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Photography and surrealism

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The automatic image

In the ‘process of condensation’ dream-thoughts, in varying degrees, are omitted and the ones that remain represented in the condensation are left because they are ‘over-determined’ by their content. An over-determined image is organized by several determinant factors, for example, the image of a man condenses, combining features of several individuals.5 The second mechanism of displacement, or ‘veering off ’, seeks to avoid censorship by ‘translating’ one thing into another. For example, clothing might be the displaced (metonymic) sign for an individual associated with it.52 It is these mechanisms, condensation and displacement which account for the strangeness, the rebus puzzle-like quality of dream-images in surrealism, like Breton’s ‘man cut in two by a window’. Through condensation and displacement, an unconscious thought emerges disguised within the preconscious-consciousness system.

Freud’s essay on ‘The Unconscious’ shows the compatibility of surrealism with, at least, his theoretical view of the production of thought processes close to the unconscious:

In the last few pages of The Interpretation of Dreams, which was published in , the view was developed that thought-processes, i.e. those acts of cathexis which are comparatively remote from perception, are in themselves without quality and unconscious, and that they attain their capacity to become conscious only through being linked with the residues of perceptions of words. But word-presentations, for their part too, are derived from sense-perceptions, in the same way as thing-presentations are; the question might therefore be raised why presentations of objects cannot become conscious through the medium of their own perceptual residues … being linked with word-presentations is not yet the same thing as becoming conscious, but only makes it possible to become so … 53

Thus, properly speaking, the psychic automatism claimed by the surrealists (the stimulation of an enigmatic image) is a means to invoke unconscious ‘ideational representatives’, ‘thing-presentations’ with a successful image, as Breton puts it in the Manifesto, ‘where its obscurity does not betray it’.54

Freud’s example is the condensation of his Uncle Josef and his friend ‘R’. See Chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams.

I am drawing here on Ella F. Sharpe’s account of dreams in her Dream Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, ), p. . She draws the analogy between gures of rhetorical speech and the mechanisms of the dream-work long before Jacques Lacan.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, On Metapsychology, PFL , pp. –.

Breton, Manifesto of Surreal-ism, p. .