[96]

6 / PSYCHIATRY AND SURREALISM Henri Ey

"Most of those who write about madness do not forget to examine its relationship to art for a
moment." MAX SIMON (1876)

Beginning in 1930, the psychiatrist finally ceases to call for the help of the gendarme and
does not resist even before the danger, which is more in itself than in the “jokes,” the “lotteries,” the
“mystifications,” and the “eccentricities,” which in his narrowed eyes surrealism appears to him only as a form
of cynical challenge. The insult of common sense certainly goes to the very center, the goal of its professional
mission. However, when the psychiatrist realizes more deeply his role and his task and rejects the game of the
protector of the oppressed, he appears and acts as one who must between the game of dream and reality, in the
realm of reflections and shadows from which the fine threads of context unfold. , necessarily meet the poet, not
with the revolver in hand, but only face to face, for it is as much the opposite of it as it is identical with it, as its
own and symmetrical image. And it is precisely the drama of this encounter that I intend to reflect on here,
attracted by the dreaded and mysterious dizziness of the abyss that threatens to engulf psychiatry if it is not
careful and turns into it. "Surrealism", or more generally "aesthetically", opens a real and deep trap for us.
Genius, poetry, fantasy, play, dream, ideal, mysticism, creation, inspiration, combining the rich fabric of art,
obscure reality bit by bit and are reflected in our eyes, which are filled with dazzling images and are thus doubly
dazzled. We must make an effort to open them up and see them clearly in this light.
Which psychiatrist worthy of the name did not experience in the contact with madness the subtle intoxication
that can only cause us
[97]

ingenious reversal of reality by a magician, Pirandell, poet, Picasso or acrobat, when a delicious anxiety spreads
in the abdomen. danger and pleasure from a miracle, the nearness of absolute beauty, taking our breath away
and crippling our hands and feet? And which psychiatrist, who is a psychiatrist who has experience with
fantastic lyricism, sensitive to the poetry of miraculous delusion, which establishes and defines both madness
and psychiatry, can forbid the echo and reflection of a poetic work in him, when faced with forms that are
uniquely intertwined for the first time: Andre Masson's drawings, Max Ernst's mysterious sculptures, the
fantastic silence ofpaintingsChiric's Andalusian dog, Giorgio dearchitectural compositions, the magical and
concentric shadows of Kafka's Process, or the restless existence of dusty "arcade dwellers" , exposing the view
and heart of the Parisian? For “such is this new vice, the son of shattering and shadow,” surrealism, so subtle,
intoxicating, and mischievous that it gives us the ultimate taste of the elliptical and creative contraction of its
movement and presents itself as a “new art form”. , while interfering with the very aesthetic principle that has
always shaken man: unreal, counter-real, or if we want, "unnatural": a pillar of a temple, a symphony, or even a
photograph, if it is "beautiful" ...
In this treatise we will clearly see that what André Breton told us about love, we must assume about aesthetic
emotions, about "convulsive" beauty, when this mage entrusts us with the secrets of "a series of mirrors that
return to me from the thousands of angles through which the unknown appears to me a faithful image of the one
I love, and an increasingly surprising prophecy of my own desire, an image more and more gilded in life ”. 1)
This means that seduction, which is inherent in art in general, can only be more tyrannical and invincible in the
 form of surrealist enchantment. Only prejudice, naivety, or the deceptive fear of mystification (that simple
distrust of dizzying attraction) can distract from the pleasure we must only be able to indulge in. As for me, I
have always been exposed and vulnerable to her. On this treatise on the immense

1) André Breton: Crazy Love, trans. Stella Pavlovská (Praha: Dauphin, 1996 [1937]) -
note transl.
[98]

I will also approach the contradiction that surrealism poses to psychiatry only with the thoughts and feelings that
command my sympathy and kinship, which I feel almost equally for both areas.
I cannot think here of making full use of the sources of historical and philosophical material on the
relationship between art and madness or on the development of surrealism in uncovering such a complicated
issue, nor a thorough aesthetic analysis of works of art, and finally numerous studies on artistic production of
psychopaths. The factual limitations of this lecture and its reproduction even force me to exclude from my
dissertation anything that might strengthen its evidence, just so that I can devote myself entirely to the basic idea
of my subject, and so I use only short references to works. , facts and teachings, the richness of which I assume
is known to all intimately.

I. - SURREALIST AESTHETICS

The term “surrealism”, the use of which Guillaume Apollinaire preferred to

“surnaturalism”, “already used pt. philosophers ”, 2) will be understood here in its broadest sense, 3) as a definition
of this contemporary aesthetic, substantially multifaceted movement, which equates all a work of art with a
poem, if, according to A. Breton and P. Eluarda 4) the "disaster" of the intellect and the pure buckle of unity, a
poetic activity par excellence based on "a more or less inadvertently measured mixing of two colorless
substances, that is, an existence subject to objective belonging of beings and an existence which specifically
goes beyond that belonging",5)

2) Maurice Nadeau: History of Surrealism, trans. Zbyněk Havlíček (Olomouc: Votobia, 1994 [1964]), p. 20. Henri Ey cites according to an older
edition of Nadeau (1945), which contains different surrealist texts, in case of difference we refer to this older French edition - note. transl. 3) I want
to point out here that the definition "surrealism" certainly expands to put in naje- that do not hold any school or group strict definition because it is
constantly changing for twenty years by various whims or ostracism. 4) André Breton - Paul Éluard: "Note sur la Poésie", Revue Surréaliste, 1929.
5) André Breton: Continuous vessels, trans. Jarmila Fialová (Praha: Dauphin, 1996 [1932]),
p. 172 - note transl.
[99]

so the surrealist work must "invoke above all a high degree of immediate absurdity."6)
From what we have already indicated and what we will see in the third part of this treatise, in this respect
undoubtedly all art is inherently surreal: “During the various attempts I have sought to reduce what is
fraudulently referred to as genius, I did not find anything that could ultimately be attributed to a process other
than this one. ”7) As a historical movement8) , however, surrealism, despite its interruptions, schisms, rifts,
fluctuations, it's already“ obsolete ”,“ unusual ”or“ obsolete ”forms, various manifestations in fine arts, poetry,
fashion and politics established his own aesthetic laws, which in the form of revolutionary slogans order to
overturn the traditional pyramid and elevate to the golden rule not construction, but spontaneity, not discipline ,
but freedom, not care for form, but submission to inner images, and not reality at all, but reality super-. Such a
movement — if it found its dogmatics among writers who, in and through their poetic works, gave rise to the
principle of aesthetics mixed with their surrealist approach — necessarily included other groups of works
(painting, sculpture, theater, or film). ) and uměl artists ’, who were based on the methods or principles of
 foreign surrealism, were inevitably attracted to its realm, that is, to a system of purely fantastic values in the
concept of beauty, which sums up Andre Breton’s cry: NE is any miraculous, indeed the only miraculous is
beautiful ",9) So a thousand times multiplied echo of Baudelaire's aphorism:" beautiful is what is astonishing.
""Art is stupid, "" do not like neither art nor the artist "(Jacques Vache ). "What is beauty? What is ugliness?
What is greatness, strength, weakness ... I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know ”(G. Ribemont-
-Dessaignes). These brazen and proud aphorisms appear on each of the pages of manifestos, creeds and
surrealist texts.

6) André Breton: "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924), in tent .: Manifesto of Surrealism, trans. Jiří Pechar and Dagmar Steinová (Prague: Herrmann
and Sons, 2005), p. 37 - note. transl. 7) André Breton: "Manifesto of Surrealism", cit. d., p. 39 - note transl. 8) Maurice Nadeau: History of
Surrealism. We intentionally take over most of the quoted texts
from this excellent work to make referencing more convenient. 9) André Breton: "Manifesto of Surrealism", cit. d., p. 25 - note transl.
[100]

"No more painters, musicians, writers!" They declare. "Literature is a path that leads nowhere," says André
Breton. And as Maurice Nadeau brilliantly emphasizes: “Surrealism is not considered by its founders to be a
new art school, but a tool of knowledge, especially knowledge of the mainland, which has not been
systematically explored so far: ignorance, miracle, dream, madness, hallucinations, in short - if we add
fantastically and miraculously scattered around the world - all the backstage of logic. ” 10) Despite these denials
and shouts, however, it would be impossible not to go where the most ardent anti-artists go, that is, to imagine, if
not works, then at least work, intuition, aesthetic germination. An hungry miracle, eager for a fantastic story,
which A. Breton wrote that admirable about him is that it “removes the fantastic”, turned away from the real in
its vulgar forms (including the traditional and academic notion of “art”, which became a second nature),
surrealists rush to images, “idols” in a furious motion, overturn the scenery, look for the other side of the mirror,
and their aesthetic attitude lies in refuting aesthetic values.
This revolutionary, subversive and decomposing attitude of the "exact opposite" is characterized by cruelly
aggressive attitudes, forming a series of negative taboos.
1. Anticonstructivism: Surrealism is terrified of formal logical creation: “In our day, logical procedures are
only used to solve problems of secondary importance. Absolute rationalism, which remains in vogue, allows us
to take into account only facts that are closely linked to our experience. [...] [It] revolves in a cage. ” 11) A work
of art must erupt at once:

A work of art, like any fraction of human life, examined in its most serious sense, seems worthless to me if it does not
have the same hardness , strength, regularity, luster of all external and internal surfaces like a crystal. Understand me
well: with this statement, I categorically and permanently oppose everything that, both aesthetically and morally,
attempts to base formal beauty on the conscious refinement work that one should devote oneself to. On the contrary, I
will not stop celebrating

10) Maurice Nadeau: History of Surrealism, cit. d., pp. 43–44 - note transl. 11) Manifestations of surrealism, cit. d., p. 20 - note transl.
[101]

12)
bu, spontaneous activity, precisely one whose perfect expression is a crystal.

And it is in this sense that the poet-dogmatist of Surrealism wrote this: "Either beauty will be convulsive or it
will not be at all."

2. Anti-realism: What could have had its origin in the restoration of volumes and density in Cubism and Picasso
did not delay and happened with the powerful effort of original creation, a new creation in which the human
spirit stands against nature, painting becomes music, that is, no longer a reproduction of “themes,” but the
creation of visual objects, thus joining poetry. This has already been shaken deeply by symbolism, and it must
 not only take a step, but also occupy the first place among all the arts, at the birth of which it also stands. The
whole aesthetic movement shifted from the flat naturalistic imitation, to which only clumsiness or inability
unknowingly gave some meaning, towards the not real, above the real, to the world of images. Let the words of
Pierre Reverdy be more self-banal for the psychologist ("An image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be
born of an analogy, but of a convergence of two more or less distant facts. The more distant and precise the
relationship between the two converged facts, the stronger the image more will have emotional powers and
poetic realities in it. ”13)), had an astonishing impact on André Breton's thinking, and in the sudden
enlightenment developed magical hints of these formulations into the whole method, program, and conception
of the surrealist world. “It is said that Saint-Pol-Roux recently had a plaque read at the door of his Camaret
mansion every day as he fell asleep: The poet is working. [...] Even if fairy tales are more self-charming, an
adult would consider it degrading to feed on them, and I acknowledge that not all of them correspond to his age.
The web of adorable improbabilities would have to be a little more sophisticated in proportion to how one
progresses through life [...]. ”14) And it is precisely this escape of reality, the struggle against reality, the
realization of the unreal that the“ most more flattering "aspect of surrealism.

12) André Breton: Crazy love, emotion. d. 13) André Breton: "Manifesto of Surrealism", cit. d., pp. 32–33 - note transl. 14) Ibid., Pp. 25,
27 - note. transl.

