Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Breton, André (1896-1966)

A French poet, the founder and theoretician of the surrealist movement, André Breton was born February 19, 1896, in Tinchebray, France, and died in Paris on September 28, 1966. Until he was four years old, Breton was raised in Brittany by his maternal grandfather. Nostalgia for those early years of astonishment, fear, and surprise never left Breton. In 1907 he entered the Lycée Chaptal in Paris. In 1913 he began studying medicine, published his first verses, and established literary friendships, first with Paul Valéry, followed by Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy.

Mobilized in 1915, in July 1916 he asked to be assigned to the army's neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier. This period had a "decisive influence" (Conversations, 1952) on Breton. As a student of medicine, he observed his patients with close attention. He developed a strong interest in psychiatry and in Freud, whose ideas he encountered for the first time in Emmanuel Régis's Précis de psychiatrie. As a poet he began to ask questions about literary creation. The discourse of madness contained striking images, how did these come into being? How did madmen and poets develop their language? What was the relationship between subject and object embodied in language?

Freud provided a response to these fundamental questions but Breton had access to them only in the form of Régis's introduction. As a result his concept of Freudian analysis was distorted. Although Breton understood the role of the libido, the conflict between desire and censure, and the dream work that provides insight into the artistic process, he believed with Régis that the analytic method was a mechanized collection of the subject's verbal outpourings, which he repeated as they popped into his mind, like a "recording device" (Régis). This was a formula Breton was to use in his Surrealist Manifesto: "We . . . who have turned ourselves into . . . modest recording devices in our art . . ." (1924). Transference, the analyst's suspended attention in the face of the representations supplied by the subject or their interpretation, dream associations, all of this disappeared. Although Breton continued his medical training until 1920, he was not interested in therapy. His meeting with Freud in 1921 had no affect on him (1924). The problems he wanted to resolve were different: "There is the entire question of language." (1919)

With psychoanalysis, Freud provided Breton with a theory of language. "Those verbal representations that Freud claims are 'memory traces arising principally from acoustic perceptions' are precisely what constitute the raw material of poetry" (1935). The poet as dreamer is the "receiver of Indirect Contributions" supplied by the figurative activity of the preconscious mind, where representations of words and things make contact with one another. He "yields to the collage" of associations (1919). This leads to the creative experiments Breton conducted from 1919 to 1924 (automatic writing, hallucinosis, half-sleep, automatic writing, and others), which found a large number of applications in literature.

In the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton condensed the theoretical conclusions he drew from his experiments. This was the founding text of the surrealist movement that did so much to introduce Freudian ideas to France and elsewhere. Although Breton used Hegelian dialectics to criticize Freud (Communicating Vessels, 1932; the republication of 1955 contains three letters from Freud to Breton), he continued to study him (Carnet, 1921, Cahier de la girafe sur la Science des rêves, 1931, Position politique du surréalisme, 1935, Anthology of Black Humor, 1940) and emphasize the importance of his thought. "Surrealism . . . considers the Freudian critique of ideas . . . to be the first and only one with a basis in fact" (1930).

NICOLE GEBLESCO

See also: Claude, Henri Charles Jules; Literature and psychoanalysis; Surrealism and psychoanalysis.