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‘This is part of what makes us distinctively human: the fact that, without any external stimulation, a man in an empty room can make himself laugh or cry.’

‘If we could listen in to other people’s thoughts, would we find that they are like our own? Or do thoughts have a personal style, an emotional atmosphere that is distinctive to the thinker?’

‘Even if we could somehow make our thoughts heard, it is likely that other people would struggle to make sense of them’

The way we think so differently and have inner worlds is ‘one the the hallmarks of creativity’. Fernyhough argues that is we evolved ourselves out of ‘intrusive thoughts, irrationality and distractibility’ then ‘creativity might become a thing of the past too’.

Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) was an Scientific experiment/investigation by Russel Hurlburt. Hurlburt gives his subjects a beeper that goes off intermittently throughout the day, when they hear the beep they must record their current thought in as much detail as possible. This method had been one of the most unique looks into the psyche. Fernyhough describes these insights into our thoughts as similar insights seen in great works of fiction that capture human concioussness well. Hurlburt claims the most common response his subjects have after completing the experiment is ‘”I have learned more about myself than I ever learned about myself before, including my wife and my bar-tender and my psychoanalyst with whom I have had five years worth of therapy”’. Hurlburt describes that for some doing DES is ‘truly life-changing'. This method interested me and I have started setting alarms to document my own thoughts at random intervals.

Hulrburt’s DES experiment also found that only 23% of beeped moments actually contained inner speech, most consisting of entirely wordless thoughts. Fernyhough also claims that there is a ‘huge variation between people in the wordiness of their thoughts’ and that ‘some people don’t use inner speech at all’. He also states that if we do talk to ourselves, ‘the language that ensues must haves some the properties of a conversation between different parts of who we are’. I find this fascinating as it is often my own experience when talking to myself, older, newer, kinder and harsher versions of myself speaking with each other.

Philosopher and psychologist George Herbert Mead, thinking involves a conversation between ‘a socially-constructed self and an internalised ‘other’, an abstract internal interlocutor who can adopt different attitudes on what the self is doing’.

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IN DREAMS, WRITERS SHOW INNER WORLDS: [ALL Edition] CARYN JAMES New York Times News Service. Sun Sentinel; Fort Lauderdale [Fort Lauderdale]. 05 Feb 1995: 10.D.

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IN DREAMS, WRITERS SHOW INNER WORLDS: [ALL Edition] CARYN JAMES New York Times News Service. Sun Sentinel; Fort Lauderdale [Fort Lauderdale]. 05 Feb 1995: 10.D.

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James describes William Burroughs novels as a ‘shadowy place between autobiography and fiction’ and ‘a dreamland where the authors allow us to see how their minds create associations, who matters to them among the living and the dead, how life and fiction merge.’

‘Revealing and concealing as they choose, these dream books are as reliable - or as unreliable - as conventional autobiographies, and a lot more fun to pore over.’

https://www.proquest.com/docview/388671045/fulltext/3C7A4AC37A094952PQ/1?accountid=10342

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‘Meet the misfits’ by Adrian Searle – about the Inner Worlds Outside exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery 2006

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‘Meet the misfits’ by Adrian Searle – about the Inner Worlds Outside exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery 2006

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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2006/may/04/1

‘a writhing and obsessively detailed drawing of entrails, hands, women and fruit, eggs and rabbits and birds, by a man with more than 100 pseudonyms, who calls himself Von Stropp’

The works in this exhibition are made by mentally ill (sometimes psychotic) artists, also known as ‘outsider art’. Searle describes outsider art as offering  ‘little except a signpost - not to a style or to an aesthetic, but to a place, somewhere beyond the pale and over the margin’ by outsiders such as ‘the criminal, the mentally ill, the spiritual medium, the eccentric, the alienated, or simply the untutored’

This art crosses between the psyche, the imaginary, and highlights the artists’ innermost disturbing thoughts.

This exhibition showed a mix of well-established artists such as Joan Miro and Jean Dubuffet, and completely unknown artists working entirely outside the art world simply labelled as ‘Anonymous’. The exhibition curator Jon Thompson does this to make the point that  "all human minds are fundamentally the same".