[102]Although these negative approaches - cannibalism directed against the "crazy" monster, which is one turned to
logic and the real - are the most powerful engine of the movement, they are not enough to define it. We must
now specify his methods, techniques and our own principles for creating surrealistic forms.
1. Liberation of unconscious automatism. We must first let the texts that tell us the secret of the miraculous
"fruit" speak. André Breton defines (in the First Manifesto) surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which
the real functioning of thought is to be expressed, either orally or in writing. Dictates thinking in the absence of
any control exercised by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral consideration ”. Despite this last reservation, the
meaning of which we have previously described as a reaction against “aesthetics”, “the secrets of surrealist
magic art” actually lead to “poetic surrealism” and create a method, if not in their procedures or intent, then in in
essence, aesthetic. After Lautréamont's attempt to "roll the dice," Surrealism imagined the aesthetics of freedom
of speech, an aesthetic already admirably formulated by Blanchot in his article 15) and showed the impasse into
which it led.
2. But let's see how André Breton explains to us what a surreal "ecstasy" must entail:

In a study of the Robert Desnos case called Media Entry, I tried to describe how I was able to focus my attention on more
or less incomplete sentences, which become completely perceptible to our spirit in complete solitude, as soon as sleep
approaches, without it being possible to reveal any previous determination of them. [...] With a certain care for diversity,
with a care that deserved better use, I composed the last poems of the collection in this Mont de Piétéway, meaning that I
managed to extract an extraordinary amount of the blank lines of this book. These lines represented the closing of the
eyes when it came to the processes of thought that I believed had to remain hidden from the reader. It was not cheating
on me, but a love of fast jumps. I achieved the illusion of possible complexity, without which I was less and less able to
do without. I started to cuddle bezměrně

15) Maurice Blanchot (in: Arche,8 August 1945): "Quelques réflexions sur le surréa-skepticism"(Some reflections on surrealism) in La Part du feu
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972 [ 1949]), pp. 95 - note. transl.
[103]

words because of the space they allow around them, because of their points of contact with countless other words that I
left unspoken. The poem "Black Forest" corresponds exactly to this state of mind. It took me half a year to write it and
you can trust me that I did not rest for a single day. [...]
One evening before falling asleep, a rather bizarre sentence appeared in me, clearly articulated, so that it was impossible to
change a single word in it, but still detached from the sound of any voice - it emerged without any trace events in which,
 at the testimony of my consciousness, I had some participation at that time; a sentence that seemed insistently urgent, a
sentence, I dare say, that pounded on the window. I noticed her quickly, and I was ready to stay with her when I was
fascinated by her organic nature. The sentence really surprised me; unfortunately I did not keep it in my memory until
today, it was something like: "There is a man torn through the window of two." [...]
Because at that time I was still completely interested in Freud and I was familiar with his investigative methods, which I was
able to practice a little with the sick during the war, I decided to achieve with myself what one was trying to achieve with
them: namely, a monologue spoken as quickly as possible, which the subject's criticism does not subject to any
judgment; therefore, it is not hampered by any hesitation and represents as precisely spoken thinking as possible. It
seemed to me, and still seems to me — and the way in which the sentence about the cut-off person emerged testifies to
this — that the speed of thought is not greater than the speed of speech, and that it does not necessarily exceed the
possibilities of language or even a running pen. . Under these assumptions, Philipp Soupault and I, acquainted with these
initial conclusions, set out to describe the paper, with a laudatory indifference to what might arise from it in the literature.
The ease of implementation contributed to the rest. At the end of the first day, we were able to read about fifty pages of
this method, and start comparing the results. There was quite a remarkable similarity between Soupault's and mine's
results: the same defects in construction, shortcomings of the same nature, but also illusions of extraordinary vigor on
both sides; a lot of emotion, a remarkable selection of paintings of such quality that not a single one of them would be
able to produce them with careful work, pito resknost very peculiar and here and there some sentence penetratingly
comical. It seemed to me that the only differences that characterized our two texts were basically the temperament of
each of us, because Soupault's temperament was less static than mine, and if they allowed me a slight criticism, also by
committing mistakenly, when placed over some pages, no doubt from
[104]interest in mystification, a few words in the manner of titles. On the other hand, I mustrightly admit to him that he always
opposed with all his energy against the slightest adjustment, against the slightest correction in any such passage, which
seemed rather unsuccessful to me. He was certainly right about that. It is really very difficult to rightly appreciate the various
elements that occur here, it can even be said that it is impossible to appreciate them at first reading. To those you write, these
elements are as foreign in appearance as anyone else, and you naturally distrust them. From a poetic point of view, their
quality lies primarily in the high degree of immediate absurdity, and it is characteristic of this absurdity that, on closer
inspection, everything that is permissible and legitimate in the world emerges: revealing a certain number of properties and
16)
facts objective than other features and facts.

As an example of "automatic writing", we can mention the word games of Robert Desnos, immersed in hypnotic
sleep:

The solution of a sage is - the pollution of a page? Rrose Sélavy demands the death of sickness from tomber and sort of
houses. Rrose Sélavy is well known for its love, this is all over the flies, in addition to the many couches. [...] Croyez
17)
-you que Rrose Sélavy connaisse ces jeux de fous qui mettent le feu a joues?

[Is the solution for smart people smearing white pages? Rrose Sélava asks whether the death of the era will throw our
fate on our roofs. Rrose Sélava wants to know if love, the mousetrap, dries the ointments in the hiding place. Do you
think that Rrose Sélava knows crazy toys that set fire to faces?]

Or also this text by Raymond Queneau:

Smudges of lead, smudges of marble, minerals and carbon, an underground world where no one traveled, aren't you on
the verge of death with your head down? Red mud of the oceans, metal lakes, blind fish, white algae, secrets of the
depths, insoluble reflections of the sun! And here is the edge of meteors and comet orbits that are lost in the gloriole of
oaks older than the moon. Asteroids are falling on all nations. Women collect them and decorate their piano with them,
men adjust hats, children shout and dogs urinate on walls soiled by the brain. The grapes will not ripen this year; the
fruitless plants wither at the first subversive cry of the fields. Topsoil, marl and limestone, humus and compost,

16) André Breton: "Manifesto of Surrealism", cit. d., pp. 30–33, 35–37 - note transl. 17) Robert Desnos: "Rrose Selava", Littérature, December 1,
1922, reprinted in M. Nadeau:
Histoire de surréalisme (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1945), p. 283.
[105]
 18)
people throw them into the air, where the pride of human labor joyfully dissolves.

From now on, dream stories, along with magical speech practices, will alternate these games with the humor
and chance that form the basis of the production. Let us specify some methods of summoning the “Muse”,
which here seems more like a “knocking spirit” from the spirit table.
Surrealistic proverbs (sometimes disseminated in the form of “leaflets”) represent a kind of semantic
“anagrams” full of once enchanting, sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes so confusing humor that they radiate
the strange emotion typical of the surrealist style. Here are some examples from Paul Éluard and Benjamin
Péret:

Big birds make small blinds. Rinse tree. The mother must be beaten while she is young. Cherries fall
where texts are missing. Crush two tiles with the same fly. Don't scratch the bones of your ancestors. A
19)
dream without stars is a forgotten dream.

Surrealistic puns: questions and answers, she "if-when", automatic conversations, hypnotic sleep, collages from
newspaper clippings, "dialogues" naturally creating chosen places of aesthetic and lyrical encounter,
unconscious currents on the surface of consciousness. To what extent "unconscious"? This is what A. Breton
asks about in connection with Raymond Roussel.20)
This “automatic activity”, to which surrealist production is substantially limited, appears in painting, film, the
creation of “ready made” (Duchamp) or surrealistic objects and situations (Salvador Dalí).
Their specificity lies in casting the imaginary against the real, in repeated bombardment of one another until the
structure of reality is shaken and phantasms elevated under the objects transformed into mere appearances.

18) Raymond Queneau: "Rêve", La Révolution surréaliste, 1, 1925, No. 5, p. 5 - note. transl. 19) Paul Éluard - Benjamin Péret: "152 proverbs
according to the taste of the day", Analogon, 8, 1992,
trans. J. Gabriel [adapted from Ey's version] - note transl. 20) André Breton: Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Michal Novotný (Prague: Competition
, 2006 [1937]) - note transl.
[106]

to "above all". Elimination of all "subject" and any imitation of nature, the horror of anecdotalism and realism,
but the search for what evokes and creates "true poetry" from the depths of one's own self, which is the exact
opposite of "pure poetry" or purely formal poetry . In the same way, the symbolism of surrealist production,
even though it accepts a certain rhetoric from Mallarmý, the "alchemy of the word" drawn from the magic of
words or forms, essentially takes place on the reverse side of his research. The meaning is not hidden, it is only
suspected and as if virtual. Just as a dream is not a rebus, Braqu's canvas or Soupault's text mean nothing precise
or rather nothing definite; they simply want to resonate, to make a sound, an image, seeking expression without
reaching it.

"How do you want people to understand them [my images]," shouts S. Dali, "when I, who make them, don't understand
them either. The fact that I do not understand their meaning when I paint my paintings does not mean that these paintings
are meaningless: on the contrary, their meaning is so deep, complex, coherent and involuntary that it escapes a simple
analysis of logical opinion. My whole ambition for an artistic plan is to embody the images of a specific irrational with
the most expansive passion for precision. ”

The surrealist absurd is therefore the magic of extraordinary and unspeakable meanings, whose world extends
within ourselves, in the virtual movement of the dream. when, as Breton says, "words are loved."follow the Let
usParisian to the heart of this lyrical world:

Oh, the metaphysics of places! You put children to sleep, they populate their dreams. All the content of our
consciousness is constantly touching those parts of the unknown and the thrill. There is not a single step into the past
where I would not have encountered the strange feeling that seized me in the days when I was still amazed, in an
environment where I first realized the inexplicable connections and their continuation in my heart. . All the fauna of
 imagery and its marine vegetation seems to permeate the veil of hair, disappears and remains forever in the dim spheres
of human activity. [...] In the clutter of places we find such locks that do not touch at infinity. Where the living perform
the most dubious tricks, things are sometimes a reflection of their most secret motives: and so our cities are full of
sphinxes that few people know about and that stop the dreamy pedestrian only if he is attracted to them by his thoughtful
scattering. nost; the deities themselves will not ask him a single fateful question. However, if that wise man understands
their words and themselves asks, thanks to those faceless monsters, he will examine again only the abyss of his own
21)
inner self. And if they don't fall into them, then only thanks to the modern unusual glow.

Another essential aspect of surrealist aesthetics is black humor, a sarcastic fantasy playing with images, splitting
both faces of their structure, the unmotivated, ingenious and engineered and the face of the harrowing
drama,that the paintings obscure. The same drama is hidden in the myth and allegory that it revives at the same
time. We are well aware that, under the irony of traps, delusions and spells, which remains the basic principle of
all aesthetic creation, the world of images - the world of includes the appearance -whole essence of tragedy.
Circus performances, spring acetylene lights, theatrical scenery, shapes and colors nailed to a wall, a semi-
reality emerging from a book being read; everything is dramatic, either directly and lightly in the sublime tone
of a melodrama, or more really, under the mask and appearance of a play that (although it seems to distract us
from it) leads us to the deepest depths of the "tragic meaning of life" ... the work that conceals this ambition is
"imbued with black humor." Perhaps better than anything else, the art of bullfighting, because it is a game of life
and death, gives us the very essence of ambiguous humor. When, after glowing arabesques, a festival of colors
enjoyed only by the uninitiated without feeling or longing for the "other world," the "mountain de la verdad ''
occurs, when a sword suddenly appears under a red cloak, then beneath the most direct black and gold Humor in
this game of death reveals the real blood of tragedy. This is also the case when, in the presence of a surrealist
production, we suddenly feel pierced to the heart by irony. This is because “romantic and eternal pessimism is a
fundamental value of surrealism; the richness of “true surrealism” must be realized by “lifting movements of
sensibility” (P. Naville) to the surrealist work the value of witchcraft. They accuse the magician of fraud. So that
he doesn't have to

21) Louis Aragon: Peasant from Paris, trans. Věra Smetanová (Prague: SNKLU, 1964
[1926]), pp. 17–18 - note transl.
[108]

to enter into the very structure of the fantastic, which thwarts the real and mocks the realist, so that he has
nothing to do with it and carefully avoids the dizziness that comes from it, the one "whom you will not come",
in the ecstasy of "discovering the trap" is freed from magic and "mystification" and giggles under the guise of
"common sense." To a hair, just like one who watches the dissolution of a “mysterious woman” (following
procedures that can be obtained in “cabinets of magic” for a modest fee), he declares that “there is a trick in it”
and refuses to rejoice in the enslavement. Art is a creation of delusion, and yet it does not cease to be art, and
when the author reveals himself and appears as a comedian at the very edge of art, he does not draw us any less
into the center of art. Just as the psychoanalyzed has his own “illusion” and lacks meaning for the psychoanalyst
- because he sees too much of it, he touches the acrobat in the cinema as well as in the circus. And in Victor
Hugo's poem as well as in Max Ernst's painting, each artist, with his art, through the expressed intention and
beyond, challenges himself and his "viewer" to appear.
Perhaps in order to escape the accusation of “mystification,” sur realism replaced the “deception” of its creation
with perfect sincerity, and even with some kind of systematic crackdown. Surrealism, engaged to the marrow in
its aesthetic metaphysics of the "opposite", manifests itself as an "enfant terrible" and declares itself to be
revolutionary, "perverse", always and under all circumstances subversive. With this enfant terrible, however, the
convulsions are "dada". Consider Maurice Nadeau's account of the "performance-for-vocation" in Zurich:

They pounded keys and boxes on stage, as if playing music, until the audience began to protest frantically. Instead of
reciting the poem, Serner placed a bouquet at the tailor's feet. Under the huge sugar-shaped hat, a voice of Arp's poem
 recited. Huelsenbeck howled his poems more and more, and in the meantime he beat Tzar in the same rhythm and with
the same crescendo on the big drum. Huelsenbeck and Tzara danced a bear dance cackle or performed, swaying in a sack
and with a pipe on their head, an exercise called the black cockatoo. Tzara invented static and chemical poems [...].

