Introduction to Surrealism and Sigmund Freud

Surrealism began as a literary movement after World War I. Its adherents based their writings on the nonrational, and thus they were naturally drawn to the Dadaists. Both literary groups engaged in automatic writing, in which the mind was to be purged of purposeful thought and a series of free associations were then to be expressed with the pen. Words were not meant to denote their literal meanings but to symbolize the often seething contents of the unconscious mind. Eventually the Surrealist writers broke from the Dadaists, believing that the earlier movement was becoming too academic. Under the leadership of the poet André Breton, they defined their movement as follows in a 1924 manifesto:

From the beginning, Surrealism expounded two very different methods of working. Illusionistic Surrealism, exemplified by artists such as Salvador Dali, rendered the irrational content, absurd juxtapositions, and metamorphoses of the dream state in a highly illusionistic manner. Automatist Surrealism, was used to divulge mysteries of the unconscious through abstraction. The Automatist phase is typified by Joan Miró. [pronounced Jwahn, not jone]

Sigmund Freud, the unconscious, and Surrealism

In 1899, on the threshold of the century, the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published The Interpretation of Dreams, one of the most influential works of modern times.

According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, deep in the unconscious mind – which he called the id – were chaotic emotional forces of life and love (a life instinct called Eros) and death and violence (a death instinct called Thanatos). These unconscious forces, often at war with each other, are kept in check by the ego, which is the more conscious self, and the superego, which is the formally received training of parental control and social reinforcements. Human life is shaped largely by the struggle between the id, ego, and superego to prevent the submerged drives of the unconscious from emerging. One way to penetrate the murky realm of the human unconscious, according to Freud, is via dreams. In the life of sleep and dreams, the ego and superego are less likely to be able to keep primitive impulses repressed. “The dream,” Freud wrote, “is the royal road to the unconscious.” To put it simply, Freud turned the modern mind inward to explore those hidden depths of the human personality where he believed the most primitive and dynamic forces of life dwell.

After the Great War, Freud’s ideas were readily accessible to large numbers of European intellectuals. His emphasis on nonrational elements in human behavior seemed logical to those who had been horrified by the carnage of the war. Surrealists were particularly interested in using Freud’s theories about the dream world of the unconscious as a basis for a new aesthetic.^[1]