intention to simulate or feign), is
always real and superior, and always marvellous. Breton’s quite critical
assessment of the medical-psychiatric establishment shines through clearly
(‘doctors, “scholars” and other illiterates’). It is indicative of Surrealism’s
ambiguous attitude towards medicine and science, and its unapologetic poaching
of their methods and concepts. Finally, it is also why despite its scientific
pretentions Surrealism essentially was and remained a literary and arts movement
and not another branch of dynamic psychiatry.
The belief in neglected associations, in the creative versatility and
potential of automatic writing, and the principle that simulation is also thought,
remained strong. In 1930 Breton, now in partnership with Paul Éluard, undertook
a new experiment in automatic writing. In parallel to The Magnetic Fields (1919),
The Immaculate Conception (1930) too was written during a very brief and
intense period, with the two authors feeding off each other creatively. Still, as
Chénieux-Gendron has argued, the automatic writing of 1930 differs from that of
1919. The authors had already chosen chapter titles before they actually starting
the process of writing, and those titles may well have induced automatism or
channelled it in some way. 74 Each author would write a separate sheet, which
would then be combined under the relevant title; less of a dialogue between the
two authors than in The Magnetic Fields. Where Aragon described Fields as

72
Breton, Manifestoes, 199, 202.
73
Breton, Manifestoes, 199.
74
Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline, ‘Towards a New Definition of Automatism:
L’Immaculée Conception’, Dada/Surrealism 17 (1988): 74-90. See also Melville,
Anthony, ‘Introduction to The Immaculate Conception’, in Breton, André, Paul Éluard,
and Philippe Soupault, The Automatic Message - The Magnetic Fields - The
Immaculate Conception, Gascoyne, David and Anthony Melville (eds.), Idem, and Jon
Graham (trans.) (London: Atlas, 1997): 150-157, 150.

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having been written by ‘one author with two heads,’75 Conception is perhaps a
case of two authors aiming to share one head; or rather and more to the point, one
very particular and defined mind state. The Immaculate Conception consist of two
sections, ‘Man’ and ‘The possessions,’ and it is the second I am concerned with
here. 76 During the writing process, the authors simulated a slew of mental
illnesses (as indicated in the titles), current in the psychiatry of the day: ‘mental
debility,’ ‘acute mania,’ ‘general paralysis,’ ‘interpretive delirium’ and ‘dementia
praecox.’ This constitutes another important difference from Fields: psychiatry’s
more tangible presence in the text. The authors only had to consult their
psychiatric handbooks to find diagnoses of these illnesses and the mental
proclivities associated with them. The overall section-title ‘possessions’ is key
here. Generally, and in particular within the discourse of dynamic psychiatry,
‘possession’ was considered to be experienced passively by mediums and others.
They were possessed by their subliminal. 77 In the case of Breton and Éluard,
however, the two poets were the possessors, in an active sense. Surrealists
practiced active ‘poetical possession’, another mechanism to turn pathological
phenomena into a creative, potentially aesthetic, expression. Here we come to the
core of the difference between automatists (such as mediums) and surrealists. The
authors considered that they had proven that

the mind of a normal person when poetically primed is capable of

reproducing the main features of the most paradoxical and eccentric verbal
expressions and that it is possible for such a mind to assume at will the
characteristic ideas of delirium without suffering any lasting disturbance
[…].78

75
As cited in Soupault, Vingt mille, 65.
76
Breton, André, and Paul Éluard, ‘The Immaculate Conception,’ Graham, Jon (trans.),
Melville, Anthony (intr.), in Breton, André, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, The
Automatic Message - The Magnetic Fields - The Immaculate Conception, Gascoyne,
David, and Anthony Melville (eds.). Idem, and Jon Graham (trans.) (London: Atlas,
1997): 147-221. Chénieux-Gendron, ‘Towards a New Definition.’
77
See also Shamdasani, ‘Encountering Hélène,’ xvii. James had defined ‘[m]ediumistic
possession’ as ‘a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality’ (my emphasis,
see also above).
78
Breton & Éluard, ‘The Immaculate Conception,’ 175; and see also Melville,
‘Introduction,’ 152. Chénieux-Gendron, ‘Towards a New Definition,’ 85; furthermore
Rabaté, ‘Loving Freud Madly,’ 65.