22) Georges Hugnet: „Duch dada v malířství“, Cahiers d'art, 1932–1934), cit. p. Na-
deau: Dějiny surrealismu, cit. d., s. 25.
[109]

And the following summary of Max Ernst's collage exhibition:

The scene was in the basement and all the lights inside the warehouse were off; there was a moaning from a hatch.
Another joker, hidden behind a closet, insulted the personalities present [...], dadaists without ties and with white gloves
came and went; [...] André Breton chewed on matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes shouted at any moment, "It's raining on the
skull!" At the entrance, Jacques Rigaut counted aloud the cars and pearls of visitors [...]. 23)

The most scandalous and outrageous parades were probably organized by Salvador Dali. In his Secret Life24)
he describes a “performance” that he organized in an anarchist event in Barcelona. After the praise of the
Marquis de Sade, who allowed him to mix in his "irrational and poetic" manifestation of the obscenity of the
coarsest grain, which offended his "free-thinking" rather than "free" audience, a furious noise erupted.
Meanwhile, two figures appeared at the nod of his hand, and "with the utmost seriousness, even with some
sinisterness," placed a two-pound loaf of bread on the speaker's head and carefully fastened it with straps. Dalí
was torn down by general “hysteria” and from his lungs he began to shout his poem “Donkey in Decay,” which
caused one old anarchist doctor in the hall a real fit of madness. "The evening ended in unimaginable general
confusion" ... According to him, the dream ball organized by Caresse Crosby in New York at Coq Rouge in
honor of Dali became a kind of "historical institution" in the United States. The sur-realistic dream here
experienced a great extravagance of dresses and scenes. “The lightly clothed lady had a 'living' mouth in the
middle of her belly, yawning with the satin of her dress. A man in a bloody nightgown was balancing on his
head with a bedside table, from which a flock of colorful birds flew at the moment. In the center of the staircase
hung a tub full of water that threatened to fall and pour its contents on the guests' heads, and in the corner of the
ballroom hung an entire pulled bull with a ripped belly supported by crutches and stuffed with half a dozen
turntables.

23) Georges Hugnet, cit. p. Nadeau: Dějiny surrealismu, cit. d., s. 29. 24) Salvador Dalí: Tajný život Salvadora Dalího, z angličtiny přel. Ludmila
Vaňková (Praha 1994 [1942]), s. 353–356. [Ey tu dohromady spojuje dva Dalího výstupy v Barceloně; překlad přizpůsobujeme Eyovu textu, který
vychází ze španělské verze Tajného života — pozn. překl.]
[110]

Gala appeared at a ball dressed for a 'cadre exquise' - a chosen corpse. She attached a very realistic puppet to her
head, pretending to be an ant-eaten child, the head of which was gripped by the claws of a phosphorescent
lobster. ”25) Scandals, farces, disciplinary expeditions, extravagance, this is how surrealism appears, as defined
below: 26)

Disturbing objects, mushroom picking, fantastic painting, indecent behavior, café revolutionaries, snobbery of madness,
automatic writing, anti-clericalism from the beginning, German discipline, exhibitionism, pranks innocent.
This violence has not only a marginal purpose, and Homer's “swearing letters” 27) testify to conflicts that
incessantly tormented the entire “group” and spawned cracks, schisms, and fights.
Total and integral surrealism is revolutionary on all levels: in art, philosophy, life, morals, and naturally in
politics. He first turns towards the Orient (R. Desnos), the focus of instinctive and "barbaric" humanity. The
Declaration of 27 January 1925 states: 28)
 - We are determined to do the Revolution. - We combined the word surrealism with the word Revolution only to show
the interest-free, immaculate and even completely hopeless nature of this revolution. - We do not intend to change
anything in people's morals, but we consider it appropriate to draw attention to the fragility of their thoughts and to the
movable foundations on which cellars they built their quivering houses. - We present this solemn warning to society: Let
her beware of her failures, of every erroneous step of her spirit, and we will not forgive her anything at all. [...] - We are
specialists in Revolt. There is no way of acting that we would not be able to use if necessary. [...]

25) Tamtéž, s. 371–372. 26) Variétés: Surrealistické číslo, 1929, in: Maurice Nadeau: Dějiny surrealismu, cit.
d., s. 248. 27) Viz Nadeau: Histoire du surréalisme (1945), s. 289–291. 28) Maurice Nadeau: Dějiny surrealismu, cit. d.,
s. 63.
[111]

The lecture given in the “Residencia de los Estudiantes” on April 18, 1925 by Aragon29) states this
revolutionary atmosphere: There is no complete revolution, only the Revolution is permanent, like real life, like
love, dazzling at all times. There is no revolutionary order, there is only disorder and madness.

"The war for freedom must be fought fiercely," Éluard shouted at the Philosophers at the same time. It is known
that the war in Marok was an opportunity to get closer to Bermer's "Clarté" group and the Communist Party.
Controversies with P. Navill, later the opposition of A. Breton, Aragon, a hundred other conflicts and
excommunications, manifests and anti-manifests concern almost exclusively the attitude of Surrealism to
Marxism, and it is also known how the anarchist zeal broke in the heart of Surrealism or rather he ignited in
contact with the purely political revolutionary mass, without, however, always satisfying his hunger and the
unquenchable thirst for fighting and resistance.

That it is subversive, or defying any moral conformism, is confirmed by surrealism with all the scathing power
of its eternal opposition. He is always determined to revolt, desecration, scandal, sacrilege; even crime appears
to him as a natural form and a necessary condition of his own existence. In 1924, Aragon became the spokesman
of this morality in Libertinage. I don't think it's necessary to mention the manifesto from the 5th issue of
Révolution surréaliste ...
More important to us is the pungent taste of evil and death that permeates the lives of many surrealists and
marks it with pathetic scenes of eternal tragedy. The Extra Extravagances ’and sk scandals’ I mentioned here
may be laughed at or offended, but no one will likely laugh at the dramatic fate of G. de Nerval or Rimbaud or
the story, character or work of Franz Kafka, Arthur Crava- on, Jacques Vachý or Jacques Rigaut. Under the
anxiety of infinitely controlling Kafka's life, as under Jacques Rigaut's “cynicism” or Jacques Vachý's refined
revolt, the surrealist attitude does not appear as a mystification, but as a mystic, a mysticism of anxiety in which
contempt,

29) La Révolution surréaliste, č. 4., in: Maurice Nadeau: Dějiny surrealismu, cit. d., s. 69.
[112]

alienation, irony and cruelty create a system and a life program that “amaze” all the more that they are
harmonized, and they appear to us as a curve into which the determined movement of systematic “conversion” is
inscribed.
Surrealism therefore seems to us as a systematic and passionate journey behind a hidden treasure, a
mysterious fire that burns under our skin and whose flashes certainly color all aesthetic production - classic
masterpieces as well as "melodramas" or color postcards - but surrealism wants to empower his flame, that
flame that absorbs reality.
The burning experience of these men, who sometimes squeezed the "blood of poets" to the last drop and who,
in their sacred ecstasy, melt in a miraculous flood of dreams, humor and fantastic ridiculousness: this experience
does not straighten before psychiatry to put it down a frightening question, the same riddle that, before the
sacrament on the one hand and crime on the other, threatens to shake and overturn the foundations of our
science: the question of the meaning, meaning, and limits of madness?

II. - PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL AESTHETIC PRODUCTION

Exceptional collections of psychiatrists and psychiatric wards, several museums, such as the one in Heidelberg
or the exhibition in St. Anne's in 1946, present a sensitive, if not urgent, problem for the aesthetic production of
the mentally ill. No psychiatrist could refuse during his career — even if only for a few moments — to be
carried away by the poetic or artistic charms that rampage, to tell us the truth, offers us all day long. Therefore,
as Max Simon wrote in 1876, "most of those who write about madness do not forget to examine its relationship
to art for a moment." Nevertheless, frankly, there is relatively little work to deal with this issue seriously,
systematically and in depth. Some (eg A. Marie, Paillas, Rogues de Fursac, Mohr, Behr, Delay, Desclaux, Digo)
are content to describe and analyze the aesthetic creations of their patients without embarking on problems that
only introduces. Others focused mainly on the study of art production, the authors of which suffered from a
mental disorder (Lucretius, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, G. de Nerval, Maupassant, Van Gogh - in particular Jaspers,
W. Riese, Minkowska), and tried to prove the mutual relationship or ratio of their “genius” and “madness”.
There is little work to address the problem in its entirety. In French they are the outdated book of Rejov (1907),
the work of J. Vinchon (1924), C. Badouin (1929), several studies by J. Delmond (1935, 1938) and G. Ferdièr
(1946); in German, these are Schilder's studies (1918), Morgenthaler's work (1921) and, in particular, the work
that represents the real 'sum' of knowledge on the subject, Prinzhorn's book (1922), and finally Bürger-Prinze's
(1929) article in Burke's treatise, these are the most penetrating attempts to study the basics of this issue.30)
Given that it is a work of fundamental importance, I present here a brief outline of a magnificent, magnificently
published and illustrated volume by Hans Prinzhorn.31)

Hans Prinzhorn studied the art production of the mentally ill. He used the spontaneous works of patients who were not
endowed with talent or knew special art techniques. These works form the “almost international” collection of the
Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg. He denied that he wanted to apply the concept of "values" in his approach and that he
wanted to conceive of this issue from the purely psychological aspect of the formation and "Gestaltung" of these
creations. He clearly suggests that he does not want to enter into the dilemma of art - -notting or healthy-sick, which in
his opinion are terms that "have no other meaning than purely dialectical." The case of Nietzsche or Hölderlin, if we
mention only the "pathographies" that were most popular in Germany, is sufficient proof of the difficulties we come to if
we lean towards Lombros's famous statement linking genius to madness. There must be something really "sacred" in
madness that puts one out of oneself, but at the same time psychiatry should subject some great human works to
methodical "unmasking." Among the inspirational

30) Od doby, kdy vznikla tato přednáška, se velmi pronikavá práce jednoho z Fer- dièrových žáků, Jeana Dequekera (1948), věnovala nejen zkoumání
díla jednoho psychopata, nýbrž i problému obecnému, o němž zde pojednáváme my. 31) Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie
und Psychopathologie
der Gestaltung (Berlin: Springer, 1922), 361 stran, 187 ilustrací.

there is a kinship (Verwandschaft) due to the process and the feeling of feeling from the world (Weltgefühl). And it is precisely

this "Gestaltung'' and nothing else that Prinzhorn intends to deal with. Life is nothing but a hierarchy of "Gestaltungen",

which depend on their instinct for creation (Gestaltungstrieb) and mental environment (Umkreis des Seelischen). What is

"formed" is the expressive embodiment of experience (Anschaath); thus formed leads us to see the essence (Wesenschau).

