The Revolution of Mental Life
On psychoanalysis, Surrealism, and the politics of change
There has been quite a bit of scholarship looking at the relationship between psychoanalysis and the art movement Surrealism [1]. What has been left out, however, is precisely the split of the two modes of praxis — and how they are each constituted as praxis, one as clinical and the other as politico-aesthetic. In this all-too-truncated article we will explore this relationship between psychoanalysis and surrealism, their common projects, and their irreconcilable differences.
The Great Masturbator
What is the meaning of Dalí’s 1929 masterpiece? Its elements are dispersed and seemingly isolated. A face turned downward, mimicking Catalonian cliff faces; a woman, Dalí’ wife, Gala, depicted rising out of flesh and directed towards a metallic crotch; ants dripping from the rock-face onto a grasshopper; an egg underneath the scene.
Dalí was 25 at the time of the completion of The Great Masturbator, and it was only months after he had joined the avant-garde movement. The name of painting, evoking auto-erotism, or self-enjoyment, begs an autobiographical interpretation. When Dalí was young, his father left open a textbook illustrated with venereal diseases. This impressed upon the young child a rather complicated relation to sexuality. Dalí’s early introduction to sex was one of decay and anxiety. It was not until his awakening with Gala that he found out there was more to sexuality, perhaps even something pleasurable about it. Nonetheless, the trauma of sexuality remained, and this painting is the result of it. Ants, the symbol of decay; the grasshopper, his personal symbol of sexual anxiety; the overwhelming presence of flesh; The cut knees under the metallic crotch representing castrated genitalia; an egg representing fertility; and so on. [2]
Why couldn’t Dalí report on his internal sexual life more directly?
The Art of the Unconscious: Surrealism
To ask the same question in a different way: What gives us the right to interpret the painting in such a way in the first place? Can’t it be just meaningless shapes and forms thrown together?
Salvador Dalí’s work is a wonderful representative of Surrealism, an early 20th century art movement that followed Dada, drew inspiration from Romanticism and Symbolism, and sought to free the repressed internal life of the individual apropos art. What is the oppression that is constraining freedom?
For the Surrealists, the structures of society, and in particular the habits of bourgeois decadence. Stifling creativity and deeper engagement with oneself and the world, bourgeois life denied the primary source of these things: the unconscious.
André Breton, a French intellectual and poet, and leading figure of the Surrealist movement, found liberation in Freud. While training as a psychiatrist and working in the military as a psychiatric aid, Breton first came across Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in the 20s, about the time the now-old psychoanalyst’s work was spreading through continental Europe like a plague. What Breton saw in Freud’s psychoanalysis was a confident voice given to the repressed tremors of our unconscious life, and he sought to apply his principles to art.
To truly become immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream. (Giorgio de Chirico) [3]
The Italian-Greco painter is pointing to the heart of the Surrealist project: the overcoming, through art, of sense, logic, explicit meaning, and consciousness. Though not exactly situated within the Parisian Surrealist movement, Chirico’s work exerted an immense influence on Breton and other major figures.
Breton was dedicated to the cause of the art of the unconscious, and in 1924 published the first manifesto of Surrealism. In the manifesto, he defines the term:
SURREALISM: 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 the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. [4]
In the early days, the surrealist impulse was purely aesthetic with a hint of social reactionism. In the manifesto, Breton attacks rationalism, logical positivism, and other philosophical attitudes that the artist and the ‘common man’ have internalized. The artist and poets associated with Breton’s group invented myriad ways to bypass the ‘control exercised by reason’:
Automatism. — Writing or drawing without any censorship. A requirement is to approach the canvas a new artist, without memory or knowledge of the entire history and laws of art;
Seances. — To bring to the light of day the darker unrealized passions of the psyche; going swimmingly until one member hypnotically tried to stab another member with a kitchen knife;
Cadavre exquis (Fr.: “Exquisite corpse” or “rotating body”). — A paper is passed around a group with each member contributing a different body part.
Ethics of the Surreal
But Surrealism did not stop with the paintbrush or the pen. What is telling, even as early as 1924, was Breton’s use of the term psychic automatism when defining Surrealism. He was already aiming for something much broader than a new form of art: he was aiming for a revolution of mental life. In 1934, for instance, Breton would claim:
I think I can most clearly express [the will of Surrealism] by saying that today it applies itself to bring about the state where the distinction between subjective and objective loses its necessity and its value. [5]
All of life, for Breton, was suffering under what he called the “reign of logic”, a product of bourgeois values and thought.
The “revolutionary element” in Surrealism’s impulses was Breton’s
… new perspective which affected the course of Western art and, even, in some respects, pointed the way towards what culture could be in a genuinely human, classless, society. [6]
Surrealism ceased to be merely an artistic movement when it began to reflect back on itself; it gained self-consciousness and mediated how it was produced and re-produced. Essentially, it gained this status by asking: Why do you paint? Why do you write? to artists and their works. Breton and his associates were disgusted with ‘art for art’s sake’, the predominant attitude of European art at the time — and even more predominant today in Europe and the US.
Surrealist art is disruptive for the sake of change. Increasingly drawn to Marxist principles, and even formally associated with the French Communist Party for some time in the 20s, Breton was seeing the ethico-politics of his new aesthetic. And it begins with the individual psyche. It begins, in particular, with dream-life and the unconscious and repressed impressions.
And a certain figure had already paved the way for this kind of thinking.
Rendezvous in Vienna
Naturally, André Breton reached out to Sigmund Freud and paid him a visit in Vienna in 1921. The meeting was rather short-lived and certainly disappointing for both parties. A deep admirer of the old man’s work, Breton had studied Freud for some time now, and had prepared for this meeting. He was, in the end, painfully ungratified.
