Andre Breton: Psychiatry in the service of surrealism, 1914--1937

Andre Breton (1896--1966) was the primary force behind the formation of the Surrealist movement and theory. Although scholars have identified Sigmund Freud as having an influence on Surrealism's visual material, this dissertation reveals that, in addition to Freud, the writings of Jacques Moreau de Tours, Emil Kraepelin, Pierre Janet, Frederic Myers, Theodore Flournoy, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Joseph Babinski had a significant influence on Breton's aesthetic theory. This interpretation is based on text and image analysis, focusing on the visual materials in Breton's books Nadja and L'Amour fou as well as in his Surrealist magazines Litterature and La Revolution surrealiste .;Chapters 1 and 2 trace the literary and psychiatric sources that influenced Breton's Surrealist experiments with automatism. Chapter 1 covers the period 1914--18, the years that Breton studied medicine. This marks the starting point in Breton's interest in the creative language of the insane. Chapter 2 covers the period 1918--24, focusing on Breton's experiments with automatic writing and drawing and with hypnotic experiments. The work of this period reveals influences from Freud's method of psychoanalysis and the concept of free association, Janet's experiments with automatism, Myers's study of spiritism, and Flournoy's concept of "cryptomnesia.";Chapters 3 and 4 are close readings of Breton's books Nadja (1928) and L'Amour fou (1937). Chapter 3 focuses on Nadja's intellectual context, examining parallels between the Surrealist concept of "objective chance" and the Freudian unconscious, and on Breton's erotic language and the illustrations in Nadja. Links to Babinski's and Charcot's studies of hysteria emerge through a textual analysis and an iconographic comparison of Nadja's illustrations, including the previously overlooked photographs of Charcot's "hysterical" patient Augustine at the Salpetriere Hospital. Chapter 4 establishes the textual and visual continuity between Nadja and L'Amour fou, and examines how the blurred limits between sanity and insanity in Nadja expand in L'Amour fou as an investigation of the balance between subjective and objective reality. In L'Amour fou, Breton includes photographs by Brassai, Man Ray, and Henri Cartier-Bresson to achieve this end. Based on his investigation of subjective and objective reality, Breton developed his concept of "convulsive beauty"---his own contribution to the literary psychiatric discourse first inspired by his medical teachers.