The psychological foundations of artistic creation can be reduced to the following basic roots: game tendencies (Spieltrieb),

tendencies towards decoration (Schmucktrieb), constructive tendencies in accordance with formal rules

(Ordnungstendenzen), tendencies to reproduce (Abbildetendenz) nature, symbolic need (Be- deutungsamkeit). The work of
 creation is carried out on the basis of eidetic material (Anschaath), which in the process of creation represents the "previous"

or lower phase and forms part of the personal "note", temperament, individual constitution and also race. All art forms

oscillate between the reproductive function of the image and its formal properties.

The observations and analyzes that make up the 'clinical material' of the work (10 cases) come from a collection created by

schizophrenics (71%), manic-depressive individuals (7 to 8%), psychopaths (5 to 6%) and several paralytics, imbeciles and

epileptics. Thus, the predominant group is schizophrenics. The whole of this production is divided into five groups:

a) Formation of disordered lines (Kritzeleien): mostly drawings pencil (letters, scribbles, doodles).
b) Ornamental and decorative drawings governed by the laws of formation of the whole, in which playfulness and rules of
symmetry, repetition and important rhythmic units prevail.
c) Figuration: playful creations in which the tendency to imitation prevails (Spielerische Zeichnungen mit vorwiegender
Abbilde- tendenz) of scenes, human figures, more or less clumsy or special landscapes, where we find previous formal
tendencies: excess detail, repetition, etc.
d) Illustrative fiction (Anschauliche Phantastik), creating or deforming reality, often in connection with hallucinatory states.
e) Symbolic compositions in which there is considerable and purely crazy material.
The ten observations of the “schizophrenic masters”: Karel Brendel, August Klotz, Peter Moog, August Neter, Johann
Knüpfer, Viktor Orth, Hermann Beil, Heinrich Welz, Joseph Sell and Franz Pohl are very remarkable for their
connection between the schizophrenic “Weltgefühl” and his artistic expression (note that Karel Brendel's works are
woodcuts).
Drawings, doodles and simple illustrations show at most a “frequent” predominance of rhythm. A striking feature is a
mixture of lines, numbers, letters and fragmentary shapes. As for the more complicated works, they show an excessive
tendency to play, symbolism and comedy. The psychic roots of the need for expression are the search for inexhaustible
and unusual symbolism, which manifests itself in the sexual and mystical realm, as well as in the metaphysical tendency
to the supernatural and magical world.
If we try to define the very nature of the schizophrenic gesture - not by summarizing the differential features in these patients
and in other works of art, but by a more immediate intuitive approach - we find that the pathognomonic character is not
created by game tendencies or formative elements resulting from the tendency to embellishments, and even those that
result from a tendency to constructive. On the contrary, we observe an absurd discrepancy between intuitive givenness
and its meaning, and in certain rhythmic formations there are features of the intensity of the drawing, which have
something disturbing in them, a kind of dynamism that literally takes our breath away. We observe this especially in
productions in which, as in the case of Pohl and van Gogh, the depiction of the experience of alien terror
(Unheimlichkeiteserlebnisse) predominates. In the confused movement of the curves, there is clearly a struggle between
imitation tendencies and constructive stylization. When we leave the formal signs to look carefully at the material
content of these creations, we are forced to admit that neither the dark experience, nor the magical bonds, nor the egoistic
themes of the mystical-erotic type are specific to these works, as we encounter them in art history. especially in Japan, on
the prayer flags of Tibet or at demon painters.

The results of our inventory are therefore very poor. The feeling that prevails before the works of schizophrenics is a
feeling of disturbing foreignness, into which, however, we probably project everything we know about these patients.
Another important feature is the tendency to autonomy of elements with respect to the overall rhythm of the work, a
feature in which ambivalence and autism converge. The last and perhaps most specific feature of all these works, bearing
the seal of loneliness and miserable solipsism, is the lack of response in others.
An interesting point at which we must pause is the question of the extent to which the disease is "creative" in terms of
expressive abilities.
From this point of view, it is very important that the forms of 'Gestaltung', which appear in the expression 'dark', carry out
a kind of updating of latent tendencies. If we examine the proportion of patients who make up 2% of drawers at the clinic
in Heidelberg, we find that this is approximately the normal proportion of drawers in any population. This would mean
that the disease does not create these abilities. In contrast, in patients who are technically equipped, we find either
Gestaltung procedures, which seek to depict the image of the psychotic world, or normal straightforward composition
 (the case of Welz and Pohl).
Now it is necessary to examine what this sick production has to do with art. Thinking about a work of art and a mental
disorder in the same person is exposed to many misunderstandings, and cases that can be studied with complete
pathography are quite rare. The main problem is to determine the mental state of the artist (inspiration and Gestaltung)
and the mentally ill, especially schizophrenic (feeling of the world and Gestalt). For an artist, all artistic Gestaltung is the
result of a whole tradition and school education. The example of Rousseau's "customs officer" is quite exceptional. The
artist's Gestaltung cannot be understood without regard to the fact that this psychic formation appears as the main process
in the child and the primitive. And it is this process that becomes apparent to the mentally ill.
As for the question of what relations exist between the schizophrenic Gestaltung and the concepts of decadence or
degeneration, it is not appropriate, argues Prinzhorn, to address this issue of "values". Nevertheless, the comparison of
schizophrenic production and works of modern art has embarked on serious studies. To say about a given artist that he
paints like a mentally ill person, and therefore he is mentally ill, does not mean or prove any more than to say that this
sick person is black because he makes the same sculptures as black people. A person who makes such insignificant
conclusions cannot expect to be taken seriously. In contemporary art, as in the schizophrenic “Weltgefühl,” there is, in
fact, something that can only be expressed in the same words. But while for the schizophrenic it is an experience of his
destiny (schicksalmassiges Erleben) and the world of perceptions seems foreign or hostile to him, for today's artist the
departure from reality is the fruit of knowledge and thoughtful decision (Erkenntnis und Entschluss) or gushing from
"torturous consciousness" ( quälende Selbstbesinung), from revolt and outrage. Perhaps, however, in the development of
these art forms and the appeal they exert, it is necessary to see the characteristic feature of the schizophrenic shade of our
civilization

In conclusion, we can say that untrained mentally ill (and especially schizophrenics) very often create works that show
surprising analogies with the works of children, primitives and especially contemporary artists. However, an accurate
assessment of schizophrenic creations and works based on these period currents (Zeitströmungen) does not yet allow
conclusions to be drawn about their identity. It is certain that in schizophrenics, during the breakdown of personality,
symbolic Gestaltungen are formed, which are analogous to the Gestaltungen of a dream, along with the emergence of the
“Weltgefühl”, analogous to the thinking of primitives. As long as the question of where the characters, symbols, and images
originally came from remains unanswered, this problem will still be open. Nevertheless, this ground of metaphysics
"Gestaltung" allowed us to lay the foundations for a better understanding of the whole issue.

In this brief analysis, if we highlighted the complex question posed by the psychiatrist to the “fantastic” production of
Expressionism and Surrealism, which Hans Prinzhorn did not hesitate to embark on, it should be noted that although its
conclusions seem correct, the author's study of relationships “Modern art” and works of the mentally ill one of the least
thorough parts of his work.

If we compare the art of the sick with academic, realistic or symbolist art, in which style and form establish the basic rule of
composition and the highest value, the confrontation of sick works with the works of "great artists" is so disgraceful for the
first and so many. It is favorable for the latter that, if we are not to go into detail, there is almost no common measure
between the “values” of these two types of creation, which separate one soul from the traditional distinction between the
“ugly” and the “beautiful”. There are also few authors who have plunged into the confrontation of surrealist aesthetics and
delirious production. Nevertheless, we must mention several valuable treatises: Pfister's (1921) on “Expressionism”,
Schilder's (1918) on “Futurism”, Bychowski (1922) on “Autism and Regression in Modern Artistic Currents,” and GR
Lafory (1922) on Cubism and Expressionism, Frois-Wittman (1924) on “Psychoanalysis of Modern Art”. Some (Pfister,
Bychowski), as well as Bürger-Prrinz (1928) and most recently C. Schneider, show the greatest contempt for the
“degenerative” art of modern aesthetics, which in their eyes is nothing more than an expression of the disease process; in
order to save its "values", some also invoke certain "creative" forces of the disease (Pironz Azizi, 1935). And even fewer are
those who, like Lefevre and Frois-Wittman, approach Prinzhorn's position and refuse to call "modern artists" lunatic ...!

In order to come into contact with the real aesthetic production of psychopaths, it is now important to leave the
soil of history and learning. We will first proceed to a purely descriptive analysis of their work, adhering to
Prinzhorn's classification. Since I cannot recall the works here with pictures or photographic reproductions, I
will try to describe them in such a way as to preserve the aesthetic atmosphere they radiate.
1) Doodles and stereotypical shading: they are teeming with pieces of torn, used paper and are exceptionally
stored in boxes with an embroidered or shiny lid made of silver paper. They are often jealously guarded like
taboos in tablets, old cans of sardines, in a knotted handkerchief, or anxiously held in the form of an amulet or
scapular. Sometimes the pages of thick workbooks are filled with tangled lines or endless dots. Parts of capital
letters, artificial capitals, pseudo stenographic marks, intermittent strokes of furious scribbles or lines
calligraphically stretched into monotonous spirals, the use of ink stains, decorative inlay with fine cloth discs
and dry leaves: all represent a poor and touching treasure of those relics. or the illumination of these mysterious
incunabula. Hundreds of pages draw these sick pencils in pencil, either in a sacred hurry or patiently and
thoughtfully, as if this graphic and at the same time artistic work was a task they cannot escape. Sometimes
hieroglyphs, serpentine wraps, hatching, and lattice, which intertwine or develop their feverish hands,
accumulate in a violent fit of inspiration and climax. In the poetic-acoustic order, monotonous singing, singing,
and modulation are an identical expression of this insufficiently “processed” rhythmic activity, which manifests
itself as a kind of split art.

2) Decorative games: in this case the production is stimulated and almost inflated by the desire for
beautification, for the “creation of the beautiful”. Excess of lines and colors, accumulation of details and
beautiful shapes, increasingly sophisticated motifs, endless in their spatial expansion and geometric or
symmetrical perfection, interlocking forms, cumbersome intertwined ornaments, complicated compositions in
which the tangle of stylized natural shapes that are placed side by side overlap they complement each other, use
the background, to the point of bursting, fill the space that the stubborn and stormy imaginations of our lunatics
provide cardboard, fabric, wall, dirty papers, or a memorial. Rhymes, syllabic pranks, calculators, comic word
associations or combined reminiscences create certain arabesques, which curl and develop in the form of singing
mourning, intermittent stanzas and sometimes alternating choruses. In this guise, these games woven from
multicolored rasters are projected into ornaments, embroidery or extravagant ornaments, as well as their paced
rhythm set the pace of thought, voice and gestures of those who are soothing and whose enjoyment they express.
Long lines of animal heads, industrial elevations, soldiers on guard, broken arches of cathedrals, encircled
circles, parades of balloons and crosses, couplets, ascents or ballads, all these forms chant their lives as unknown
movements of artistic breathing.

3) Descriptive and narrative depiction: in this case it is "drawings", "paintings" and also "narratives" and
"poems". Motifs of the face and the human body, often “simultaneous”, tilted and outstretched heads, a cluster
of several physiognomies and phases of a mimic melody, vague grimaces. Crippled human crowds, figures laid
out on tree branches like flowers, scenes from daily life, “cum grano salis”: a scene with fantastic humor
depicting a donkey sitting with his family at a table, a scorpion in a teacup and a well in the middle of the room.
Countless crowds of round heads and raised arms, desert landscapes filled only with a flood of vehicles or a
cluster of trees in the corner. Historical, allegorical and fairytale costumes. Symmetrical or inverted figures,
indeterminate, mixed or cursed. Significant units inscribed in a concentration around a mystical or erotic motif,
memories immobilized in a moment of astonishment, surprise, fury, etc. telling about the present everyday life
or memories from the past: it develops in comic protests of spoiling inspirations and fantasies with the meaning
of pamphlets, pastes or satire. Other times they are verse texts in the form of sonnets, psalms, "realistic songs" or
"black spirituals". In all these works, the desire to reproduce the sacred aspect of reality, the privileged fact, the
desire to tell or sing about them in one's own original way, whether comic or dramatic, erupts, but always
stagnates in Baroque color prints. Children's imagination, the memory of well-known literary and artistic works,
grotesque, mischievous or pathetic ingenuity contribute to the production of these “scenes”, scenes from life that
have a taste of death and to which all “naturalism” is usually forbidden.