‘Henry Darger, was a hospital caretaker who, after his death, was discovered to have left a 15,000 page manuscript, and thousands of watercolours and drawings, most of which depict the misadventures of a group of androgynous, semi-clad little girls (Darger may have been ignorant of the details of female anatomy). Darger's drawings are repetitive roundelays of violence, strangulation, torture and murder, made all the more disquieting for the sugary prettiness of the glades and fields where these scenes are set.’

Searle reflects on thie image of the ‘crazy artist’ and how this is often a media sensation or expectation of artists, describing it as an ‘enduring [myth] of the popular imagination’.

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trange, somewhat indecipherable signs are slathered over the lid of a cardboard hatbox, as if, in his urgency, the author just picked up whatever was to hand. The image might represent a bird or a stick person, or an amalgamation of the two - it is difficult to be certain. Maybe they're just brushstrokes, scribbles and splotches. This is a painting by Joan Miró. And here's a writhing and obsessively detailed drawing of entrails, hands, women and fruit, eggs and rabbits and birds, by a man with more than 100 pseudonyms, who calls himself Von Stropp. Miró's Personnage-Oiseau we can comfortably deal with; the other is more difficult. Miró the artist; Von Stropp the outsider, a visionary and a conundrum.

Now take a seismic, juddering pencil drawing by Henri Michaux, a convulsive abstract text produced on mescaline, and compare it to the diagrams, drawings and beautiful calligraphy of Carle Lange, who died at an unknown date in a Polish hospital. Lange believed the sole of the foot was "a religious site". Michaux was a poet and artist; Lange was diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

The Whitechapel's Inner Worlds Outside is a complex and sometimes disturbing exhibition, filled with mysterious and peculiar things. The London exhibition brings together artists as well known as Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Francis Picabia and Philip Guston, alongside self-taught artists and isolated individuals, who either worked for years, unrecognised, filling their rooms and their lives with the products of their imagination. Or who, within the confines of institutions of one kind or another, painted, drew, sculpted, invented, illustrated their theological ruminations, poured out their sexual desires, and somehow found a language, and a place, for their inner voices, emotions and obsessions.

Unlike minimalism, expressionism, pop art, or any other of the ways we define various kinds of practices and beliefs in the art of the past century and a half, terms like "art brut", "outsider art", and primitive and naive art, offer us little except a signpost - not to a style or to an aesthetic, but to a place, somewhere beyond the pale and over the margin. Certain artists, such as Antonin Artaud, have crossed and recrossed the borders between these worlds, and have become canonical misfits. But, habitually, we relegate the art of the outsider - whether it is the criminal, the mentally ill, the spiritual medium, the eccentric, the alienated, or simply the untutored - to this zone, however interesting, appealing (or at times appalling) we find the things such people make. They become examples.

Who are "such people" in any case? What defines these outsiders is, apparently, what they lack: the seriousness of the professional, the art-world insider. But most "outsider artists" are in fact deadly serious, and they often toil as though their lives depended on it, as perhaps they do.

We might think we can distinguish art made self-consciously and with volition (even when it is by an artist high on a hallucinogenic drug) from art that springs from motives that remain obscure even to the one who made it. We might also think there is some essential difference between the hardnosed and the deluded. Yet there are many artists whose work depends on a world system or a point of view that is, in many ways, illogical or impenetrable (think of Matthew Barney), or which hinges on beliefs in things that cannot be proven to exist (like God, or unseen powers). What we cannot take at face value is that there are readily discernable differences between "outsider art" and insider art.

The exhibition's curator, Jon Thompson, says he is attempting to show established artists alongside outsider artists in an unqualifiedway - in part basing the exhibition on the fact that "all human minds are fundamentally the same", and that we are all products of the condition we call "modernity". Following Marx, he also speaks of the degrees to which we are all alienated in one way or another, or in many ways at once. This seems to me quite right.

But there is a marked difference, for example, between the drawings of Hans Bellmer and those of the "Anonymous" here, who has drawn a number of images of bound and tethered, subjugated women. The latter are feeble, miserable things, and only interesting as examples of a man's sexual fantasy. If that were all there was to Bellmer, we would forget him, or relegate his art to the status of evidence, the pathology of his desire.

