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The relation between psychoanalysis and Surrealism, a movement that played a dominant role in art and culture in the Western world for at least a generation between the wars, is an episode in the history of psychoanalysis that has been of greater interest to art historians than to psychoanalysts. A very few references appear in the psychoanalytic literature (e.g., Kaplan 1989; Davis 1973), while the field of art history is replete with articles, books, and passing observations; Freud's name is scattered through them like autumn leaves on the grass. In his classic History of Surrealist Painting, for instance, Marcel Jean (1959) cites Freud five times, while Peter Webb (1985), in his book on the multimedia artist Hans Bellmer, refers to Freud on eleven occasions. Polizzotti's biography of André Breton (1995) has over thirty such references, and Mundy (2002), in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, refers to him twenty times, cites eighteen of his writings, and provides a listing of French translations of his works from 1896 to 1969.
The Surrealists' romance with Freud and psychoanalysis began with the litterateur André Breton, who, at a time of enormous literary and cultural ferment in Europe (exemplified by the iconoclastic Dada movement founded in Zurich in ), worked during his youthful service in World War I as a psychiatric aide in a military hospital. Breton had long been partial to German literature and philosophy, and under the tutelage of one Dr. Leroy, a psychiatrist with whom he worked, discovered and became fascinated by Freud's writings, particularly The Interpretation of Dreams.
Thus by 1919, then under the influence of Dada, Breton wrote (a few years later), “Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar as I was with his methods of examination … I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from [patients], namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible, without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties …