PAOLO SCOPELLITI: THE INFLUENCE OF SURREALISM ON PSYCHOANALYSIS

par Catherine Dufour

"That psychoanalysis has influenced surrealism is now an established fact that is no longer questioned; on the other hand, it has never been envisioned that a contribution could have come, in return, from surrealism to psychoanalysis." With this first sentence Scopelliti announces the hypothesis that he methodically verifies in the three parts (Hysteria/Paranoia/Schizophrenia) of his book, highlighting the "chassé-croisé" (1) between psychoanalysis and surrealism and the active role played by the latter in the interpretation of psychoanalysis, its contestation, and even the elaboration of unprecedented concepts.

The first part (1900-1930) explores step by step the knowledge that Breton had of the achievements of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at the beginning of the century, according to his readings, his writings, his correspondence, with Théodore Fraenkel notably, without forgetting the direct observations he made himself as a medical student at the neurological hospital of Saint-Dizier in 1916. From this period emerges the existence of an intense exchange between the first surrealists and the psychiatrist Hesnard, first coherent introducer of Freud's thought in France as early as 1913, and thanks to whom Breton, who already knew the fragments published before this date (by Ladame, Régis, Jung, Kraepelin), accesses the essential Freudian concepts.

Along the way, we penetrate into the meanders of a psychiatry very determined by war traumas and the dominant nosography of hysterical simulation. Hesnard is interested in the surrealists' writings on the subject, which intersect with his own work of Freudian vulgarization. Surrealist thought thus surreptitiously infiltrates the data of psychoanalysis which, still strongly misunderstood, finds itself caught in the trap in this exchange, impregnated with the numerous psychiatric and philosophical writings published since 1870 (Krishaber, Taine, Janet (2), Grasset).

Animated by a "surrealism before the fact," Breton seeks to transpose the psychoanalytic method of associations into poetry and invents automatism with free association (The Magnetic Fields, Soluble Fish). But, influenced by war interrogations, he is already interested in directed association, antithetical to psychoanalysis, which was to prevail in the automatic productions of the thirties. From 1920 develop the "hypnotic sleeps," coinciding with the first translations of Freud and Breton's visit to Vienna. The surrealists, on the terrain of this new common field of experimentation, help Hesnard to theorize, obtaining in return a scientific endorsement of their own positions.

We see through these examples that psychoanalysis did not play as dogma on the surrealists but aroused from them an autonomous experimental attitude. The "psy" significance of their discoveries mattered less to them than the poetic revolution that emerged from it, producing an annihilation of the opposition between words and thoughts (Tzara, Desnos, Leiris, Artaud) that announced the following phase.

The second part of the book begins in 1930: the group opens to Lacan, and paranoia [founds] the new course of psychoanalysis, just as hysteria had founded the old one. The new automatism of The Immaculate Conception is provoked and directed, in the same way as Dalí's paranoia-criticism. The active nature of mental illness constitutes the fracture line by which surrealism then influences psychiatry (Borel and Robin, then Dupré) in the continuity of an internal debate to pre-Freudianism (Marie, Sicard). Lacan recognizes the scientific pertinence of surrealist theses, collaborates with Minotaure (1933-1939) and adopts in his famous thesis, On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations with Personality, the positions of Dalí, Eluard and Breton on paranoia, interpreted as the activity of desire projecting the multiple representations of its identity onto the world, [realizing] non-contradiction and subjecting reality to its own structuration. Lacan also retains from the surrealists the idea of a madness envisioned more as "light that retains something of the trouble itself" (Alquié) than as illness, and enunciates the linguistic character of the unconscious, brought to light by The Immaculate Conception.

If it is true that the productions of psychosis are by essence written—those of hysteria relating to orality—the simulations of The Immaculate Conception undeniably belong to psychosis. We recognize there moreover the knowledge diffused by various psychiatric works published from 1905 to 1928 (Rogues de Fursac, Chaslin, Éliascheff), although Breton defended himself against it, just as he denied having practiced the collage of clinical texts. His true objective was in reality to demystify the "psy" knowledge and nosographic categories. By using a discourse that was not a simple plating of the psychiatric onto the narrative, he wished to confer on the "Possessions" the status of a poetics that would serve as a meter to evaluate the results of the experience and the ensemble of surrealist texts.

Under the influence of Hegelo-Marxism to which the group rallies around 1930, we witness the elaboration of a new conception of the subject. Banking on an anthropological revolution that would replace [it] with the plurality of the Self, whose pieces psychiatry sought to glue back together (Kraepelin, Bleuler, Freud), the surrealists aimed at Marx's "total man," who at the same time filled the Freudian forgetting of the social determinisms of madness (Crevel, 1933). More profoundly still, we witness the emergence of a new rationality, initiated as early as 1921 by the calling into question of the Western episteme, anesthetized (3) and de-eroticized since Plato in the name of an "immobility" opposed to a real always in movement. Breton assimilates Descartes, Charcot and Freud in the same maneuver of occultation of reality by rationality and expulsion of the body outside the subject, while Lacan himself, who gradually loses interest in history, is accused of metaphysical and linguistic idealism. To the immutable structuration of the human psyche, the Hegelo-Marxist corrective opposes the historicity of psychic evolution (Tzara, 1931), the dialectical integration of subject and object, of the real and man (Breton, 1932), and of the conscious and unconscious (Crevel).