4) Fantastic images: they materialize in the same way in sculpture, painting or poetry. The most breathtaking are, of
course, in the form of painting. It is thus a matter of creating a fantastic concentration in the contours of a drawing
or colored matter, which acquires a phantomic character of penetrating emotional value. Such aesthetic production
is irresistibly reminiscent of a dreamy scene, and is often indeed a dreamy or hallucinatory “experience”, the lyrical
value of which is stylized and concretized into a lavish, hermetic and appropriated depiction. For such works are, in
the true sense of the word, jewels cut from a poetic substance, unique and extremely rare jewels. In order not to
stretch this description too much - if he were to grasp the essence of this aesthetic material, he would have to
include a very long comment - I will be content by recalling a few captivating examples. Prinzhorn's book gives us
many opportunities to penetrate the magical atmosphere of these creations. Let us recall in particular painting No
167 ('Angel of Death'), which also forms the title page of the book, as well as painting No 41 ('Feeding horses'), 57
('Delusion'), 68 ('Ecce Homo'), 72 ("Miracle on the inner sole of a slipper"), 133 ("Two figures"), 159 ("Fantastic
drawing"), 123 ("Miracle Shepherd") and 140 ("Circle of man's imagination").

But before I talk about these last two works, I would like to remind you that there is an enigmatic creation in St.
Anne's Library (at Prinzhorn No. 110).

one anonymous patient. This is a watercolor depicting a head. The profile is clear and simple and at the neck
level it is cut with a sharp line. The hair is replaced by a series of ornamentally placed bodies, hung on top of
each other as on a horizontal bar and forming the links of three strangely curved fingers. The last row
representing the headdress

it is composed of female faces that reproduce the main profile and are wrapped in a hood; these faces are placed
on top of each other in strict and symmetrical “curls”. The whole shows a head gripped by a mechanical and
multifaceted human hand. The painting gives a "gloomy", mechanical and cold impression, an impression of
machine and aggressive automatism, caused by the multiplication of artificial characters exactly where an
invisible and silent brain was to be found, the first, free and hidden thought.

August Neter, "The Miracle Shepherd" (No. 123)

The “Miracle Shepherd” (at Prinzhorn No. 123) is the work of the “schizophrenic master” August Neter,
whose work is, in my opinion, the most lyrical. In a gray monotonous and oceanic space, a cluster of forms
rises, the main line of which is the shape of a bayonet. A giant vertical head of a surfaced fish, to which the
foot adjoins horizontally, and a severed snake's torso, and a small lyre swirls between them, an obvious
symbol of the female sex. The upper vertical branch consists of a foot and a foot, to which are attached a
snake body with a head and a peaceful silhouette of a mysterious figure, who has a hat on his head and holds
a cane in his hand. Her dog is simply and innocently sitting in front of her. The whole consists of a very
sober and stylized drawing with a wonderful and amazing accuracy of lines, which mark the movement of
the transformation of shapes from one segment of the composition to another. I know nothing more
"fantastic" than this creation. Neter added a few "explanations" to his subject:

There was a spectacle in the air, glittering green and blue. A foot approached him. Then came the other leg.
That leg was made of beets. My father-in-law's face appeared on this long leg, in one word: the miracle of
the world. The forehead shrank into wrinkles and the annual rings sprouted out of them. They then became a
tree. The bark of the tree was broken in front in such a way that the notch shaped the mouth. [...] Then the
female genitalia appeared between the leg and the foot, that is, the sin comes from the woman and leads the
man to fall. Then came a Jew, a shepherd girded with sheepskin [...]. That shepherd is me. These paintings
were only for himself; others might see them as well, but "it would be death for them."
The image of another patient from Heidelberg (at Prinzhorn No. 140), Heinrich Welz, is made up of subtle,
almost disappearing strokes: the massive head of a bearded, biblical man drawn in sharp strokes opens into a
shape of a tent at the top and liberates a truly miraculous world where in an exceptionally simple and stylized
sketch, a pile of buildings, floors of houses, embankments, castles and human figures towering over towers, a
hand crawling on the roof, etc. - This whole set of many multi-storey architectural forms, as well as a lot of
rational composition, it is a kind of seat, a palace miraculously built from a fantastic mind, the abode of madness
itself.
Literary work abounds in so many "fantastic images" of this kind that I would rather not give examples known
to all here. I just note that the fantastic work most often remains trapped in a verbal and magical tide, the eternal
source of poetry, which we call delirium. How many times it happened to us that we were hit, penetrated by a
flash of aesthetics that emerges from some of these creations, not only artistic but also verbal. One day a patient
came to see me, an old woman, small, and with her banal and ordinary appearance an almost "insignificant"
country girl, when she suddenly lit up here and to my amazement she said the following words:
All four, František, Michal, Jan and Ludvík [her brothers] put us in my mother's womb. We sat on a small
bench. Daddy wanted to go in too, and we prevented him from doing so, and the galleys, meanwhile, won
fanfare.

5) Great symbolic compositions: I do not have enough courage or skills to describe the magnificent and
mysterious character of these drawings, watercolors, oil paintings or those great literary works that reflect
the idea of a mad world. How can we "describe" this world of images, each part of which contains one of the
wings of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights"? How to describe these metamorphoses,
allegories and myths, penetrating landscapes, architectures, the "cosmos" of human flesh, body and organs?
We are blinded by the magic of these creations, this “story” open like a corpse, which shows its symbols in
its translucency, but with its opacity it retains the abysses of hermetic secrets. Take a look at "The Back of
the World" (at Prinzhorn No. 151), crayoned by Joseph Sell, a geek whose clinical history is described by
Prinzhorn, and tell me if his drawing depicts the entire universe. Here, as we shall see later, the work is so
intertwined with madness that it is almost dissolved in a delirious image of the world and becomes a simple
reflection of the flourishing richness of its inspiration. I would like us to listen now to what one of my
patients wrote, who comes from humble circumstances and from which, like Pythia sitting on a tripod of her
madness, an inexhaustible source of fantasy magic gushes:

As I gradually explain as I write, the things written are judged, but the fighting continues as some of them go
on the offensive again. We do not have to despair or give up as long as we have property and as long as there
is good food in the world, it is proof that there are still good creatures in the world. Many will continue to eat
me from within, it is useless to tear myself apart and cut myself, only to suffer more, I free myself, as I can,
without cutting, by the fluid I have in my mouth, which manages to dissolve metals that are not of the same
kind, and to separate from them and untie the live telegraph wires and other wires that are involved,
sometimes disrupting the connection, I must not touch the wounds on the bodies of other creatures that are
on the cuckoos. I also wanted to tell you that there are fluids among the patients that attack and etch good
metals that have been used by doctors or surgeons during operations. I know that some metals were taken
away from me to make needles for my vaccinations because I felt it, and some made cups and goblets and
Chinese tea sets with my metal mixed with the mass from my skeleton when up the books of the one who
called herself Jean Thimothée [her father] are coming, I am experiencing terrible pain on the right side of my
chest, my life has been taken away from this side to make it a tea or coffee service, my island of Formosa is
largely devastated . The Jean Thimothée is upstairs and is in the Pacific Ocean, I have his photograph
multiplied with my eyes on a piece of parchment between China and the island of Formosa, I can show it to
you, if you wish, on the route of the Tropic of Cancer. Vitriol-producing creatures are very dangerous to look
 at and must not come into contact with other creatures. At the tip of my feet is Annam and behind my skull is
a city called Quimper. In India they have been flogged for centuries in a holy temple, salvation, like my
currents that have entered, is flogged, salvation with black curly hair greeted me from the moon a few years
ago at midnight, India was irritated for many centuries by a mysterious fluid. On the green carpet, some play
Jean Thimothé and others, although the owners of the name are not to throw themselves on my property, it is
not surprising that we have been deprived of Paris and a lot of food for so long, some dare to play with
countries called the fathers of creation, although they were never their descendants other than cannibalistic
practices, and many of those who have many possessions were persuaded by some to eat misery as colonists
in the colonies, and for centuries some could not get rid of them. besa and paradise and all their bodies are
full of it, and so the robbery continued. For a long time, many have been trying to find out what the real
name of a provincial entity is to sign it as its sovereign owners, but there are so many elements that
fortunately there are many names. [...] Some penetrate the walls of the monastery to starve me, and I have
heard that the pieces of rock from which it is built come from China. It is a harmful liquid that eats me in
China and many other places and which claims to be my father and which flows through the premises as well
as their property with my stolen bodies to give the impression that I had a different form, and you they do
not cease to cause pain at night or during the day, and others, many of those who have been imprisoned for
years, attack in this way because their portraits are known and seize the bodies and other races for which the
lives of others suffer and are doomed to forced labor, filled with food and drink of other creatures, go to
school to become shepherds and priests and to know all the holy secrets and all power. They can see how
they make plans of ships and other things, it is terrible to be hit by a welder, good and bad metals have been
welded together in many warships.

What could a psychiatrist deliver after such an influx of lyrics without embarrassment?
We have just reached the top of the poetic construction of chorality. We see that style, structure and aesthetic
form are flooded with that powerful current of poetry experienced, words that become the world.
The psychopathological value of this production: our study describing the aesthetic production of sickly
patients has so far remained before its real object, which is the bond between aesthetic production and madness.
The rule of "all or nothing" cannot satisfy us here or elsewhere, and it is necessary to penetrate to the core of
phenomenological analysis, to the place where the work is born, born and develops, to the living source of its
inspiration.

Some creations are "juxtaponized aesthetic forms," meaning that they have no direct connection to mental
disorders. For example, when we carefully study the collection located in the St. Anne's Library, we realize that
most of the canvases were created by patients who are either in convalescence or already healed, accustomed to
painting, and mastering "craft" or "talent." Such works are the fruit of technology and common inspiration, their
style and “execution” are in accordance with the production of a certain school and do not result only from
personal inspiration. And when these creations emphasize brilliant and exciting originality, they show
experience or technical value that has already been confirmed. Their main feature is stylistic continuity before,
during and after illness. In the case of these poetic or artistic “expressions”, it is similar to the speech or
behavior of patients who remain untouched by the disease or survive it. Thus we have before us the first,
essentially “negative” form of the relationship between aesthetic production and “morbidity”.

Other works are "aesthetic forms altered by disease". Literary and artistic works, drawings and poems “bear the
mark of disease”, but it is still a production whose inspiration and performance remain inscribed in the history of
the individual style. Very interesting work by Fr. Minkowska about Van Gogh, which she even introduced to us
here a few years ago, shows how epileptic disorders correspond to significant changes in the painter's meaning
and expression. If we add to this penetrating analysis another in which Claude and Masquin analyzed the
paintings of a patient with progressive paralysis, we are particularly impressed by what Minkowska wrote about
Van Gogh: “Psychosis does not transform anything in depth; if it riots inward, it adds a new tone that completes
the artist's inner tragedy.” Likewise, Claude and Masquin note in their patient,“ that craft automatics have been
preserved, with intellectual weakening affecting the way the artist's personality condenses. “. So in cases of this
kind, it is both a change and the stability of production, without there being anything substantially different in its
construction and its sudden emergence from ordinary artistic expression, which maintains its style, its rules and
its own register of means. In such cases, the most disturbed factor seems to be the inspiration, freeing itself from
the formal rules of its ordinary expression, as if psychosis actually shook the system of meaning much more
than art techniques. With more frequent observation of literary or poetic production, it is easy to observe this
“liberation” of deep expressive tendencies during the development of repeated and paroxysmal psychoses,
which triggers rhythm, execution, style, freedom of a special “way” and inspiration. However, the basic aspect
of this aesthetic pathological production is the distance with respect to production, and here we come to the
fundamental point, namely that this production retains its “artificial'' meaning. What a manic poet writes is a
poem, what a demented painter paints is a "painting," and if this poem and this painting fall from it like apples
from a tree, he detaches himself from them and they from him.
Let us now examine the third modality of the relationship that unites production with a psychopathic artist. This
is the case of "aesthetic forms of disease projection". Of course, in the first case, which we have described
above, painting, poetry or prose of the mentally ill can take their illness as a theme and express this lived event
with their theme and means; and in the latter case, the deformation which the disease causes to the formation is
nothing but the imprint of the disease experience. Here, however, we mean the unique structure of this
relationship. We want to talk about the projection - unconscious mechanisms of liberated diseases - onto the
conscious surface of the psyche, from where creation "separates". So far, we have basically examined only the
case of acute or irregular psychoses, but in diseased chronic arrangements of psychic life, aesthetic production
can affect a specific aspect of the disease's complex projection in its relationships with personality (and
especially in psycho neuroses). Aesthetic production here takes the form of a central image (Oedipus' complex,
sadomasochism, castration, anal, etc.). It rises and spreads in poetic or artistic form like a flower that emerged
from the symbol of an updated disease. It represents a myth to which the sick is magically attached. After all,
rather than neurosis, it creates, uses and crystallizes expressive abilities that "in front of his eyes" and "in front
of him" throw the inner drama of his life into the image or on a sheet of paper.

