64

Photography and surrealism

65
1he automatic image
sive attitude tovards hysteria, the surrealists celebrated
it as an expression (but not symptom, and aligned them-
selves against the dominant vievs ot lrench psychiatry
and closer to Charcot and lreud. Llisabeth Poudinesco
comments: lor the surrealists, hysteria vas a language, a
means ot expression, a vork ot poetry vhose subversive
torm ought to be championed against art itselt, against
literature 1hey retused to reduce hysteria to malin-
gering and dinerentiated it trom systematic torms ot
madness
37
Iike Babinski, Charcot, anet, Breuer and lreud,
the surrealists used hypnosis, but on themselves, again
vithout the therapeutic clinical aims ot cure or analy-
sis. 1hat the discovery ot hidden repressed thoughts
under hypnosis could reveal seriously unpleasant mat-
erial became quite evident in the surrealist so-called
period ot trances betveen +,:: and +,:.
38
Accounts
ot the experiments vere vritten up in Littrature.
Conducted by Breton and those around him, the group
experimented vith hypnotic trances to bring out auto-
matically produced material in speech, vriting and
draving. Pene Crevel and Pobert Desnos in particular
shoved their susceptibility to hypnosis, but also shoved
dangerous violent tendencies. Breton, tamiliar vith
these techniques trom his hospital days, stopped the
experiments vhen they became dangerous, he caught
Crevel apparently leading a group ot entranced men and
vomen into an attempt at collective suicide by hanging.
On another occasion Pobert Desnos chased Paul Lluard
vith a knite, trying to kill him.
39
1his vas all very dinerent trom hypnosis in psychiatry.
anet conceived ot the sick individual as sunering trom
a constitutional incapacity to bring lover automatic
processes into connection vith higher ones, and used
hypnosis (artitcial automatism, to rejoin them. lreud
used hypnosis in the treatment ot hysterical patients to
discover the repressed dramas causing the symptoms, but
he rejected hypnosis, due to clinical reasons, in the long
term hypnosis cures taded (as anet also admitted, and
vere inenective, since they only treated symptoms and
not the actual cause. Dreams and their interpretation
became the more enective technique tor lreud, as the
royal road to the unconscious.
; Poudinesco, Jacques Lacan
and Co., p. ;. See also David
Maceys Petrospective, in Lacan
in Contexts (Iondon: Verso, +,::,.
: Maurice Nadeau coins this
term 1he Period ot 1rances as
the title ot Chapter in The
History of Surrealism, trans. Pich-
ard Hovard (Iondon: Plantin,
+,:;,.
, See Andre Breton, Conver-
sations: The Autobiography of Sur-
realism (Nev York: Paragon, +,,,,
p. ;o. Also see Matthev oseph-
son, Life Among the Surrealists
(Nev York: Holt, Pinehart and
Winston, +,o:,, p. ::+.