Chapter 12 stance was | type of eme: 1 doubt i particular tr his repeated habit of clai Readers of « analysis of ¥ of the psychi Whatever Breton and hi his writings: In ‘What is Surrealism?", André Breton recalled how he ‘practised occasionally and the pleas on the sick’ during the war using Freud’s ‘methods of investigation’, as he exper- meant by “abs imented in written monologue by throwing out ideas on paper, followed by critical examination. He invited Philippe Soupault to do this with him and soon | tions, it dscap. they were writing automatically and comparing results. Although of course their | having marvel contents varied, Breton noted that sees, he was ni in the method there were similar faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, music, literate in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary verve, much emotion, a consider is one’s craft a able assortment of images of a quality such as we should never have been able We can paint to obtain in the normal way of writing, a very special sense of the picturesque, -painting. We ca and, here and there, a few pieces of out-and-out buffoonery. 3 pidea is. Or we c (4934: 4129 Indeed this : decrying the rep The writings proved ‘strange’, invested with a ‘very high degree of immediate | tive outcome of absurdity.’ It was out of this experiment with Freud’s method that Breton founded | F simplicity of af surrealism and when he asked himself to define it he wrote that it was ‘p E side in this confi psychic automatism’, which through the spoken or written word, or some oth means of expression, would reveal ‘the real process of thought’. The associ created by the surrealist act created a ‘superior reality” ~ more purely because they came from the unconscious — otherwise known in the forms of the dream and f° It is not too dif disinterested play of thought’. bir one is too self. Breton’s manifesto was a passionate attack on a trend in civilisation. Bi ity. Perhaps th by ‘absolute rationalism’ mankind ‘under collar of civilisation, under the p conscious beca of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstting erly stylised ar hhas been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching after truth character of t been proscribed” (1934: 413), ‘All credit for these discoveries must go to Fread hich elaborated he wrote, concluding: ‘the imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming uminate the str rights? (p. 414). Freud’s method of free association launched one of the more intense, sivity’ as ‘spont programmatic, periods in Westem fine art, and Breton was not alone amo d systematic. « those influenced by this way of imagining, In the novel, poetry and music, Fre poted in Breton Creat y and psychoanalysis To some ex iters, musiciar tation beais Creativity and psychoanalysis 195 stance was liberating, suggestive and morphogenically concordant with a certain type of emergent representational freedom, I doubt it-was puzzling to artists that Freud shied away from their own particular transformations of his method. Even a casual reader would have noted his repeated effort to affiliate his discoveries with the scientific world and his odd habit of claiming that one day all his theories would be explained biologically. Readers of ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ would also have noted that in his analysis of Westem culture, he stressed the exchange of pleasure for civility, part of the psychical change brought about by development of the superego. Whatever one thinks of the surrealist celebration of Freud, itis of interest that Breton and his colleagues brought to the foreground what Freud marginalised in his writings. If civilisation was a triumph of the conscience in a war with instincts and the pleasure principle, Freud subverted this reality — perhaps what Breton ‘meant by ‘absolute reality” —by inventing the free associative process, To some extent, Freud took inis method for granted, and as with many assump- tions, it escaped further consideration and development. Like an astronomer who, having marvelled at the discovery of a telescope; subsequently gets lost in what he sees, he was naturally more interested in what he found through his method than in the method itself. We may see something of the same tension in much modern ‘music, literature and painting ~a conflict between examination of the method that is one’s craft and concentration on what can be manifested through the process We can paint a figure without having to scrutinise the type of thought that is painting. We can compose a melody without having to think about what a musical ‘idea is. Or we can write a poem and not have to examine the poetic process, Indeed this tension gives rise to certain intellectual wars, with some artists decrying the representation of the process of creativity and celebrating the figura- tive outcome of the creation, and others expressing clear irritation with the mimetic simplicity of a figure. Perhaps we all recognise the essentials of this debate: each side in this conflict loses meaning ifits opposite is