62

Photography and surrealism

63
1he automatic image
hidden mental thoughts to light. But the surrealists
dinered trom anets automatic vriting treatment, since
they vere not in the trst place clinically ill and second,
they advocated vhat in anets viev vas actually a state
ot mental veakness. Here vere the surrealists, not
only claiming that a state ot distraction vas vorthy
ot attention, but also that it could give rise to literary
vorks.
While today anets pre-lreudian theory might
sound crude, it vas nevertheless part ot the advance
avay trom nineteenth-century mechanical models ot
the mind. In +:o: psychological automatism had been
detned by Prosper Despine as the product ot a living
machine devoid ot consciousness, a sort ot brain-dead
automaton, an uncanny image (ot death,, an animated
inanimate valking dead robot.
29
anets achievement vas the demonstration that a
human is involved in automatic actions in everyday
lite activities vithout being reduced to the status ot
an android machine. He proved that psychological
automatism is a tact ot human activity and detned it as
a psychological phenomenon in its ovn right, alvays
entailing a rudimentary consciousness.
30
Hovever, vhat
this theory did not have or recognize vas the concept ot
the unconscious or its connection vith sexuality. It vas
oseph Breuer and Sigmund lreud vho developed the
unconscious as subject to and constituted by repression
and psychical connict in their studies ot hysteria.
3I

Hysteria vas the enigmatic illness ot the nineteenth
century. 1he sudden unaccountable paralysis ot a limb,
organ, or temporary loss ot tunction ot part ot the body
(vith no explicable organic cause, vere all symptoms
that scientists tound hard to explain. Invariably, prior
to lreud and Breuer hysteria vas attributed to either
laziness (no doubt because ot the apparent theatricality ot
hysterical attacks,, a mental maltunction or a congenital
detciency ot the brain. 1he debates over the cause ot
the illness hysteria as a torm ot neurosis developed
trom Charcots attempts to treat the symptoms as
signs ot a psychical disorder. 1he physical expressions
(contortions, paralysis etc., vere representations, sub-
stitutes tor mental ideas that had been (sometimes long,
torgotten, repressed. (It vas lreud vho noticed that the
:, Prosper Despine, Psychologie
Naturelle (Paris: Savy, +:o:,, Vol. +,
pp. ,o+, cited in Lllenberger,
Discovery, p. ,.
o Ibid., p. .
+ Sigmund lreud and oseph
Breuer, Studies on Hysteria
(Iondon: PlI , +,::,.