Photography and surrealism First Manifesto of Surrealism in .

The title of Freuds essays,Slips of the Pen,Bungled Actions,Symptomatic and Chance Actions among others, easily provided fuel for thinking that psychical activity can be provoked as poetic activity by inducing states of distraction. In the various essays of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud demonstrates how these parapraxes, Freudian slips, are motivated and not arbitrary. They are all species of the same psychical phenomenon: evidence of other unwanted motives, the irruption of unconscious thoughts in consciousness. That is, a contamination or interference of automatic mental and motor activities, like talking, walking, writing and so on with desire. Yet despite crediting Freud with their interest in psychical thought, the sources of automatism for surrealism are at least threefold: the old spiritualists, French psychiatry and Freudian theory (from which they gained a loose grasp of the concept of repression which the other two practices did not have). While surrealism claimed psychic automatism as its own, it drew freely on these different sources to cut another path, different from the previous spiritualist (or spiritist) use of automatic writing by mediums before them and the therapeutic aims in French psychiatry contemporary with them. As for Freuds work, although Breton had certainly developed a knowledge of it, in the early years it was essentially through French psychiatric interpretations of Freud, primarily, E. Rgis and A. Hesnards Psycho-analyse des nvroses et des psychoses which appeared just before the First World War in .9 Remarkably late compared with elsewhere, translated fragments of Freuds work in French began to appear in and the rst book by Freud published in French was The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in . By this time Breton had been to meet Freud in Vienna, a matter of months before, in October , and had, with Philippe Soupault, already published the automatic texts of The Magnetic Fields ().
Spirit Messages

See Elisabeth Roudinesco; I am indebted to her chapter Surrealism in the Service of Psychoanalysis, in her Jacques Lacan and Co.; a History of Psychoanalysis in France, , trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Free Association Books, ), p. .
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The concept of automatic writing was not new. Automatic writing was a practice common in French