Such creations are characterized by conscious symbolism if the patient knows the meaning of the metaphor they
carry out, but the mechanism of their projection remains unconscious if it blurs the line between subjectivity and
objectivity: that is, the imaginary seeks to be experienced as "real". that the world and art strive for
interconnection and identification. A mentally ill person does not perceive that while indulging in the flourishing
of a work, he is less obedient to the desire to express or display the work than to the desire to experience it. We
thus take another step in the dialectic of relations between the work and its psychopathic author; indeed,
production still remains an “artificial creation”: it is a “picture” that can be framed, a “poem” that can be
published in a collection of poetry, something that we are somewhat distant from and separated from by the
depth of objectivity. It is still something "done," "done," "expressed." However, it is also a system of images
that does not belong only to the ego (moi) in its origin, but remains attached to it as a living tsar (soi). To
illustrate this specific form that grows out of the neurotic, perhaps we could refer to the very beautiful
observations of Delay, Desclaux, and Dig that have just been released.32) Their patient, whose drawings
attracted attention at the St. Anne's Exhibition, was neurotic and nervously unstable painter (psychasthenia
bordering on schizophrenia). He portrayed (in a “style” whose relationship with Max Ernst's work may indicate
a real influence by this painter) the horror of sex: machines and distillation apparatus in which the secrets of the
real wizarding world are produced and released, desert landscapes filled with stiff or dead objects and animated
or already living mechanical figures, all in an ingeniously clear merger or rather in an ingeniously considered
 and well-thought-out juxtaposition of breathtakingly precise indefinite and dreamy forms. He added an
explanation to each of his paintings and drawings: The muse evokes in the artist, not depicted but symbolized,
the transformation of the instruments of suffering and death into instruments and means of action, joy and
happiness; - Beauty and Ugliness, the Woman and the Monster, which is a kind of artificial robot; - the octopus
represents the female genitalia, whose obscenity is symbolized by the head, etc. that is, what separates the work
from it.
This attachment of the work to the person is even deeper and more evident in the category of creation, which we
will refer to here as “aesthetic forms of one's own madness”. Here, production is nothing more than an aspect of
psychosis, it has no “aesthetic”, “moral” or “intellectual” meaning, but only the meaning of psychosis itself (we
will discuss this issue at the end of this text), and as we mentioned above, artistic or literary production is only
accidental due to the lyrical and magical work, which forms the essence of the crazy idea of the world of
psychosis. Thus, the fact that the patient draws, writes or paints, or, on the contrary, suffices with speaking or
“dreaming”, does not bring anything into the aesthetic essence of delusion or take away from it: man has turned
into poetry. It has become an "aesthetic object."

32) V časopise Semaine des Hôpitaux, květen 1947.

However, in order to properly understand the true meaning of this formulation, which must seem strange and
which we will use later, it is essential to first distinguish well the two basic aspects of psychosis; it is a
distinction that forms one of the cornerstones of my psychiatric concept.33)
In the first case, the patient is immersed in a certain dream or in one of those dream modalities which constitute
a “primary delicate experience” corresponding to different levels of decomposition of psychic activity; then the
patient is a prisoner of his dream. He is its author and spectator. However, he maintains just enough distance to
realize this influx of the imaginary he is and lives on, and the hallucinatory world can hardly separate from it
and establish himself in this structure. It is this common, but double-bowed root of person and fiction, the point
of contact that is the essence of hallucination, that makes something come out of me and stand in front of me.

33) Viz první svazek mých Psychiatrických studií (1948) a zejména studii č. 8: „Sen
jako prvořadý jev psychopatologie“.

In the second case, the patient does not experience fiction immediately and in the current arrangement of the
present moment, the field of his consciousness, but carries it within himself as an inexhaustible source of
inspiration and miracle. She moved into the structure of his personality, ie. into the path of his possibilities, into
his ideal of himself. Here, fiction is separated from the automatic and spontaneous movement that gave birth to
it, or rather, it survives it, so it is no longer mixed with the structure of the present reality, but with the structure
of all possible reality.
If we want to grasp this basic structural difference, which I am trying to place at the center of the study of all
chronic delirium psychoses, it is becoming increasingly clear that aesthetic production, which forms a whole
with psychosis, can take on two different modalities in its relationships with personality: modalities of automatic
aesthetic production and modalities of thoughtful aesthetic production, but “thoughtful” in madness.
Poetic or artistic, immediately experienced automatic emanation is strictly identical with the degree of aesthetic
production of a dream. In this case, fiction spontaneously erupts from the very sources of inspiration, ie from the
living movement that gives birth to the world of fundamentally "aesthetic" images, as J.-P. Sartre in his opinion,
in my opinion, the most amazing book, L'Imaginaire (Imaginary). Just as the dreamer is "fascinated" by the
abundance of imaginary forms that flourish in himself, the chore-minded is captivated by his enchantment in a
state of acute experience of madness. If his hand reaches for a pen or brush, he does nothing but extend beyond
him what is happening inside him. The aesthetic expression, which is only an extra degree in relation to the
words describing his sick “experience”, comes directly from the magical world.
Thoughtful poetic or artistic production brings us closer to art in the sense that the deep bond that unites
individuals and art is no longer immediate, but breaks into the order of the world. However, this arrangement of
the world is delirious, meaning that every part of it is "in the world"; the metaphor loses its depth of primordial
nature, the symbol its extent unreal, the image its analogous function, and the work of art, like the patient's own
dream, becomes a being in the world. The patient neither paints the picture nor writes a poem. The work has as
much a magical value as it has an aesthetic value. The author has fallen into an abyss in which not only does the
reality not exist, because everything is fantastic, but where, thanks to the metamorphosis that took place in it,
there is so much reality that no more imagination is possible in it.
Perhaps at the end of this study, we might now try to figure out why we find so few works in our patients. In
cases where the bonds between talent and disorder are sufficiently loose, only experienced or talented
individuals create their works, while in cases where the work is really based on psychosis, it mixes so much with
its movement, experience and structure. that it is essentially nothing but expressive randomness. In fact, the
works of the mentally ill are relatively rare. As we will see now, the essence of madness is BEING an aesthetic
focus rather than CREATING a work of art.

III. - SURREALISM, ART AND MADNESS

Whether we let ourselves be captivated by the atmosphere of “paintings -objects”, the mannequins of Giorgi de Chirico
and Carlo Carry, or let us be fascinated by the magic of Braqu's composition or some Picasso's prank; whether we are
captivated by the construction of Max Ernst (Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale), or let ourselves be carried
away by the seductive poetry of André Breton and Éluard, captivated by “Dalí” jokes and whims, the comedy Mud
Children by Raymond Queneau, puns by Michel Leiris, etc. it is still the same world, at the same time strange, baroque
and miraculous, in which we follow these guides of our own lyrical desire. Originality and extravagant ingenuity,
brought to the highest degree of engineering and dream, seize us in such a way that it causes a break in reality, so
sovereignly irritating that even laughter, which only wants to ridicule its absurdity, gushes from its power. Let's move on
to one work that completes the surreal "aesthetics" and read Andre Breton's text on it. It's an "anti-painting" by Marcel
Duchamp. The bride undressed by her bachelors, even.
For the sake of simplicity, I will confine myself to [...] describing only briefly the life of a relationship which, in my
opinion, unites the thirteen basic components of the work [...].
Through the three upper nets (air songs), the bride exchanges orders with the youth machine, orders driven by the Milky
Way. Nine male (at least in terms of expectations) castings, which by definition have "accepted" the flue gas and created
its castings, allow the flue gas to escape by a certain number of capillaries located in their upper part (each of which of
these capillaries, in which the gas flows, has the shape of a prototype measure, ie a shape which, after falling to the
ground, receives a meter long fiber which was previously horizontally stretched at a height of one meter above the
ground and suddenly left to itself [...] .
[...] The bride undressed by her bachelors - two main elements: 1. The bride - 2. The bachelors [...]. The young men are to
serve as the architectural basis for the bride, who becomes the apotheosis of virginity. Steam engine with a brick
foundation. On this solid brick base, solid body, a fat and slimy bachelor machine (divorce). At the place (upwards)
where this eroticism manifests itself (which must be one of the large gears of the youth machine), this afflicted gearing
produces a component - a stiffness at the machine. The tough component changes the whole mechanism: a steam-
powered machine becomes an explosive engine. This engine - a brick is the last part of a youth machine. The motor is
rigidly separated from direct contact with the Bride by a paddle-driven radiator (or water). This cooler (graphically) to
express that the Bride - instead of being just a piece of ice without a hint of sensuality, rejects the warmly (and not
chaste) hasty offer of the bachelors [...]. Despite the cooler, the connection between the youth machine and the Bride is
not disturbed. However, the connections will be electrical and will thus express undressing: an alternating process. Short
circuit if necessary.
Bride. - If this engine of the Bride is to appear in general as an apotheosis of virginity, that is, ignorant and - with a pinch of
malice - immaculate desire, and if it does not need to (graphically) comply with the rules of onerous balance, with her friends
and parents [...]. The bride is essentially an engine. But before it becomes an engine that transmits its power - timidity is
precisely this timid force. This power - timelessness is a kind of fuel, a love gasoline, which - carried to the fragile cylinders
within reach of the sparks of her unchanging life - serves to flourish this virgin, who has reached the peak of desire. (The
desire-gears will take up less space here than in a bachelor machine. It is just a ribbon enclosing a bouquet). All the graphic
significance serves this kinematic flourishing [...]. Controlled by electric undressing, this flourishing is the Bride's aura, quite
radiant vibrations: it is completely out of the discussion to graphically symbolize this peak of the Bride's blissful desire with
the help of an exalted painting; for the sake of clarity only, the painting will be an index of the elements of this flourishing,
the elements of the sexual life dreamed of by the longing Bride. In this heyday, the Bride appears naked in two forms: firstly
as undressed bachelors and secondly by her own imagination. The whole flourishing depends on the connection of these two
forms of pure virginity, on their collision: the higher whole and the crown of the whole picture. Develop: 1) flourish when
undressing bachelors; 2) flourishing in the imaginary undressing of the longing Bride; 3) to find peace for these two graphic
elaborations, which should be in "prosperity without distinction of cause" [...].

"I think it is useless to emphasize what such a concept conceals a completely new [...]," concludes A. Breton.34) The
mysterious secrets of the labyrinth, the Grévin Museum or the cabinet of magic, where we are not really in danger without
irony and fear, but where, for the price of simple permission, we can feel the strange chill of the unreal, the miraculous
unreal ...

This is the essence of surrealist aesthetics: it draws us to the abyss of our own dream, and it is to its “aesthetic value” that we
must now focus on.

Imagine a museum of scents, where visitors would come to enjoy the scents of roses, lilies of the valley, in short, the most
delicate essences and the most exquisite scents. And let's imagine that the “new aesthetic” will offer lovers of olfactory
sensations with a combination of malice and seriousness ammonia, devil's shit, etc. We can easily think of what fuss the
crowd makes: “We came to inhale pleasant scents and they shove the most disgusting fumes! ”This is, I think, the idea we
naively create about both art and the“ surrealist revolution ”in art.

34) Minotaure Magazine, No. 6, 1935, pp. 48-49. [André Breton (1934): “Marcel Duchamp. Phare de «La Mariée» “, in:
Survival and painting. New edition revised and corrected 1928–1965 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965)] - pozn. transl.