Alfred Kubin, draughtsman, illustrator, early expressionist and member of the Blaue Reiter, is included here with a drawing of a man who appears to be performing oral sex on a female corpse. One of the most famous outsider artists, Henry Darger, was a hospital caretaker who, after his death, was discovered to have left a 15,000 page manuscript, and thousands of watercolours and drawings, most of which depict the misadventures of a group of androgynous, semi-clad little girls (Darger may have been ignorant of the details of female anatomy). Darger's drawings are repetitive roundelays of violence, strangulation, torture and murder, made all the more disquieting for the sugary prettiness of the glades and fields where these scenes are set.

What's lacking in Darger's work is much sense of development or self-reflection, whereas Kubin, many of whose images are not much less alarming, was a fully paid-up member of the European avant-garde. If there is a difference between a head by Paul Klee, Philip Guston or Emil Nolde, and those by "outsiders" Scottie Wilson, Richard Nie or Rudolf Horacek, it is certainly not a matter of presence, or of recognition. Sava Sekulic's Napoleon and his Daughters may not look anything like Napoleon, but it is more a recognisable human head than Guston's black blob, floating in its sea of grey.

Skill here is not an issue. Bill Traylor, born a slave in Alabama in 1854, only began to draw and paint in his 70s, using scraps of paper and card. He never thought of himself as an artist, yet his marvellously lively animals, people and "exciting events" have a great graphic touch, an inate skillfulness, and sense of shape and placement. They are as characterful, memorable, and drawn with as much fondness as any Miró. If Traylor is still an "outsider", his status was a matter of circumstance, education and opportunity, or lack of it, in Mississippi.

Others here led lives troubled in rather different ways. Many were the inmates of mental institutions, some of whom were taken from their asylums and killed in the death factories of the National Socialists. Their biographical notes are often painfully brief and patchy, the barest details accorded to tragic lives. Some here are completely anonymous, the only trace of them being the things they drew, painted or made.

Yet these individuals are as various as what they have been driven to make, and sometimes the manner of the making is as telling as the things themselves. James Castle insisted on drawing with soot and spit on the sorriest scraps of paper, even when other materials were offered him. Another, Carlo Zinelli, was discovered, first of all, attempting to draw by dragging a brick across the ground, and fumbling in the earth with his fingers. Given art materials, his drawings and paintings are a playful, sophisticated confusion of figures, patterns and stories. As much as any other artist, he seems to have been driven by inner need. All he wanted was an opportunity to make visible the things in his head. But here is a significant difference between certain kinds of insider and outsider art. Making visible does not in itself make anyone an artist.

One of the enduring myths of the popular imagination is that of the mad artist - crazy art, crazy guy. Dali with his moustache, poor Vincent alone in a field with a gun, mad Tracey from Margate. This cliche is reinforced often enough by genuine eccentricities and misfortune, as well as being turbocharged by self-serving showmanship and journalistic representations of the artist as driven and troubled, ludicrous or absurd. Against this, we now often set the artist up as some kind of intellectual, the consummate professional, engaged in the practice of culture, of making critiques, and weighed down by professorships and onerous exhibition schedules.

But this is not a case of responsibility versus disorganisation and mental chaos, self-consciousness versus daydream and reverie, success versus failure. Context matters. Many here could never survive as artists, not now or at any other time. Nor was that how they saw themselves.

What drives someone, on the other hand, might always remain obscure. In his catalogue essay, James Elkins asks if distinctions between insider and outsider art are useful, or even tenable. They certainly matter in the sense that those artists who are seen as "outsiders" to the mainstream are not looked at with the same kind of critical rigour as those for whom art is a profession. Nor does their work appear in most of the histories of 20th-century art. They are not, in a sense, players - even though, as the exhibition shows, what insiders and outsiders have in common outweighs their differences. But how should we speak of the obsessional, the selfengendered, the pictorial system or solipsistic world view that takes so little account of its own place in history? By excising differences, and pretending they don't exist? Inner Worlds Outside raises such questions, but cannot answer them.

· Inner Worlds Outside is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, until June 25. Box office: 020-7522 7880.

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Adrian Searle: Inner Worlds Outside at the Whitechapel Gallery

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trange, somewhat indecipherable signs are slathered over the lid of a cardboard hatbox, as if, in his urgency, the author just picked up whatever was to hand. The image might represent a bird or a stick person, or an amalgamation of the two - it is difficult to be certain.

