In an interview conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist in , Leonora Carrington was asked for her definition of Surrealism. Her answer continues the impish evasiveness she demonstrated throughout the interview and seems, initially at least, to refuse a definition. The tendency to focus on a small part of the Surrealist movement as representing the whole, diminishes the vibrancy of the Surrealist movement, by not properly describing the range of its activities and interests, or the heterogeneity of the artists who embraced Surrealism, with varying degrees of commitment.
This text addresses some of these issues, but will focus on French Surrealism, using select examples. Breton worked as a medical orderly during WWI, where he was struck by his encounters with patients suffering from shell-shock. This experience reinforced his interest in psychoanalysis, one of the key discourses that informed Surrealism. While Surrealism was strongly influenced by the models of the unconscious mind and the discussions of psychological states and dreams β both in terms of function and contentβ in the work of figures such as Sigmund Freud, it was not a slavish transcription of these ideas into a cultural context.
Surrealism tended to place a very different value on psychoanalytic principles, theories and methods. For example, whereas, for Freud, automatism was simply a diagnostic tool, for the Surrealists it formed a central route to the unconscious. Eros is also inevitably bound to its counterpart, Thanatos, the destructive death drive, and to society and its repressive codes of behaviour. Breton was also strongly influenced by his involvement with Dadaism, and many other artists associated with Surrealism such as Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier links to various Dada groups.
The Dada interest in the ludic the playful and spontaneous and in chance and irrationality, particularly as a means to counteract or refuse the norms of bourgeois society, was adopted in Surrealism, although Breton argued that Surrealism was less nihilistic than Dada.
Leave Everything Leave Dada Leave your wife, leave your mistress Leave your hopes and fears Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere Leave the substance for the shadow Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future Take to the highways. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express β verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner β the actual functioning of thought.