It seems that the two were coming into the meeting from vastly different perspectives. Freud with the ear of a therapist; Breton with the eyes of a radical and an artist. Breton was disappointed that Freudian psychology was meant for clinical psychoanalysis, and that the latter could not quite grasp what Breton was on about, writing later to the young Parisian that he, Freud, was
… not in a position to explain what surrealism is or what it is after. It could be that I am not in any way to understand it; I am at such a distant position from art. [7]
Freud was famously conservative in his artistic and literary tastes, and Breton charged him with intellectual and personal timidity, going so far as to claim that the Interpretation of Dreams retreated from its own hypotheses because the author was not willing to interpret his own dreams to their deepest sexual nuances.
After this disappointing meeting, however, Breton sent dozens of recorded dreams to Freud to be interpreted. Freud, forever the scientist of subjectivity, refused to comply on the grounds that dreams are highly individualized. They are deeply contextual and their handling and interpretation depends on the specificity of the analysand’s personal history. Indeed, much of chapter 2 in the Interpretation deals at length with the fallacious attempt at applying psychoanalytic principles to an individual whom one is not analyzing in detail.
Finally, Breton broke off his attempts at recruiting Freud into the camp of Surrealism. (It is, however, interesting to note the later friendship that grew between Jacques Lacan and Breton. Lacan even published some essays in French Surrealist magazines.) Freudian psychoanalysis, it seemed to the artist, was deeply bourgeois in its commitment to ‘therapy’ and not to social change. It revolutionized the mind, but not society.
For both, he needed Marxism.
Revolution: Mind and Society
While Breton retained psychoanalytic theory as the foundation for the central project of Surrealism — resolving the contradiction between sleeping and waking life — he became increasingly attracted to Marxist politics and revolution.
But revolution begins with the mind. In the 1930s, Breton met with the exiled Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The two collaborated on a statement and belief addressing the relationship between art and political revolution, “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.”
Though rejecting Freud the man, Breton retained his faith in the project of psychoanalysis, believing
that psychoanalysis could be used not only to treat mental illness, but to transform life generally. [8]
Trotsky, however, pointed out something irreconcilable in the two projects, saying to Breton in 1938:
You invoke Freud, but does he not do the opposite? Freud raises the subconscious into the conscious. Are you not trying to smother the conscious under the unconscious? [9]
Here Breton was stuck in a deadlock: his commitment to Marxist materialism meant that he had to believe in an objective structure to everything, including the unconscious. On the other hand, his adoration of German idealist theories of aesthetics committed him to a purely subjective and intuitive understanding of art. Because of this theoretical difficulty — and practical: one can see nothing but nonsense in some of the ‘intuitive’ works of Surrealism — Breton later came to see art in the following way:
This outlet [dreams and art] can also be an aspiration — the dream itself can affirm a belief that life could be better than it is, that the restrictions imposed by existing reality on freedom and happiness could and should be overcome… It is hope that is the key to the Surrealist concept of beauty. [10]
In other words, the psychic cornerstone of bourgeois ideology — the Freudian reality principle — would force a fuller experience of desires and feelings into another “outlet” in the unconscious, in dreams, and finally, in art. The radical reading of an aesthetic Freud consists not in fleeing from the material to the immaterial (conscious to unconscious), but a going into the immaterial to retrieve something of subjectivity which could disrupt the material.
The revolutionized mind could draw upon its frustrated desires for hope of a better material and social world. Surrealism escapes solipsism in its reach for revolution. Like he tells us in his poem, Plutôt la Vie (“Choose Life”):
Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors are purer
Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles of cold flame
Instead of these overripe stones
Choose this heart with its safety catch
Instead of that murmuring pool
And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time
Instead of that marriage blessing joining my forehead to total vanity’s
Choose life
There is beauty in the everyday; but the everyday has since been co-opted by bourgeois conceptions of everyday-ness. To a Parisian like Breton, psychic life looks more like colonized Algeria with its imported language, customs, indeed even legal and military structures. And with art, as with psychoanalysis, one de-colonizes one’s psyche.
Reflexivity in Psychoanalysis and Surrealism
Despite their ambivalent relationship, psychoanalysis and Surrealism surely share common ground. Belief in the creative power of the unconscious, the constraining structure of the reality principle, and the disruptive nature of sexuality and aggression. There is perhaps another, more interesting similarity between the forms of production — that is, praxis.
Psychoanalysis and Surrealism are both self-reflexive. They ask and challenge their own nature of Being. For each activity, it’s own boundaries and structure is a task, a question. In psychoanalysis, for instance, it is not uncommon for an analysand to question and ask, “What am I doing here? What will you give me that I can’t give myself?” to the analyst. The analysis is then informed by this reflexive moment. Why is the analysand here? Surrealism asks the same about its art: “Why was this painted? To what end?”
The commonality shared is a profound questioning of the very foundations of each praxis based on its particular mode and form of production and action. That is, both psychoanalysis and Surrealism are open-ended; they are not scientific. One does not enter a course of analysis and come having achieved precisely the goals one entered with just as well as one cannot create Surrealist work ‘for the sake of it.’
[Detours]
References
[1] See, for example: Esman, A. H. (2011). Psychoanalysis and Surrealism: Andre Breton and Sigmund Freud. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 59(1), 173–181.
[2] https://www.theartstory.org/artist/dali-salvador/
[3] Chipp, H. B. (1968). Theories of Modern Art, p. 401.
[4] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andre-breton-manifesto-of-surrealism
[5] Chipp, H. B. (1968). Theories of Modern Art, p. 417.
[6] André Breton and problems of twentieth-century culture — World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)
[7] Davis, F. B. (1973). Three letters from Sigmund Freud to Andre Breton. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 21(1), 127–134.
[8] [9] [10] André Breton and problems of twentieth-century culture — World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)