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Most noteworthy here is the adjective normal to person: minds of those

who are not ‘normal’ will suffer disturbances. Having worked with ‘male
hysterics’ in psych wards during the First World War, that is to say with shell-
shocked soldiers,79 Breton knew very well the ravages that the mind could inflict,
and could be inflicted upon it, in those who were not ‘normal,’ that is sane by the
medical standards of the time. Female hysterics, mediums, and aliénés were also
not seen as ‘normal’ persons possessing properly functioning minds. Indeed,
Surrealism fully internalised the normative medical predisposition of positioning
the observer himself, the doctor, the researcher, the investigator, as normal and
sane. This ‘normality’ of mind is both a prerequisite — for being a surrealist as
such — and the obstacle to be temporarily overcome by psychic automatism, if
only because of the ‘associations’ that such a normal mind ‘neglects.’ The
surrealist poet, in contrast to the medical or mediumistic automatist, is therefore
normal of mind – albeit not necessarily in the meaning of having an ordinary
mind; after all, surrealist minds are poetically primed.
In his seminal and in Surrealism much appreciated study of the art of
patients, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933)
stressed that however similar on the surface contemporary artists’ desired mental
alienation may be to the madman’s ‘innate primeval process of configuration,’ the
first ‘involves conscious and rational decisions’ — and that, he emphasised, is
something asylum patients clearly lack. 80 The assumption that volition and
intention — in other words, will — distinguish the artist from the madman, with
its subtext about insanity and creativity, was dominant throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth century in the discourses of both art and medicine. Surrealism
unmistakably conformed to it. Their thought was disinterested. They were not
‘mesmerised’ by the works they were making and getting lost in the process itself;
they kept the end goal in mind.
Finally, note too the authors’ use of the term ‘reproducing.’ It is the
surrealists’ volition and their normality of mind that allows them to possess the
mind states of automatists for surrealist ends, and to discard them again
afterwards. In line with the point about simulation, made earlier, the mental states
temporarily re-produced by the authors for The Immaculate Conception (compare
‘re-create’ in case of the writing of Fields) are, apparently, genuine enough to
yield unrestrained subliminal creativity.81 For the surrealists, temporary insanity
or the simulation of mental illness functioned as a mind state fruitful to automatic

79
On ‘male’ hysteria, see Micale, Mark S., Hysterical Men: the Hidden History of Male
Nervous Illness (Cambridge [etc.]: Harvard University Press), 2008.
80
Prinzhorn, Hans, Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and
Psychopathology of Configuration (Vienna: Springer, 1995), 271 (my emphasis).
81
Compare Chénieux’s point on pastiches, in ‘Towards a New Definition,’ 85-7.

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writing, just as the state of almost-falling-asleep was to The Magnetic Fields and
other automatic writing, hysteria was to bodily automatism, or the sessions of
lucid dreaming to many surrealists and their dream-inspired works.

In conclusion: instrumentation and the misfortunes of psychic

automatism

Although the Manifesto-definition may suggest automatism to be an end, it was

throughout the first two decades of Surrealism predominantly employed as a
means:

Psychic automatism … has never constituted an end in itself for

Surrealism, and to claim the contrary is to show bad faith. … It was a
question of foiling, foiling forever, the coalition of forces that seek to
make the unconscious incapable of any sort of violent eruption… . The
technical procedures that Surrealism has developed for that purpose could,
of course, have value in its eyes only as a sounding-line… [W]e persist in
maintaining that they are within the reach of everyone and that once they
have been defined, anyone who cares to can trace on paper and
elsewhere… [that which] has been called, by contrast to the ego, the id,
meaning thereby all the psychic elements in which the ego (which is
conscious by definition) is prolonged… I do know that art… cannot help
but be eager to explore the immense and almost virgin territory of the id in
all its directions.82

Within dynamic psychiatry, automatism was both a method and a

treatment. In Surrealism, psychic automatism was a poetic technique – or more
properly, an overarching label designating several techniques, including automatic
writing, automatic drawing, and dream narration. The surrealist, as we have seen,
should be like a device and aim for the talentless objectivity and neutrality of an
instrument. Such a judgement of the surrealist-as-device refers clearly to the
graphical recording instruments that had been becoming increasingly more
popular in science from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards; in
particular in medical psychiatry, which was aiming to establish itself as a serious
and empirical science by means of visual measuring machines. As medical
students, Breton, Aragon, and others would have been quite familiar with such

82
Breton, Manifestoes, 231-2 (‘Political Position of Today’s Art,’ Prague lecture of 1935).

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devices. In the on-going effort in early Surrealism to stake out position as a

