70

Photography and surrealism

71

The automatic image

The question of how unconscious material in what Freud calls the ‘ideational representative’ comes to be represented as a manifest content is also dependent upon the ‘means of representation’, that is, the available means of ‘dramatization’ for its mise-en-scène.55 The mind ‘borrows’ from conscious scenes or conictual events that have usually occurred in the days prior to the dream to stage the dream’s scene. The manifest content of the dream is then subject to ‘secondary revision’ as the dreamer brings to bear conscious censorship when the dream-content is articulated within discourse by suppressing or deleting elements of the material found uncomfortable or unpleasant (discarded as ‘irrelev-ant’ etc.). The condensation, displacement, means of dramatization and secondary revision are component mechanisms of what must inevitably take place in the process of automatic writing or its equivalent means. By the time the image has been transcribed, it is subject to secondary revision (repression and censorship) in addition to the means of dramatization. Thus, theo-retically speaking, psychic automatism would be some-thing struggled for, with conscious censorship and repression as obstacles to be overcome and measured in terms of the realism of the unconscious. Jean Laplanche: ‘That which comes from the unconscious intervenes as a reality (itself conictual) in the midst of the conscious “text”, which therefore appears much less coherent: sometimes lacunary, sometimes, on the contrary, with moments of unjustiable intensity and insistence.’56

The ‘unnatural image’ of Breton’s man cut in two by a window would appear to be electable to such a category of image; it also has a clear affinity with the ‘visual’ examples given by Freud at the beginning of ‘The Dream-work’ in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he gives rebus ‘picture-puzzles’ as illustrations of a dream-image. (A man with a comma for a head, a house with a boat on the roof, a letter of the alphabet with the gure of a man running away.)57 For Freud, such images could not be read for their literal content as representations, but demanded a translation (dream-work analysis) of their distortion (chain of signiers) effected by repression. Breton’s image is not just an image of ‘castration’, a man cut in two by a window (paradoxically

In the English translation of Freud this is the ‘means of repre-sentation’. I have substituted Ella Sharpe’s term ‘dramatization’ here to emphasize the sense of staging that this gives.

Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, ), p. .

Sigmund Freud, Chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams, PFL , , p. .