Everyone "feels" or thinks they understand what's beautiful about Mona Lisa, Millet's Kneeling, Botticello Jaro, Titian's
portrait, frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, El Greco's Count Orgasm's Funeral, etc., "we don't feel", we resist " to feel "what is"
beautiful "in Picasso's" abominations "or in the" stupidities "of Duchamp and Dali. We look forward to the smell, and they
look at us with spoiled eggs! This feeling of being cheated and ridiculed would be justified if the essence of art lay in "sense
gratification." But this is not the art. "Sensual pleasure," writes J.-P. At the end of his Imaginary, Sartre “has nothing
aesthetic in him [...]. When we perceive red in the image, we perceive it as part of an unreal whole, and it is this whole that
makes it beautiful. ”I would even say that the key to all aesthetic“ value ”is the function of this belonging to the unreal,
namely to the extent that aesthetic enjoyment and knowledge begin with a real "lover" 35) of art only when - after
suppressing his and her "theme" in the image above all and naturally - he clings to the miracle of this curve, to form,
shadow , the ratio of matter and values, this balance of colors, etc. Not only does he believe that he begins to appreciate the
"technique of execution", but also enters the game itself unreal, the weight, light and meaning of these forms, which are
offered to him in their unique and original “art”. Before this portrait of Vermeer, I do not rejoice in the colors, but in the
mystery of colors ...

This irresistibly leads us to consider poetry as the essence of aesthetics, which in its nature cannot be understood
other than as a mystery. Jean Paulhan's book La Clef de la Poésie (The Key to Poetry) is very rare in this
respect. between the two elements of each expression. Sometimes the meaning lies in the formal construction of
characters. And other times, despite the clear lightness of the formal structure, the deep and dark meaning is
reflected.
 35) We are forced to use this terrible word here, which trivializes aesthetic emotions. We would like to give him
the meaning of the Spanish word “afi cionado”, which would restore his emphasis on passionate sincerity. 36)
Jean Paulhan: Clef de la poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 1944).

However, aesthetic feeling always springs from this disproportion, indefinite edge and ambiguity. What often
unknowingly impresses us with the most carefully crafted piece of marble, with the best-balanced architecture,
the most vividly painted canvas, the most parnationalist sonnet, the best-built tragedy, or the most striking
drama are not the perfect forms we realize, but the secrets based on them, an incredibly doubling clarity of their
contours. Poetry in poetry is not "pure poetry", but "true poetry" and Valéry is as great a poet in his prose as in
the verses. Photography begins to be aesthetic at a time when it reveals the qualities of distant mere reproduction
of objects, for example if it is “out of focus” or “well lit”, in short, when something, as in nature itself, seems to
take away its “nature”. "And he moves in it. This royal journey leading to the imaginary phantasm of art can be
taken in two ways. Either the author refines the reality of the still depicted reality in a well-thought-out
architecture of the style and erects the radiant unreality of the form as a symphony or cathedral, or by drawing
from the world of paintings and presenting them to us in the form of formless strips of flesh and blood. The bet
in this game is again and still unreal, variously sublimated and with more or less impressively harmonized in the
technique of more or less organized "Gestalt".

Another and even deeper aspect of the aesthetic feeling is the fact that if we come into contact
with the unreal through a "continuous vessel" of art, we encounter the image of another, creator
unknown to us, who sets his expression as a gift and the sensitivity of those who we necessarily
associate it with our charm. The meeting with the author takes place more or less from the path of
this agreement, depending on whether the work is direct or hermetic, but it always requires the
“lover's” enthusiasm and requires his cooperation in the work postponed until this decisive
meeting. The degree of its involvement even ensures and determines its aesthetic enjoyment. In
this respect, the creator-lover pair is a structural dimension of the aesthetic feeling, which requires
not only the confrontation of these two functions, but also their inversion: 37) because every lover
of a work of art completes his work or creates it again and in a new form. For this reason, it seems
to us that every work of art contains some loose, usable and random part, which the hermetic work
only completes. However, an image, a musical composition or a poem are, or rather, the focus of
another meeting, namely with imaginary or real characters, which we let with us enter into
contemplation and which evoke our affection or evoke our memories. I don't think we would
enjoy the aesthetic object ourselves. Fashion, general collective taste, or taste limited to one
aesthetic fraternity are nothing but the grossest aspects of this participation. The projection of our
ties with the "other", whom we more or less identify with our own image and the image of the
characters who attract our libido in various forms, is an integral part of this "contact." All
“aestheticians” have understood this profound unity, which is also at the root of aesthetic
enjoyment. It is certainly one of the things that Jean Paulhan put it perfectly when he wrote: "In
order for poetry to be possible, it is simply necessary, and it seems that it is enough for there to be
communication, conversation, intercourse." 38)
This opens the ultimate meaning of the aesthetic world, which is the communication of our
most intimate and deepest nature: images that move our lives. Although only here and there in the
history of art do so-called "symbolic" works of art shine (because in frescoes and paintings they
express the essence of humanity: Old Testament, Shakespeare, Hieronymus Bosch, Max Jacob), in
fact a deep current of every work, every aesthetic school is never nothing more than a lyrical
stream that mixes art, love and mysticism. Myths, psalms, poetry, "cours d'amour", knightly
novels, frescoes, tragedies, museums or symphonies hold us all at heart. They touch in us the
lyrical core of humanity, the core which we all "contain" and which unites us, as well as our
views, language and feelings. So perhaps now we can better understand that surrealism is just a
sharpened form of aesthetics, which was in its motion so far that the "patterns of art" are reversed.
Where “classical” art seems to play a keyboard for the enjoyment of the senses, form, perfectly
executed expression, and subliminal touch, surrealist aesthetics immediately finds the concepts
opposite to all these formulas: miraculous unreality, depth, infinity, and the libidinous brutality of
aesthetic unity. .
37) I deliberately use a term here that allows me to understand exactly what role it plays
homosexual narcissism in his free time and the career of an esthete. 38) Jean Paulhan: Clef de la
poésie, cit. d., p. 124.

If the barrier between Art (ie "Art" with a capital A, which belongs to the Academy) and "surrealist art" is thus
broken down, then it is not surprising that the production of our patients also includes something in common that
is their " aesthetic ”feature. In this, but only in this respect, there is no essential difference between the aesthetics
that radiate from every work of art and the aesthetics that rise from madness.

Before we approach the general issue of the structural differences between the surrealist aesthetics and the
aesthetics of madness, we still have a few threads to unravel from this haunting entanglement. We must
correctly understand that what is called the field of aesthetics means at the same time and necessarily what is
and what is created. Natural forms are aesthetic either by undergoing a transformation imposed on them by the
ways of our feelings, or by breaking in the lyrical core of our nature. Forms created by artists are also
aesthetic.39) Aesthetic objects and aesthetic works are the two edges of a moving series of forms of psychic life
which, expressing our own harmony and harmony with the common world of images, form a dialectic of beauty.
And it is from this perspective that the “aesthetic object”, the “work of art” and the “artist” must be defined.

The aesthetic object as a natural form (sunset, diamond, dream) is characterized by a deep and immediate
resonance, which some aspects of the sensory world evoke in us, if they come from a miracle, ie. from what is
experienced as unreal. Like a diamond, sunset is “unreal” in that the glare it evokes in us has something
inconsistent with aspects of reality we know. The dazzling excess of colors and rays is “aesthetic,” while the
cannon shot is not, because it opens the gates of fear in front of us and throws us into the terrifying arms of
reality, while the former opens the gates of dream in front of us and allows us to return to ourselves. Every
“aesthetic phenomenon” of nature is reduced to this own movement of magical dreaming, as it defines an
aesthetic object as an “imaginary” whose focus is a dream.

39) We must use the word "artist" so degraded and emptied here, so be it however, it is understood as a
synonym for "magician".

A work of art is the creation, artificial formation of an aesthetic object. It is a creation of expressive work
corresponding to a formal principle, the law of style. It is arranged according to a certain ideal, which
determines a given school or epoch. Every work of art becomes - if in a piece of marble, on paper or on canvas it
expresses with the help of characters, colors or sounds the artist's desire to "realize" forms of his receptivity -
part of an artificial framework, that is, it separates from the author in a form that distances him from him and
brings him closer to others.

Finally, the "artist", whether indulging in his inspiration or unconscious automatism, whether shaping or giving
style or taming the influx of his eidetic spontaneity - or indulging in the unconscious and free flow of his
paintings - the artist always separates his work from himself . As we have repeated several times, it disconnects
from it. However deep the bond with which his work belongs to its essence, sooner or later the artist will always
break it. Before: when he processes a form until he "finishes" it; later: when he exhibits his work as a mystery.
Moreover, the work and the ideal begin to separate from their source of inspiration and “mission” in the
intention and through the intention to create the work, to lead the “artist's life” in projecting the virtual image
into its future framework, in projecting this ideal of life into the life program. “Sincerity” is thus eternally
questioned, and no more tragic effort will be able - and this is the “romantic” drama of the artist's life - to
completely and definitively suppress this basic outburst.

After explaining what is fundamentally identical in all aesthetic production, and especially in the production of
surrealism and madness, we are now able to quickly solve the real problem: the question of the structural
differences that separate one production from another.

Let us first ask ourselves this general question: does the subject of psychiatry include surrealist aesthetics?

To approach this issue, we need to answer three questions: What are the intrinsic characteristics of the surrealist
experience? What is the very subject of psychiatry? What differences separate aesthetic production surrealistic
from psychopathological?

1) Characteristic features of surrealist “experience”: All the incomprehensibility, illogicality, irrationality,

miraculousness, whims, fits of imagery, anarchist freedom, and subversiveness must not distract us from the
direct and consistent route marked by Breton. Beneath all the confusion and cracking lies in the surreal
experience of discipline, rigor and style. The concepts of automatism and pure spontaneity did not detract from
the fact that, as Maurice Blanchot writes, 40) “the specificity of the Breton school lies in the fact that it has
always kept irreconcilable tendencies together. No more literature, and yet it strives for literary research, the
pursuit of figurative alchemy, the constant attention paid to procedures and images, criticism and technique.
Writing has no meaning. [...] And yet he has it; writing is a means of authentic experience, a completely
legitimate means of giving a person an awareness of the meaning of his situation ”. And let us remember the call
of a dogmatist in the Legitimate Defense: "Writing like this does not mean, as far as I know, neither playing nor
cheating." 41)

Even in the days of Desnos' “sleep period” and automatic writing and Magnetic Fields, every experience of this
kind really took place in the sign of “command,” control, and evaluation of the work. Intention cannot do
without rich production, and as Michel Leiris recently told me, "it's a matter of speed". Some (such as Desnos)
could indulge in intoxicating and inspiring virtuosity, and others (Raymond Roussel) did not design their
fantastic structure other than according to meticulous architectural rules. It is one thing to give in to inspiration
and it is another to cut back from your inspiration, to show yourself as a machine, speaker or phonograph, to
delete from the work of the author, the character! I can't think about it here, because I'm not competent enough
to show what surreal "styles" and "techniques" were born and formed.

40) Maurice Blanchot: “Some exions on surrealism”, cit. d., pp. 95–96 -

note transl. 41) André Breton: "Legitimate Defense", cit. Mr. Nadeau: History of Surrealism, cit. d.,

I am content to quote M. Blanchot once again: “If speech is connected with the silence of my immediate
thought, it becomes authentic only when it implements it; we must say goodbye to literature. Those famous
attacks against the concepts of work, art or talent are based in part on the postulate of writing an idea [...].
Nevertheless, it may be a fact that surrealism seems to us mainly as aesthetics and seems to us to be primarily
interested in words. Is it the inconsistency or perhaps the weakness of writers ashamed to be what they are?
Rather, it is a matter of fidelity to their conception of speech. Words are free and perhaps they can set us free; all
you have to do is follow them, surrender to them, surrender all sources of invention and memory to their
services. If, as Jean Paulhan says, rhetoric consists in claiming that an idea comes from words, then it is true that
surrealism is rhetoric. ”42) This is not, moreover, a“ rejection ”of the methods of surrealism itself, but only a
signal that without he can't get around them. As we have emphasized for a long time, surrealism is a form of art,
 and in a sense a form of the highest art, surrealist creations are works and surrealist artists. Although they
rebelled against this idea, they could do nothing to defend their “value” other than to enter the system of values,
talents, style that characterizes the school. Because "artists" are artists, even if they claim not to be them. Their
attitude to reality and society, their submission to nonconformity, their forgiveness represent the usual and - God
forgive me! - traditional features of "esthete". I know that if I take one of the "most extravagant" among them
and one of the "most suspicious" for them, Salvador Dali, I cannot judge everyone. But I read his Secret Life
carefully, and I can say that what amazed me most about his author was the most obvious thing: a systematic
"determination" to imagination and eccentricity. His life unfolds like an endless Freudian dream, like
"madness." "I'm crazy," he writes repeatedly, "except for one small thing, namely that I'm not crazy." This
wording seems concise to me and expresses quite precisely a form of the fantastic ideal of himself, which Dali
himself calls himself (referring to J. Lacan ) by paranoid criticism, in which, however, I would rather see a
certain semblance of paranoia, just as it is time for the Surrealists to generally distinguish the semblance of
madness, voluntary madness, ie the absence of madness.

