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The author states that he combines Jung's psychology with psychoanalysis to bring about a greater understanding and deeper appreciation of surrealist art which is primarily an expression of the
unconscious. Although Wyss admits that only the artist's own associations are the key to an adequate understanding of his art, and that Wyss' own associations are by necessity 'second-hand', he relies heavily on the latter.
The book begins with a brief review of various tendencies in modern art, as expressed by the cubists, abstract artists and expressionists. Some space is devoted to the forerunners of surrealist literature: Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Guillaume Apollinaire, with quotations of entire passages of their works. Wyss points out that a new element of a predominantly psychotic nature (voluntary hallucinations) is added to the technique of relying on free associations and describing moments of complete 'breakthrough' of drives, as used by the cubists and expressionists. All the quotations are interpreted by Wyss either in symbolic terms or as a struggle between ego, id and superego, in terms of 'collective and archetypical symbolism'. Wyss calls these writings 'unique, powerful, perfect in their æsthetic form, attractive and at the same time repulsive'. It is rather difficult for this reviewer to follow the writer in this opinion, particularly with regard to Lautréamont (whom Wyss puts above the rest and whom he calls the 'poet of the perverse unfettering of the drives'), whose fantasies are most gruesome and revoltingly sado-masochistic, and can only be compared to the worst orgies of Hitler's National Socialist atrocities.
The major portion of the book deals with surrealist writers: André Breton, Antonin Artaud, René Char, Robert Desnos, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Eluard and Henry Miller. The surrealist movement was founded in 1924 by Breton and Rimbaud. Its goal was to use unconscious hallucinations, dreams, and intoxications as sources fo