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Surrealism, however, offered the young Lacan an alternative route to psychoanalysis and the crucial link to his clinical practice in psychiatry. The Surrealists fully embraced psychoanalysis and during his medical studies Lacan developed strong links with the movement. Surrealism was a literary and artistic movement that emerged after the First World War in Paris, its founding figure the writer and poet André Breton (1896-1966). Breton was familiar with Freud's work on dreams and developed a technique of 'spontaneous' writing to give free expression to unconscious thoughts and wishes. Similarly, Surrealist painters such as Dali attempted to paint the 'reality' of their dreams, which they saw as more 'real' than the prosaic reality of our everyday world. In 1932, and within this context, Lacan completed his doctoral thesis on Paranoid Psychosis and Its Relations to the Personality. Around the same time he entered analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, the SPP's most famous training analyst (a recognized psychoanalyst who is qualified to train other analysts within the Society). There has always been something of a controversy around Lacan's analysis, with critics questioning how successful it was and whether or not he completed it. It is known to have been a very 'stormy' relationship and ended rancorously in 1938. What is clear is that Lacan spent six years in analysis - longer than was usual at this time - and that he remained in analysis until he was accepted as a training analyst. During this time, Lacan's links with the Surrealists developed further. He was a friend of André Breton and Salvador Dali, and was later to become the painter Pablo Picasso's (1881-1973) personal physician. He attended the first public readings of James Joyce's (1882-1941) Ulysses in 1921 and was a well-known figure in the cafés and bookshops of Paris's Left Bank. In 1933 Dali was to refer to Lacan's doctoral thesis in the first issue of the Surrealist review Minotaure and Lacan himself was to make many contributions to this and other Surrealist publications.
Lacan's doctoral thesis, then, was written in a largely anti-psychoanalytic culture and remained within established psychiatric categories and theories, but at the same time it drew on the alternative resources of the Surrealist movement.
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Begun as an investigation of poetic images and language, their sources, their nature, and specific features, surrealism is a movement of ideas, of artistic creation and action based explicitly on Freudian discoveries, which were used to develop an original theory of language and creativity. In later years it adopted Hegelian dialectics and Marxist-Leninist historical materialism. The "social and martial cataclysm" (Breton, 1934) provoked a revolt by an entire generation.
The movement was founded in Paris in 1924 by French poet André Breton, with the support of a group of poets and painters. The presence of Max Ernst, from Germany, Man Ray, from the United States, and Joan Miró, a Catalan, gave the group its international flavor. Surrealism's goal was to "change life" (Arthur Rimbaud) by freeing humanity from the constraints of mental or social censorship as well as economic oppression: "Poetry is made by everyone. Not by one" (Lautréamont).