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Neurology and surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Babinski by Joost Haan, Peter J. Koehler, Julien Bogousslavsky 

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Neurology and surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Babinski by Joost Haan, Peter J. Koehler, Julien Bogousslavsky 

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https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/135/12/3830/282832

‘The influences of psychiatry and psychoanalysis on surrealism and especially those of Sigmund Freud on Breton have been explored in many studies (Kaplan, 1989; Becker, 2000; Drèze, 2003; Rabaté, 2003; Chevrier, 2007; Esman, 2011). Freud is mentioned several times in Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism, published in 1924 (Breton, 1924).’

The disstinction between psychiatry and neurology played an important role in the formation of surrealism, this essay hypothesizes that Andre Breton was highly influenced by neurologist Jospeh Babinski when writing the Surrealist manifesto

Breton speaking about his time working in a psychiatric ward: ‘That is where I could experiment on patients, seeing the nature of diagnosis and psychoanalysis, and in particular, the recording of dreams and free association. These materials were from the beginning at the heart of surrealism’ (Breton, 1993).’

In 1919, Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault published ‘Les Champs Magnétiques’ which set out the beginnings of surrealism. Each author would write any thought coming to their mind in sentences or half sentences that would be completed by the other author (Breton and Soupault, 1920; Bergengruen, 2009).

The concept of psychological automism was developed by neuropsychiatrist Jules Baillarger around 1850, who asked his patients to write down any thought coming to their mind in rapid succession, he explained this was to portray the patients’ ‘subconscious fixed ideas’, getting to the root of their subconscious mind. This technique was widely used before psychoanalysis was invented.

‘In First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton defined surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism’ reflecting the true functioning of thinking in the absence of any reasoning or moral or aesthetic concern (Breton, 1924). The emphasis upon automatic writing in the early 1920s suggests that the surrealists wanted to parallel aspects of the hysteric’s and psychotic’s experience in their own processes of artistic production. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, they wove elements of hysteria and psychosis into their work, acknowledging it as a form of psychic release that rejected the rational world.’ - is this problematic? Did the surrealists romanticise mental illness or simply see it as a gimmick to be used in their work? The way they used it as a technique to make their work more interesting highlights the contrast between the privileged and well established surrealists and outsider artists portraying their suffering in a raw way that doesn’t require psychological techniques that mimic mental illness.

In his novel ‘Nadja’, this attitude is exposed as the main character, named after Breton, has a romance with the subject and muse, Nadja, whose mental illness leads to her being committed to an asylum, after which Andre discards her as her mental illness becomes too much for him to bear. This illustrates the surrealists’ surface level connection to mental illness and psychosis that was essentially just a muse to them, never something experienced personally or on a deeper level. ‘In the end, it appears that Nadja is mentally ill and has to be admitted to an asylum. The protagonist André uses Nadja as a muse until her symptoms become so worrying that he has to abandon her for her forced institutionalization.’

‘He appreciated psychiatric cases not for their therapeutic value, but for their applicability to the roots of artistic creation (Bonnet, 1988; Polizzotti, 1995).’

Did Breton suffer too? ‘on 11 October 1916, Breton wrote to him about his despair to find that he was himself a ‘degenerate’ unable to take care of his own ‘psychism’ (Bonnet, 1992).’

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Abstract

Before he became the initiator of the surrealist movement, André Breton (1896-1966) studied medicine and worked as a student in several hospitals and as a stretcher bearer at the front during World War I. There he became interested in psychiatric diseases such as hysteria and psychosis, which later served as a source of inspiration for his surrealist writings and thoughts, in particular on automatic writing. Breton worked under Joseph Babinski at La Pitié, nearby La Salpêtrière, and became impressed by the 'sacred fever' of the famous neurologist. In this article, we describe the relationship between Breton and Babinski and try to trace back whether not only Breton's psychiatric, but also his neurological experiences, have influenced surrealism. We hypothesize that Breton left medicine in 1920 partly as a consequence of his stay with Babinski.

'Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable...'

André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

'Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.'

André Breton, Nadja, 1928

Introduction

André Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement, studied medicine from 1913 to 1920. He had 'chosen medicine as a kind of lesser evil' ( Polizzotti, 1995), but during his medical study he became intrigued by psychiatry and psychiatric diseases such as hysteria, psychosis and paranoia ( Becker, 2000; Rabaté, 2003). The influences of psychiatry and psychoanalysis on surrealism and especially those of Sigmund Freud on Breton have been explored in many studies ( Kaplan, 1989; Becker, 2000; Drèze, 2003; Rabaté, 2003; Chevrier, 2007; Esman, 2011). Freud is mentioned several times in Breton's First Manifesto of Surrealism, published in 1924 ( Breton, 1924).