The third part of the book takes a detour through the Romanian surrealists (Trost, Luca, Pãun) who, emigrated from Paris to Bucharest at the beginning of the Second World War, and back in the West to flee Stalinism, invented the schizo-analysis promoted by Deleuze and Guattari in the sixties. To understand this path, we must go back to Reich's The Sexual Crisis (1934) and to Malinowski who, like Propp ten years later, shakes the universal scope of the supposed Oedipus complex, while Reich, Sapir and Fromm (1929) establish a link between the organization of society, rethought by Trotsky, and the structuration of the psychic apparatus.

In Romania in the forties, the theses of the First Non-Oedipal Manifesto by Luca and Trost plead for the dislocation of language. They radicalize the work on the dream undertaken in Paris by Aragon, Breton and Crevel, and imagine a veritable surrealist Traumdeutung, which wants to wrest dreams from the repressive therapeutic use of psychoanalytic interpretation—a sort of predetermined censorship—to make them into so many weapons aimed against society. The methods of scientific transcription of the dream (Trost) and of "sur-automatism" (Prãun) place the subject in contact with a pre-social and biological, asymbolic condition, close to that of the schizophrenic, aiming to push desire to the paroxysm of its realization and to inaugurate a psychic mutation beyond social classes. Going back to the historical origins of the structuration of the psyche, Trost enunciates the same ideas as Crevel and Tzara on the unification of "directed thinking" and "non-directed thinking" (Tzara), allied to the schizophrenic mechanism that repairs the scission, imposed by repression and social repression, to a faculty of desire formerly unique (Breton).

Anti-Oedipus (1972) takes up the essential theses of the Romanians. The process of dissociation inherent to schizophrenia, which had been implemented by Artaud, Breton (the "game of one in the other") and Dalí (the "double images"), becomes the principle of schizo-analysis. The dissociative, anti-artistic, non-figurative methods, at the origin of Luca's poetic stammering and the asemanticism of the colored "aplastic" graphics (Luca and Trost), had in fact been sensed by Crevel and Breton in the thirties, and even in the twenties, in full associative period (in poetry by Breton, Soupault, Reverdy, in painting by Buñuel or Morise). This is why automatic writing had gradually freed itself from meaning, submitting to no other determination (non-metaphorical) than that chosen by its author and proving right Todorov's theory (1979) of a psychotization of literature since romanticism.

Deleuze and Guattari have articulated the concept of bricolage, derived from Marx, with those of unconscious-surface and negation of structures in favor of series. The unconscious-surface—Breton's "disorientation"—which already existed in Hesnard and Reverdy in 1924, has relayed the metaphor of Freudian depths. Lacan has drawn from it his "quilting points" and his "Möbius strip," Deleuze and Guattari the notion of "plateau" (1980)—formal means of writing comparable to collage—itself connected to that of "machine," then of serialism of the subject's arrangements, which evokes Breton's multiple personality, Caillois's "mantis" (1935)—cannibal, "woman-machine" and paradigm "of legendary psychasthenia"—or Dalí's "spectral woman," dismountable, always metamorphosed and edible (1934). These "desiring machines" or "constellation-subjects" whose workings the Romanian surrealists valorized, have substituted themselves for the bipolarity of the "Freudian conflict." The open dialectic of "disorientation" has replaced the closed dialectic of psychoanalysis.

In conclusion, surrealism, place of an important amalgam between psychiatry and psychoanalysis (4), and bridge between the latter and schizo-analysis, has brought [psychoanalysis] to assume the henceforth irreversible disintegration of the modern subject (5). To restore to the poetic approach of man and the world the global character of the first ages, the surrealists have introduced art into science—to the great dismay of psychiatrists and Freud himself—and have traveled backwards, to schizophrenia, the history of the psyche. Borrowing proper poetic or iconic forms, they still do not have the endorsement of science. And yet numerous endorsements have been brought to them, which at the same time verify the linguistic evolution developed by Rousseau and Vico. Numerous recent studies (6) confirm that the integration of the stages of the psyche would be the resultant of a set of cultural facts rather than a genetically immutable given, making possible an ulterior evolution on the basis of sociocultural transformations. We rejoin the idea of restructuration of the psyche by insertion of new images (those of surrealism) into language (Tzara).

Scopelliti concludes with an act of faith in a new surrealism that would regenerate psychoanalysis—by restoring to it its lost sociopolitical weight—and Marxism—by inciting it to reconnect with Trotsky—by means of a schizo-analysis that would constitute the practical support of this political combat. We burn to ask him by what concrete paths he envisages launching into the realization of such a utopia...

    1 — Expression that dictated to Roger Dadoun the title of his preface, "Surrealism and psychoanalysis: a chassé-croisé." ↩

    2 — Scopelliti has placed at the end of the work an appendix that specifies what the surrealists do or do not owe to the theories of some prominent figures of psychiatry at the beginning of the century, including Binet and Janet, the latter not being the inspirer of The Magnetic Fields as Soupault had claimed. ↩

    3 — Aisthesis meaning immediate knowledge. ↩

    4 — In appendix, Scopelliti recalls the surrealists' fidelity of reference to Freud despite their disagreements, contrary to their globally distant attitude vis-à-vis Reich and Rank, or Jung who, despite the borrowings—exclusively terminological—from Tzara, barely grazed the movement. ↩

    5 — We do not detail here the role, however major, of psychiatrists Bourru and Burot as supposed theoretical link between the surrealist experiences on hysteria of the sleep period and the paranoid and schizophrenic simulations. ↩

    6 — Scopelliti enumerates and analyzes the contributions of a dizzying number of ethnologists, anthropologists, semioticians, archaeologists and linguists, among the most recent, who have confirmed the surrealists' theories on the historical and structural evolution of the human psyche. ↩