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Photography and surrealism

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The automatic image

of elementary ‘automatic’ mechanisms, where the things that ‘normal’ individuals do mechanically, ‘without think-ing’, had simply collapsed. For example, a pinch on the arm resulting in its automatic withdrawal, or food placed on the pharynx causing a swallowing action to occur might cease to function in hysteria. Janet summarized:

If, in a general way, we call automatism the activation of an inferior tendency that escapes from the control of superior tendencies and especially the provocation of an immediate assent, instead of a reective assent, we may say that the essential part of the treatments we are considering is the provocation of automatic actions instead of superior and reexive actions.26

For Janet the hysteric’s automatic actions had fallen out-side the sphere of consciousness as though the subject had ‘forgotten’ to do them. Without any concept of ‘repression’ or the unconscious, this pre-Freudian theory determined that automatic actions were synonymous with ‘subconscious’ actions. Hence Janet used sugges-tion on patients under hypnosis to ‘re-instal’ automatic functions where they had declined or failed in an attempt to put them back into the ‘higher tendencies’ of consciousness proper.

Breton argued that in surrealism automatic writing was used to nd ‘nothing less than the unication of that personality’.27 This was like Janet’s view of hysterics, in that a part of the whole ‘personality’ was missing or lacking and had to be reunied with the ‘higher tendencies’. In this respect the surrealists could be seen to be ‘imitating’ Janet’s treatment of hysterics, using automatic writing in a state of distraction to ‘capture’ unpremeditated thoughts and induce psychically auto-matic images. Breton’s medical experience for this was crucial. He would certainly have understood that the subject could be ‘divided’ from his experience of the traumatized soldiers in hospitals where terrible scenes recurred insistently in their nightmares but not in their waking life.28 From such ‘splitting’ the surrealists could conceive ‘psychical automatism’ as a means to produce not only images of stunning vivacity, but also bring

Ibid., p. . André Breton, ‘The Auto-

matic Message’, reprinted in F. Rosemont (ed.), What is Sur-realism? (London: Pluto, ), p. .

This is what Freud explored as the phenomenon of the ‘com-pulsion to repeat’ as a symptom of traumatic neurosis in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (). That the patient was xated to the traumatic experience in their dreams, but positively avoided it in conscious thought is made clear: ‘I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident’ (On Metapsychology, PFL , p. ).