Psychiatry and neurology had not been fully separated everywhere in the first decades of the 20th century. The emergence of neurology as a separate discipline had started among others with the work of Jean-Martin Charcot. Joseph Babinski, one of his pupils, played a major role in this development. As Babinski met Breton on several occasions, and as he is also mentioned in Breton's First Manifesto of Surrealism, an influence of Babinski on Breton is likely.

Little is published on the influence of the neurological way of thinking on Breton. Here, we describe the relationship between Breton and Babinski, with special emphasis on possible associations between neurology and surrealism.

Breton and neuropsychiatry

Breton was born in 1896 in Tinchebray (Normandy) and started to study medicine in 1913, although he had already developed a passion for poetry ( Polizzotti, 1995; Drèze, 2003). Soon he had to serve in World War I and felt 'flung into a cesspool of blood, mud, and idiocy' ( Polizzotti, 1995) ( Fig. 1). In 1916 he worked as a medical orderly in Nantes and later as a student in the neuropsychiatric centre of the second army in Saint-Dizier (east of Paris). Here, he worked with doctor Raoul-Achille Leroy (1869-1941), an alienist who had a great influence on the young student and aroused his interest in psychiatry. Advised by Leroy, who supplemented the education of his students each evening with several hours of conversation, Breton read with passion the neurological and psychiatric treatises of Jean-Martin Charcot, Emil Kraepelin, Emmanuel Régis, Valentin Magnan, Gilbert Ballet and Sigmund Freud, among others ( Polizzotti, 1995; Biéder, 2007). Leroy had been a resident of the Seine asylums and physician of the Évreux asylum. He had published several papers on mental diseases, wrote a thesis called Les persécutés persécuteurs, presented a report on the 'responsibility of hysterics' at the Congrès des aliénistes et neurologues de langue Française in Lille in 1906, and a report on 'hallucinations lilliputiennes' at the Société Médico-Psychologique in 1909 ( Biéder, 2007). It has been suggested that Leroy used to be a collaborator of Charcot, but this remains controversial, as in 1893, the year of Charcot's death, Leroy was only 24-years old ( Chevrier, 2001; Biéder, 2007). Nevertheless, it is not impossible that Leroy was present at some of the presentations of Charcot, as students of the hospitals around Paris were allowed to attend these ( Chevrier, 2001; Biéder, 2007).

In Saint-Dizier, Breton especially cared for shell-shock victims. He became fascinated with psychiatry and thought seriously about becoming a psychiatrist, but could not unequivocally decide to abandon literature ( Polizzotti, 1995; Becker, 2000). Breton quoted Leroy in a letter to his classmate, the future physician and author Théodore Fraenkel (1896-1964): 'Charcot? Perversity of hysterics? Come on, are all women not whores?' ( Fraenkel, 1990). He described Leroy in another letter to Fraenkel:

'C'est un figure étrange, avec ses cheveux bleus en vieille brosse, ses yeux d'azur clair, sa tête en cube, ses creux sillons nasolabiaux, sa vareuse défraîchi. Il est doux, superbement lucide, blasphème avec élégance et lit La Croix' ( Fraenkel, 1990).

(It is a strange figure, with his blue hair in old crew cut, his clear azure eyes, his cube-like head, his hollow nasolabial pleats, his withered blouse. He is gentle, very clever, blasphemous with elegance and reads La Croix).

Under Leroy, Breton also practised neurology with great pleasure and Leroy was proud when Breton diagnosed a patient with tabes dorsalis (locomotor ataxia) that had been overlooked by others ( Bonnet, 1992; Saint-Dizier catalogue, 2000). Leroy suggested that Breton write a thesis on Le délire d' interprétation dans Freud ( Chevrier, 2007). Instead, Breton wrote several case studies for Leroy, including a report on the 'mad man who did not believe that there was a war' ( Chevrier, 2001). Interestingly, this case was published by others, but without mentioning Leroy and Breton's names ( Demay and Renaud, 1919). However, Breton used this case in a poetic text, which he published shortly before the end of the war in Pierre Reverdy's avant-garde periodical Nord-Sud ( Breton, 1918). It seems that Breton made more bright diagnoses in neurology, as he wrote to Fraenkel on 15 September 1916: 'I have picked up a case of radial palsy which was misleading, and I even had ideas of greatness when I could challenge four diagnoses made by Dr Cruchet, chief of the neurological centre at Bar-le-Duc' ( Bonnet, 1992). A few years later, the same Cruchet was to become famous for his description of Von Economo-Cruchet encephalitis (lethargic encephalitis).

