Changes

In 1927 André Breton, Louis Aragon, PaulÉluard, and Benjamin Peret joined the Communist Party. Breton did not, however, abandon Freud: "The Surrealism that, as we have seen, has adopted Marxist beliefs does not intend to treat lightly the Freudian critique of ideas" (Breton, 1930). Breton soon quit the Communist Party, which reproached him for his Freudianism. Surrealism embraced cinema (Luis Buñuel), the construction of objects ("Situation surréaliste de l'objet," Breton, 1935), and produced important works of art in every field.

But in 1930, in his <i>Second Manifesto of Surrealism</i>, Breton acknowledged the existence of a profound crisis. The third period of Surrealism was about to begin. A new review was introduced, <i>Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution</i>. In 1930 the review published two articles by the French-American psychoanalyst Jean FroisWittmann, in 1933 the Breton-Freud correspondence of 1932, a favorable critique of Jacques Lacan's doctoral dissertation by René Crevel, and, also by Crevel, an attack on an article in the <i>Revue française de psychanalyse</i>. The review also published the first texts by Salvador Dali, where he developed the idea of "critical-paranoia," the use of the interpretative processes of paranoia for creative ends, and the exploration of the unconscious.

Breton, the principal theorist of the group, maintained a close association with Freudian thought throughout his career. He was most interested in the logic of the unconscious, in conflicts between the ego, the id, and the superego, relating them to the process of artistic creation, to Freudian ideas of sexuality, fantasy, desire, repression, the death instinct, whose opposition to Eros he assumed to be dialectical (Breton, 1930), and especially to ideas about representation and perception (Breton, 1933). Beginning with his concept of "pure mental representation," situated "beyond true perception," he examined, in the context of the <i>Essais de psychanalyse</i> (1927), how the transition from the unconscious to the perception-consciousness system takes place in the creative individual. For Breton, as a reader of Freud, it was at the preconscious level that language and the traces of acoustic and visual perceptions were united and charged with affect. But Breton went further: he saw in these preconscious elements the raw material of creation, obtained by the removal of repression with the help of automatic writing and drawing. In creating a work of art, the artist would make the individual universal (Breton, 1935).

In a letter to Stefan Zweig, Freud, who had met Salvador Dalí in London, also associated the fundamental elements of the work of the artist with the preconscious, but he added a principle of economy: "From the critical point of view it could still be maintained that the notion of art defies expansion as long as the quantitative proportion of unconscious material and preconscious treatment does not remain within definite limits" (July 20, 1938). The specific task of the creative individual, the result of his "initiative" (Breton) is to manipulate the relation between unconscious and preconscious elements, and objectify them in a work of art. Repression would have to be removed using "surrealist techniques" (Breton). Freud's meeting with Dalí seems to be the only time when Freud made an effort to understand the surrealist use of psychoanalysis and compare it with his own beliefs.