scientifically informed endeavour making use of objective experimentation, such
references to tracing machines and measuring devices would speak to the public’s
association of them with science, thereby bolstering Surrealism’s experimental
image as well as its bold claim to investigate the unconscious.83
Yet before graphical devices were connected to humans to measure
seizures, pulses, etc., there had already been machines in human form that could
write or draw: the automata. First widely popular during the Enlightenment,
interest in such automata was rekindled in the nineteenth century, and again
around the fin-de-siècle, what with the prominence of automatism and hypnosis in
medical practice. Among the surrealist group there was considerable interest in
such mechanical automata too, evinced for instance in an article by Benjamin
Péret on automata in surrealist journal Minotaure 3-4 (1933). It was liberally
illustrated with images from the monumental Le Monde des automates by
Edouard Gélis and Alfred Chapuis, which had been published a few years earlier
(1928).84 It is certainly no coincidence that this essay appears in the same issue as
Breton’s ‘The Automatic Message,’ making that entire issue of Minotaure a
commentary upon the successes and failures of many forms of automatism.
In significant contrast to the mechanical automaton, and automatists such
as patients or mediums, firstly, the surrealist is his own device. In his writing,
drawing, or speaking he employed neither actual technical apparatus (like a
planchette), nor an instrumentalised human (a medium or patient) as Flournoy and
others did. Just as important, moreover, is that surrealist automatism is a creative
expression in itself instead of an indication of one. Despite Breton’s use of the
phrase ‘tracing’ and the resonances of tracing and charting that recording devices
carry, it is not the case that surrealist automatic text traces a surrealist’s
unconscious. A graphical machine is more than a tool; both in its own activity and
its results, like pages of lines, it functions metaphorically, as it makes visible what
cannot normally be discerned and what is moreover essentially not visible. More
than just a visibility machine, it is a translation device — translating pulses,
muscle contractions, fluctuations of energy, movements of the earth, etc., all
things not perceptible with normal human senses, into a visual form that can be
perceived and read. Even one’s repressed desires and dreams require the
interpretation and thereby diagnostic translation of a Freudian psychoanalyst. Not
so in Surrealism. The lines of an automatic drawing by Masson do not function as

83
Lomas, David, ‘Becoming Machine: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary
Instances’, Tate Papers 18, published online 8-11-2012 (accessed 9-12-2014). As well,
Lomas, David, ‘‘Modest Recording Instruments’: Science, Surrealism and Visuality,’
Art History 27, 4: 627-650.
84
Péret, Benjamin, ‘Au Paradis des Fantômes,’ Minotaure 3-4 (1933): 29-35.

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analogies of the (invisible) activity of his unconscious. His unconscious is not

traced; on the contrary, I argue, his unconscious traces. The drawing functions as
an actual creative product as such, rather than as a visual metaphor for something
else. For all the emphasis upon the techniques of psychic automatism in
Surrealism, it is about the product as generated by the process. The surrealists are
not mesmerised by what they are writing or drawing, as we have seen. The
communication is understood to be direct, unmediated (as near as possible), and
real. It is that which it is – a creative expression. There is no need for
interpretation or analysis. Psychic automatism does not need to be translated.
Rather than a metaphor, an analogy of the unconscious, rather than a simile, it is a
fact. Thus the dream is manifested directly and in all its omnipotence. Thus are
previously neglected associations reshaped anew in all their superior reality. Thus
is the marvelousness of thought displayed in all its talentless disinterest.
Surrealist psychic automatism hardly ended in misfortune, despite
Breton’s dramatic lamentation. Rather, it was immensely successful. Yet the
automation of the surrealist poet, his becoming a device, courted misfortune —
among which, not least, the violence erupting near the end of the time of slumbers,
or the psychic problems that arose from long-term practicing of forms of
automatism. In a series of interviews given late in life, Breton spoke about issues
of ‘mental hygiene’ that prompted him not only to end the sleeping sessions (i.e.,
the mental hygiene of others), but also that of himself when it came to automatic
writing. Being in the required slumber-state and writing automatically for long
periods of time (‘my immoderate use’) led to ‘a worrisome tendency towards
hallucinations.’ 85 Hallucinations, too, are among the list of passive sensory
automatism delineated by Myers, and apparently Breton was averse enough to
them to limit his own experiments with automatic writing. Probably, I think, we
find here an indication of the rationale behind the surrealist turn towards
increasingly more active forms of automatism, including on the one hand active
and temporary possession of mind states by poets, and on the other, visual
techniques such as frottage, grattage, and decalcomania.
Automatism never truly failed or disappeared in Surrealism. Ernst
continued to use frottage and similar techniques; Masson kept on drawing
automatically in addition to experimenting with other associative techniques;
Péret and Breton continued to write automatically. Near the end of his life Breton
published Le La, composed in the 1950s. It consists of a few enigmatic sentences
of automatic writing, generated during evenings of near-slumber — fittingly
enough connecting this work composed near the end of his life to The Magnetic

85
Breton, Conversations, 69.

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Bibliography

Primary sources
Aragon, Louis. ‘A Wave of Dreams.’ De Muth, Susan (trans.). Papers of
Surrealism 1 (2010; original translation 2003; accessed 10 June, 2014)

Aragon, Louis, and André Breton. ‘The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria.’ Breton,
André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Rosemont, Franklin (ed.). London:
Pluto Press, 1978: 320-321.

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Images

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