Free Associations and Automatism

Since I will not be visiting Washington DC for another few weeks, I believe that it is appropriate to begin my research by visiting local libraries and museums. This week, I have chosen to focus on Surrealist poetry and its adoption of automatic writing.

To begin, automatism (that is, the process of writing, painting, drawing, or speaking automatically without conscious thought) was originally adopted from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical techniques; however, Freud referred to these unconscious flows of thought as "free associations." He explains this idea towards the end of chapter 7.A. in his Interpretation of Dreams:

"It has been considered an unmistakable sign of free association...if the emerging ideas (or images) appear to be connected...without inter-relationship of meaning"

For Freud, free associations were flows of thoughts or images that occurred in succession with no apparent connection to one another. The famous psychoanalyst frequently encouraged his patients to speak freely without interruption so that he could interpret their dreams and analyze their respective mental states, a practice that some Surrealist artists would have perhaps named "automatic speaking." In fact, in Chapter 6.E., Freud explicitly states that he is compelled to use a technique which "is based on the dreamer's [free] associations...."


This background now brings me to my point: Freud's theory of free associations drastically influenced Surrealist automatism, one of the most common Surrealist techniques. In a way that sounds eerily similar to Freud's description of free associations, Andre Breton defines Surrealism early on in his Manifesto of Surrealism as

"Surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."

Breton defines Surrealism as expression of thought without the control of reason, while Freud states that free associations lack any interrelationship of meaning. With these two definitions taken side-by-side, and also with the knowledge that Breton was a huge fan of Freud, it seems safe to conclude that Surrealism began as a movement that sought to project its members' "free associations" into the realm of art, specifically by means of "psychic automatism." It now becomes obvious that Freud did in fact have a major influence on the techniques of various Surrealist artists, especially those who used automatism in writing or painting.

In my next posts, I will use a Surrealist poem as an example to emphasize my point. I will also attempt to discover a link between the Surrealist idea of "juxtaposition" and Freud's "superficial associations."