42) Maurice Blanchot: "Some exions on surrealism", cit. d., p. 95 - note transl.

Surrealist production is thus connected with the free intention of its author, from whom it separates.
Surrealism does not exclude her work, she does not exhale it without taking a certain distance herself, filled with
his inspiration and a certain style, ie. a certain intentional form of expression. And even though in "free
automation" it goes further than "classical art", it still remains an artist who creates a work of art . His "free play"
is a voluntary "free play". Whether surrealistic production is experienced, intense, naive and "automatic", it is
born of thoughtful and committed creative power. In this respect, surrealism is an art form that is and remains,
and I do not mean these words in any pejorative, "literary", "aesthetic" and "methodical".
2) The subject of psychiatry: I will be brief on this subject, for all my work, and in particular my first
important study (presented here in 1932) on the “concept of automatism,” revolves around this central question.
That the madness and the dream are the same seems obvious to me. And that the subject of psychiatry is the
study of all variants of psychic life, which are defined as forced regression to automatism (a typical example of
which is a sleep dream), is the leitmotif of my whole conception of psychiatry, I would even like to say, all
possible conceptions of psychiatry.
Madness, in all its forms, is therefore a threat to freedom. Only from this perspective is and can be seen. Ill
thinking, and especially delirious thinking, is automatic thinking. It's just a free game. This does not mean that it
is a pure mechanism, but that it is simply less intentional, less conscious and voluntarily controlled, and that it
escapes the disappearing control of higher forms of psychological integration.
Madness is inferior in the sense that it returns to the instinctive sources of the "Psyche" by its inability to
adapt to forms of reality (negative aspect).
It is a lyrical thought, basically delirious, governed by the laws of dream thinking and which, in a certain
structural form, represents a miraculous production of fantasy (the positive aspect). To recognize that a human
phenomenon enters the realm of madness is to define it fatally as a pathological change involving a judgment of
reality as well as a pejorative value judgment in the sense that the specificity of the psychotic phenomenon lies
in the state and expression of helplessness.
3) The difference between surrealist and psychopathological aesthetic production: if we limit the problem of
these differences to classical art, psychiatrists will immediately think of a “genius” thanks to Lombros's
statement. The more significant and original the work, whether it is Lucretia, Shakespeare or Proust, the more
constitutive pathological or pathological features we are looking for to “explain” it.
Since I set myself the task of exploring the relationship between fantastic art (the “demented art” that Lehel
wrote about incredible nonsense) and psycho-pathological art, the whole thing is even more complicated.
Refusing to consider all the "bastards," "fans," etc., who often pretend to be themselves, could seem like an
uncertain bet if declaring them all insane was not nonsense. If only one of them weren't crazy, the problem
would remain open! Moreover, as we have already seen, surrealist aesthetics incredibly identifies in many
respects with its procedures and research with the aesthetics of dream and delirium. The problem thus seems
unsolvable and in our opinion it cannot be viewed otherwise than in terms of previous analyzes.
Note first that the creations of both have the same aesthetic value when compared point to point (as two
points on a line or curve). The systematic release of form in some surrealists and a certain "talent" in our patients
sometimes coincide very precisely in terms of aesthetic value in both. However, to be more precise, we must add
that aesthetic creations are very unique in our individuals and that the geniuses of surrealist painters or writers at
the level of fantasy are even rarer. The disappointment of the “majority public” when leaving the exhibition of
mental images is proof of this!

Nevertheless, sometimes the work of psychopaths has a tone that does not deceive. An example in this respect
is the reading of R. Queneau's book Children of Mud. Even before the deliberately ambiguous note at the end of
the book reveals that many of the wonderful texts that are being reproduced here come "naturally" from the pen
of the sick-minded, we cannot be mistaken. Precisely because, as we have seen, psychosis imprints its seal on
these creations. On the other hand, when André Breton and Paul Éluard try to "imitate progressive paralysis" in
the Immaculate Conception, they fail to the fullest. In the same logic, the conspicuous feature of mentally ill
creations is the poverty and stereotypes of themes, leitmotifs, preferred forms. Although the production is rich, it
revolves around the same basic images, is cast into a small number of molds, and clings to the limited play of
shapes.
Thus, there would be formal features that pass from a psychotic structure to an aesthetic structure. We have
discussed this above under the designation of altered aesthetic forms. I would just like to remind you that it was
an artistic activity that was subjected to a more or less fundamental structural change by psychosis. This is also
the case for “aesthetic forms of projection”, in which some features of classical images become the artistic
expression of neurotic experience. However, this is even more true of the "aesthetic forms of one's own
madness", which "form a whole" with psychosis. However, as Prinzhorn emphasized, whether these structural
differences are more self-evident are not decisive, precisely in relation to surrealist works that spontaneously
and in a way naturally demonstrate the deformity of rhythm and the "Gestaltung" of schizophrenics.
We must therefore turn even more decisively to the solution we suggested when we looked at the
psychopathological value of the work of neurotics and psychotics and examined how this production separates
from the level of its origin in the consciousness and intentional sphere of the artist and the patient. We have seen
that the creations of the sick have sometimes affected only inferior or haphazard relationships with diseased
thinking (j juxtaponized ’and modifik modified’ works), and we can clarify that these are works in the sense that
the patient, even if his inspiration is This technique or technique has been changed - it maintains the attitude of
the creator of aesthetic forms: this means that it occupies a distance with respect to them, thanks to which his
works are built by him and in front of him as “artificial creations”. Despite the deeper closeness of the magical
bond that binds the poet to his poem or the painter to his image, in the "aesthetic forms of projection" this poem
and this image remain what they are: images and poems. On the contrary, in the “aesthetic forms of one's own
madness,” that is, those that are directly dependent on psychosis, the very act of painting, depicting, and writing
is “bound” by madness and its system of symbolic representations.
What decisive conclusion can we draw from this phenomenological difference, given the specific question we
are dealing with here? The following: pathological aesthetic production, which is based directly on madness, has
a specific structure; it is not a "work of art", but a natural "object of art." In this way, I believe that he realizes a
“surreal” ideal that no surrealism can ever achieve unless he is truly insane.
Let us now return to what we said earlier about the difference between a work of art and an object of art. We
have stated that the " object of art", the aesthetic material, breaks very precisely in the focus of the unreal and
the dream. For this reason, madness is as beautiful as a sunset or a play of images, and its figurative or poetic
 production benefits from exactly the same aesthetic nature. It is an art unconscious of itself, and in order for this
aesthetic phenomenon to become a "work", it lacks "artificial" formation. He is attached to madness, radiating
from his magnetic field, forming an integral part of his “Gestaltung”. On the contrary, a “work of art”, even a
surrealist work, - if it expresses the intention to create an artificial aesthetic form (even if it is purely and
spontaneously “verbal”), in which, however, imaginary, even after its elevation to the level of “realization”, it
remains imaginary. - differs from psychopathological production by its very structure.

In addition to this structural difference, there is another difference - or if you want the same, only seen from a
different point of view - which concerns the personality of the surrealist and the madman. If, in the eyes of those
who do not accept the concept of psychiatry as helplessness and regression, as I have explained above, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to separate what is the "ideal de soi" from "paranoia" . (J. Lacan - S. Dalí), on the
contrary, the theoretical possibility of this differentiation, which is in line with the fact that the esthete, although
a “fanatic”, is not insane, facilitates my position. I return to the criteria that I repeatedly suggest — and which,
after all, are recognized by all psychiatrists, even if they resist them — the criteria of the relationship between
the structures of thought or behavior and the developmental stages of personality. If it is true that the trajectory
of our personality evolves and changes, that it is able to choose its own understanding of the world, life and art
by its own movement; if, on the contrary, it is true that the mentally ill is characterized by determinations which
stand in opposition to his personal zeal and which put him in a state of helplessness, identical in nature, if not
also the degree of helplessness of a dreamer sleepy, then just and only structural An analysis of the author's
personality can determine the differences between the aesthetic production or the more self-fantastic work of
someone we claim to be insane only because he is a "poet," or who declares himself to be insane without being.
- Madness does not produce a work of art, it is not creative. It releases aesthetic substance, the lyrical core of
human nature. - Madness can coexist with certain forms of poetic activity or imprint on them some characteristic
structural features. - A madman does not become an artist because of his madness. - An artist can become a
madman without ceasing to be - if not the same, then at least some - an artist. - No matter how free and eccentric
the artwork is, it is a work of art having form and style. - Madness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
condition of either genius, nor a work of art, nor of that extreme aesthetic form, which is surrealism. - The
subject of psychiatry does not cover surrealistic aesthetics.
However, I would not like to end this treatise with such “geometric” conclusions, but rather by recalling or
rather echoing my first works on “automatism”, which I presented to this company in 1931.
[150] Madman slot machine, surrealist slot machine! The common denominator of their aesthetic production
should be seen in this basic identification with the machine. However, surrealist works, like the state of delirium,
are filled to the brim with images of robots, instruments, gears, mannequins, mechanisms that reflect their
"machine" production.

The problem of distinguishing an authentic automaton from a pseudo-automaton from a certain distance
has kept human curiosity in tension for centuries. From the android doorman Albert the Great, who took
visitors to the parlor in a few words, to Poem, a celebrated chess player, to the metal fly of Jean Müller,
which flew and landed on his hand again, and the famous duck from Vaucanson, not to mention
homunculus from Paracelsus to Achim von Arnim, there has always been a completely disturbing
ambiguity between the animal world, especially the human world, and its mechanical likeness. It is
characteristic of our time that it transposed this ambiguity by moving the automaton of the outer world
to the inner world [...]. This mannequin [...] showed outside the proper "superhuman" mobility (and this
momentum must be given all the freedom since surrealism arose). This special character [...] has the
ability to move without the slightest murmur in time and space and at once to eliminate the
insurmountable abyss separating the dream from the deed.43)

The premise of automatism, the "puppet," in our lives and activities, as opposed to which our freedom
is defined, is a basic insight to which I have never ceased to refer and which is of profound significance
for my dynamic conception of psychiatry. Acting is always a form of dreaming, just as being is a form
of nothingness; it is always the world of images that we carry, we automatically produce it, we "design"
it in our plans and works. We think and act against him, not just him. This movement of "relaxation,"
which defines freedom and which is its true path, certainly contradicts the ebb tide towards the
automatic pole of our being, the real source of psychic inertia.

If this fall is free, ie. if it produces art (and especially that aesthetic form called surrealism), and is also
a “take-off,” then the “poet” indulges in the powerful germination of images that elevate in him what
we call inspiration. CREATES A WONDERFUL.

On the contrary, when this dizzying, irresistible, and irreversible fall depends on the physical weight of
our organism, it gives birth to madness. This means that it is not a voluntary and sought-after
automatism, but a forced automatism, a automatism of powerlessness. In this and only this way, man is
insane, not at all because he has become a machine, but because deprived of his freedom, he leads to
becoming a machine. And in this way, halfway between being and nothingness, between life and death,
the soul becomes what it was only within itself, on the reverse of its full reality. Captivated by the
fantastic existence of images and their supernatural unreality, he IS MIRACLE.

43) André Breton: Anthology of black humor, cit. d., pp. 255.