André Breton

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Breton and Freud

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From at least three viewpoints, quite as inseparable as art and life usually are for the surrealists, Breton affirms the importance of dreams: to the poet, painter, or sculptor, dreams furnish the models—procedures and products—of an activity which is unencumbered by the constraints of realist representation; to the explorer of daily life they indicate by analogy how spaces and events which initially appear disconcerting are organized among themselves; to man in general, that "definitive dreamer," the analysis of dreams provides the most vivid sense of all the possibilities which existence offers him. Apprehending his dreams, man would in the same breath apprehend the "natural necessity" which governs all life….

Despite important reservations, [in Les Vases Communicants] Breton borrows from Freud the essential elements of the notions presented in The Interpretation of Dreams: wish-fulfillment, manifest and latent content, the mechanisms and the processes of dream-work, the method of "free association."… (p. 18)

[The] method of interpreting dreams opens a considerable breach in the defensive system of surrealism. Breton recognizes that the method is valid and necessary not only for understanding night-dreams and certain phenomena of the wakeful state but also for explaining the activity, in literature or the plastic arts, of the surrealist. The 1924 Manifesto kept open, in the domain of dreams, the possibility of several investigations that would be neither competitive nor dependent on one another, including those of the analyst and the poet. Les Vases Communicants, however, would at least appear to support a very different hypothesis: the poet has followed in the footsteps of the scientist, has borrowed from him the tools, if not the spirit (but is such a division possible?) of his research. It has even been possible to write that after spending ten years producing "material" (texts, paintings, collages, diverse games and experiences) surrealism inaugurated a new period with Les Vases Communicants: that of the interpretation of this material. Thus we are led to ask whether this text indicates that Breton is abandoning the ideas which have governed the organized activity of surrealism since 1922 in favor of recognizing the results achieved by the science of psychoanalysis, still in its formative stages, or whether he is trying to develop the earlier intuitions of surrealism in another way. And in the latter case, what would be the import of the borrowings from Freud? We cannot attempt to answer these questions without recalling, if only in a very summary fashion, the focal points of André Breton's undertaking.

First of all, a fundamental relationship unites man with the universe which surrounds him. Thus the knowledge of subjectivity is the best preparation for apprehending the world through human understanding. Inversely, all dogmatism and all oppression are based on the refusal to consider the individual being in his subjectivity. Now, in this area, there is no phenomenon so important, and until now so poorly understood, as "the constant exchange which must take place in thought between the external and the internal world, an exchange which requires the continuous interpenetration of the activity of wakefulness and of the activity of sleep."… On this point, the discoveries of psychoanalysis seem fundamental, for they will make it possible to answer several questions which, as is usual with Breton, have been raised "by life" itself: what is the relationship of dreaming to external reality? what criterion makes it possible to distinguish between the former and the latter? in what way does this relationship affect the emotional life of all men? Following the example of Freud, Breton analyzes, in the first part of Les Vases Communicants, two of his dreams, and in the second part, a period of his life (three weeks of April 1931) that he likens to a daydream (rêve éveillé). The results of this self-analysis can be restated under three headings:

(a) All the elements which compose the nightdream come from lived experience…. [His analyses lead] to complementary conclusions: the dream is formed solely with the elements of wakeful life; but also in the state of wakefulness it can happen that the human mind functions no differently than it does in dreaming. Whence the metaphor of the "communicating vases": the fluid which runs through them is desire.

(b) This force of desire, and the identity of the transformational processes to which it subjects its raw material, "whether in reality or in dreams,"… do not act at the expense of external reality. Dreaming never abolishes in man the faculty which recognizes that the external world exists outside of him and independently of him. Only madness, idealist philosophy, or religion allow and keep alive such a confusion. As a consistent materialist, Breton tries to show that space, time, and the principle of causality are identical in dreams to what they are in reality, i.e., laws or objective forms of existence, and not properties of our mind…. In dreams, the wish transforms reality without investing it with new properties which might change its nature.

(c) This conclusion is crucial because of its practical consequences. For according to whether man recognizes or not the existence of external reality and its preponderance over the human mind, the function of dreaming changes completely. The example of the first attitude is given by Breton himself: he never loses sight of reality, never claims that it is merely dependent upon his freedom or his wishes. In these conditions, dreaming or daydreaming has a positive influence; better than conscious thought, they help man resolve problems, calm worries, make decisions. (p. 19)

Inversely, the price of ignoring or disdaining external reality is the renunciation of action. For dreaming (while one is awake or asleep), when it is cut off from its origin, is henceforth considered as a degraded or larval form of the mind's activity, or as the gratuitous play of an illusion, or as the mark of a providence or divinity. Each of these interpretations precludes the possibility of a human activity that would transform the world…. [For] Breton the historical solidarity of social conservatism and idealism appears clearly in the idea of the dream conceived as a refuge or as a sign of supra-human action. The three apparently opposing solutions of the worldly life, religious retreat, and suicide are, in his eyes, only three ways of giving in to the ascendancy of negative dreaming and institutionalizing it….

[In] the first part of Les Vases Communicants, the coexistence of opposites in the unconscious is supposed to reflect the dialectic of nature within man. In the second part, the nocturnal dream-work is echoed by that of the daydream. But now this construct is based less on intuition than on a critical reading of the work of Freud. Can we say, however, that Breton showed himself to be faithful to the "illustrious master"?

