You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
PSYCHOANALYSIS, ORIGINATING IN VIENNA and in the mind of a single brilliant man, has come to have worldwide recognition (if not acceptance) and has influenced the development of concepts in such diverse fields as anthropology, art, history, sociology, literary criticism, and law. One of the clearest examples of such an effect may be found in the work of André Breton, the founder of Surrealism.
In 1916 Breton served as a medical aide in the psychiatric center at Saint-Dizier where he came in contact with mental patients evacuated from the front. It was here that he first heard of psychoanalysis and began to read Freud's works. He recorded patients' hallucinations and delusional experiences and subsequently tried to "interpret" them, relying on psychoanalytic principles. After the war, Breton along with other Dadaists experimented with what came to be known as automatic writing. This consisted of writing rapidly without pausing to reread or correct, or writing while in self-induced trance states, or recording the hypnogogic phenomena that occur just before sleep. Several years later, by then the acknowledged leader of the Surrealists, Breton utilized actual dream material in his poetry and lyrical "interpretations." Some of the early Surrealist works are recordings of the dreams of artists and writers, and for a time there was actually an agency in Paris for the collection of dreams from the populace at large.
Breton first corresponded with Freud in 1919, and paid him a visit in 1921. Through this direct contact and from reading