eradicated. Indeed, we know that writers, musicians or painters who profess impatience with the deconstructivists — those artists whose figures are, breaking down or cracked to begin with — are also intensely interested in the process that generates their creativity. Itis not too difficult to understand at least one of the sources of this impatience, Ifone is too self conscious, or too self examining it may interfere with one’s crea tivity. Perhaps the surrealist movement fuiled to realise its wish to employ the unconscious because an anxious self awareness in their undertaking resulted in an overly stylised art. Indeed this extreme in self observation — or representation of the character of the mind ~ led Dali to his celebrated ‘paranoiac-critical method! which elaborated the irrational character of mental contents in order to further illuminate the structure of the irrational. Paranoia, he wrote, was the ‘delirium of interpretation bearing a systematic structure’ and he defined ‘paranoiac-critical activity’ as ‘spontaneous method of ‘irrational knowledge’, based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations’ (quoted in Breton,-1934: 416). The surrealists experimented with the primary196 Creativity and psychoanalygis process in earnest: Max Emst used hypnagogic illusions to provide material for his collages, Miro went hungry to inspire hallucinations, coming from what 4 he thought of as the form of the object. But they did so in a curious combat of absolute unconsciousness and absolute consciousness, rather like a meeting of absolutes negating one another. Perhaps abstract expressionism became the vital compromise. For in the works of de Kooning, to take just one example, one can see how a technique, once sufficiently divorced from the figurative, allows for a certain type of unconscious influence that can be observed but not readily comprehended. Even as the process of painting + becomes to some the aim of the painting, heralding what could become a disturb- | ingly intrusive self observation, the result is mysterious. Even as the patterns typify and identify the works as the product of one artist, they nonetheless open the project as a question. What is this? What is one looking at? From which perspective? De Kooning knew paints. He knew how to keep the paint on the canvas alive | until the last possible moment, ready for its eradication and substitution with. another colour, another shape. For every vision there was a revision. And revi- 4 sions of the revisions. The cumulative visual effect is of time and space suspended in a moment, congealed into one representation. If this leads us to think of Freud’ mystic writing-pad as a metaphor of the unconscious, realised in these paintings. as layer upon layer of the many strokes of the brush, it also suggests Freud’s meta-4 phor of life itself, the self as the city of Rome in all its stages — Etruscan, Empire,’ Medieval, Renaissancé — visible in the same gaze and superimposed on on another. Such is the story of any self. In the works of de Kooning one gazes upa an object that in its revisional intensity reflects the dense overdeterminatio of psychic life, We witness it, indeed for some we are bewilderingly moved by! it, guided less by Western conventions of narrative and figuration, than by objectification of us, not as body or social being, but as unconscious movement: intelligent emotion. tion of an object’, writes Francis Bacon (1953: 620). Our words ~ feelings, affe ‘moods — are not adequate signifiers, as Bacon means much more through ‘feeli than is conjured by this word. He adds, ‘A picture should be a re-creation of event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the pictm unless there is struggle with the object’. Emotion (from ‘movere’), ot moving experience is an inner event and may get us closer to what we try to signify byy affect or feeling, We seem to be set in motion either by internal stimuli (such asi memory ora wish ora mysterious idea) or external stimuli (such as meetis someone, of reading a book). Complex states of mind, emotions arise out of the vagaries of life, ‘meetings between inner interests and circumstance. “The way I work’, said Bao is accidental... How can I re-create an accident? [Another accident] woull never be quite the same’ (quoted in Chipp, 1968: 622). So too with an emotio experience. Bacon continues: This is the thing that can only probably happen: oil paint, because it is so subtle that one tone, one piece of paint, that moves a thing into « would agree contents on Itis possi managed to it is more th surrealism f tapped by fr of the differ image, one 1 Dream the into other sc of thought, i see how ~ if Tepresentatio Freud how art-like. ‘War would appror in the dream. the body’s rai own, eviscers instincts was support this v ‘is nothing m point of repo: Perhaps if Pound, Stravi works have a rise to new e process is ver represented’ t Those psye life are largely ‘They would b being designe towards some genera’ to ider previously unr would be unc experience. Th provides us wi wrote in ‘Tin impels/All th things’ — is str