The first difference between them concerns precisely the relations of reality and the night-dream. All the elements which Breton observes and identifies in his personal experience in order to show, after a scrupulous inventory, that they are the driving forces of his dream, are, in Freud's theory, "day's residues," i.e., thoughts, worries or problems which, in a conscious or latent fasion, occupy the mind of the wakeful subject. Localized in the preconscious system, these residues, despite their importance, cannot on their own motivate the formation of a dream…. In other words, it is probable that the emotional, political or intellectual concerns which Breton writes about would be, for the psychoanalyst, only the pretexts of unconscious desire. Should there be any surprise that Breton's analysis remains silent, or very reticent, with respect to the nature of this desire, the supplier of instinctual energy, without which there would be no dreaming? Probably not. But it is more surprising to see Breton limit the origin of dreaming to what is only, in fact, the prolongation, in sleep, of a part of wakeful thought….

The second difference between Breton and Freud concerns the daydream and seems to be a counterpart of the first. If, in the first case, the nightdream is markedly simplified, in the second the notion of daydreaming undergoes a notable extension. Of course, it was Freud himself who discovered the resemblances which link the dream and the series of "fantasies, castles in Spain or daydreams": the common element is the fantasy, an imaginary scenario, always centered upon a wish, possessing a single structure, but open to diverse manifestations. (p. 20)

Now the fantasy is not even evoked by Breton…. [He] is less concerned with the nature of the unconscious wish, the driving force of daydreaming or dreaming, than with the way in which it transforms certain representations of external reality.

A common reason underlies these differences: Breton refuses to consider, except in his criticisms, Freud's fundamental hypothesis concerning the existence of unconscious psychic processes…. Like the word fantasy, the term repression [referring to sexual wishes], in its theoretical sense, has no place in Breton; it is another cornerstone of psychoanalysis which has been discarded. (pp. 20-1)

By putting aside the theory of the unconscious and the process of repression, and by pursuing the consequences, Breton succeeds in supporting more solidly his theory of the "communicating vases." In Freud, it is the presence of repressed and unconscious desire, acting from a distance upon preconscious representations, which allows us to explain the form of visual hallucination that the dream most often takes. Breton retains without explaining it the fact that the dream very often puts thoughts into images. Likewise, he takes the processes of condensation and displacement from Freud without linking them to the "primary" process. For Freud … the state of sleep … allows wish-fulfillment to occur. For Breton, this condition is not indispensable….

Finally, sleep provisionally suspends the ability of every normal man to differentiate between material reality and a hallucination…. [But to Breton], there is no difference between dreamed representations and real perceptions. In a dream it is possible to give the same status to the image of a composite person and the abstract idea of woman which develops out of ongoing encounters, in the wakeful state, with real women. On the other hand, neither in the night-dream nor in daydreaming is reality-testing entirely suspended: at every moment the external world is capable of reaffirming its rights….

Breton undertakes to overthrow a philosophic and literary tradition which treats dreaming and the wakeful state as a pair of opposites, indeed antagonists. In place of this struggle, which is resolved sometimes to the benefit of dreaming and sometimes to the benefit of wakefulness (according to the prevalent doctrines), surrealism wants to substitute "universal reciprocal action."… This means that if it changes the relationship, it needs to conserve the two terms: dream and reality, dreaming and the wakeful state; and in order to establish continuity between them. Breton must indeed neglect the distinctions which psychoanalysis introduces between the unconscious and the preconscious, on the one hand, and between dream-work and wakeful thought on the other. He must also give the same status, as the second part of the book demonstrates, to the night-dreams, demented ideas, confusions, misunderstandings and superstitious ideas. Not only are their mechanisms analogous to those of the dream, but their effects are entirely identical to those that the dream produces….

[Note Freud's] famous hypothesis: "The scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life. This is the only hypothesis that makes the special peculiarities of dream-life intelligible."… [No] supposition could be more vigorously fought by Breton. If the dream serves as a model for imaginary productions such as poetry or play, it cannot be detached from the one and only sphere, i.e., from the world in which man lives, loves, and struggles. The imaginary and the real are one and the same thing. Or at least this should be the case. (p. 21)

For Freud, "dreams do not differentiate between what is wished and what is real."… Breton transforms the phrase: it is the wish which does not differentiate between dream and reality….

Breton's self-analysis is not lacking in references to the author's sex life. But these are always introduced in terms of symbolism….

Breton considers sexuality to be only one of the provinces, so to speak, of the imagination. And as the imagination itself is life's capacity to translate itself into images, the representations linked to repressed desires make up only a part of the material issuing from the vital drives as a whole. (p. 22)

Breton does not limit himself to interpreting dream-work; he changes certain of its processes when they chance not to fit in with the rhetoric of persuasion that constitutes for him the dream. (p. 23)

To the questions that Breton asks about dreaming and desire in Les Vases Communicants, Freud's work could only offer partial answers. In skimming through The Interpretation of Dreams, Breton retraces an earlier route: and his paths are neither those of the scientists nor of the poet, rather those of a certain practice of poetry or fiction. (p. 25)

Jean-Pierre Morel, "Breton and Freud," translated by Philip Lewis, in Diacritics (copyright © Diacritics, Inc., 1972), Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer, 1972, pp. 18-26.

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