64

Photography and surrealism

65

The automatic image

sive attitude towards hysteria, the surrealists celebrated it as an expression (but not symptom) and aligned them-selves against the dominant views of French psychiatry and closer to Charcot and Freud. Elisabeth Roudinesco comments: ‘For the surrealists, hysteria was a language, a means of expression, a work of poetry whose subversive form ought to be championed against art itself, against literature … They refused to reduce hysteria to malin-gering and differentiated it from systematic forms of madness …’37

Like Babinski, Charcot, Janet, Breuer and Freud, the surrealists used hypnosis, but on themselves, again without the therapeutic clinical aims of cure or analy-sis. That the discovery of hidden ‘repressed’ thoughts under hypnosis could reveal seriously unpleasant mat-erial became quite evident in the surrealist so-called ‘period of trances’ between and .38 Accounts of the experiments were written up in Littérature. Conducted by Breton and those around him, the group experimented with hypnotic trances to bring out auto-matically produced material in speech, writing and drawing. René Crevel and Robert Desnos in particular showed their susceptibility to hypnosis, but also showed dangerous violent tendencies. Breton, familiar with these techniques from his hospital days, stopped the experiments when they became dangerous; he caught Crevel apparently leading a group of entranced men and women into an attempt at collective suicide by hanging. On another occasion Robert Desnos chased Paul Eluard with a knife, trying to kill him.39

This was all very different from hypnosis in psychiatry. Janet conceived of the ‘sick’ individual as suffering from a constitutional incapacity to bring ‘lower’ automatic processes into connection with higher ones, and used hypnosis (articial automatism) to rejoin them. Freud used hypnosis in the treatment of hysterical patients to discover the repressed dramas causing the symptoms, but he rejected hypnosis, due to clinical reasons; in the long term hypnosis ‘cures’ faded (as Janet also admitted) and were ineffective, since they only treated symptoms and not the actual cause. Dreams and their interpretation became the more effective technique for Freud, as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’.

Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co., p. . See also David Macey’s ‘Retrospective’, in Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso, ).

Maurice Nadeau coins this term ‘The Period of Trances’ as the title of Chapter in The History of Surrealism, trans. Rich-ard Howard (London: Plantin, ).

See André Breton, Conver-sations: The Autobiography of Sur-realism (New York: Paragon, ), p. . Also see Matthew Joseph-son, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ), p. .