Another sign of the persisting influence of Leroy is the inclusion by Breton of 'lilliputian hallucinations' (studied in 1909 by Leroy, the first to call them so) into his poetic work, in particular, in L'Air de l'Eau in 1934 ( Chevrier, 2001).

Of his time in Saint-Dizier, Breton later said:

According to Fraenkel, the neuropsychiatric experiences had metamorphosed Breton:

From Saint-Dizier, Breton was sent to the front near Verdun as a stretcher bearer, but due to shortage of personnel, also served as a kind of doctor. After 4 weeks, he moved to Paris for further schooling ( Polizzotti, 1995). Around that time he read a publication by Babinski and wrote to Fraenkel:

'I may be at the point of feeling a strange and, as usual, resounding admiration for Dr. Babinski. I examine with self-satisfaction the progress in my will. I've asked one of my friends to accord me the vacant position at the neurological department at La Pitié. In this way I shall know if I like it' ( Fraenkel, 1990; Bonnet, 1992).

From January to September 1917, Breton indeed worked under Babinski as a non-resident student at the neurological centre of La Pitié hospital in Paris. Babinski inspired in Breton an intense admiration. Perhaps most memorable in Breton's eyes was the combination of 'sacred fever' and casual aloofness that Babinski displayed while handling his patients ( Polizzotti, 1995).

Later that year, Breton continued his studies at the military hospital Val-de-Grâce and prepared for his exam. However, he never qualified as a medical doctor.

Surrealism

Why Breton left medicine, after obviously at first being fascinated by it, has remained unclear. Rather enigmatically, he expressed his feelings as follows:

Shortly after the war, he became involved in the avant-garde milieu, such as Dada. He started to work for indexing the collections of Jacques Doucet (1853-1923) and correcting Marcel Proust's proofs of Le Côté de Guermantes (part of the well-known In Search of Lost Time) at the publisher Gallimard ( Polizzotti, 1995).

In 1919, André Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs Magnétiques on mental automatism, where each author would write any thought coming to his mind in sentences or part of sentences that would then be completed by the other author ( Breton and Soupault, 1920; Bergengruen, 2009). Les Champs Magnétiques is considered the founding publication of surrealism ( Bergengruen, 2009).

The notion of psychological automatism goes back to the neuropsychiatrist Jules Baillarger around 1850, who already asked his patients to write down any thought that was coming to their minds, a technique that was then developed further, mainly in Charcot's laboratory, by Pierre Janet in order to delineate what he called 'subconscious fixed ideas', several years before Freud set up his theory of the unconscious ( Janet, 1889; Bergengruen, 2009). In fact, the emphasis on 'association of ideas' was rather commonly used by psychiatrists shortly before the war, including Bleuler, Claparède, Toulouse and many others ( Chevrier, 2001). However, when Breton picked up this technique, he mainly referred to Freud in his correspondence with Fraenkel, although it is obvious that he had read many other authors who were currently using 'associations of ideas' with their patients ( Bonnet, 1992). At that time, Breton had studied Freud only indirectly, through the textbook of psychiatry of Régis, as well as Hesnard's 1914 book on psychoanalysis ( Bonnet, 1992). The technique of automatic writing was also largely used with psychiatric patients before psychoanalysis, and several famous books from the 1880-90s by Binet, Séglas and others were part of the psychiatric theoretical armamentarium during World War I ( Chevrier, 2007).

In First Manifesto of Surrealism ( 1924), Breton defined surrealism as 'pure psychic automatism' reflecting the true functioning of thinking in the absence of any reasoning or moral or aesthetic concern ( Breton, 1924). The emphasis upon automatic writing in the early 1920s suggests that the surrealists wanted to parallel aspects of the hysteric's and psychotic's experience in their own processes of artistic production. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, they wove elements of hysteria and psychosis into their work, acknowledging it as a form of psychic release that rejected the rational world. The neuropsychiatric readings of Breton, advised by Leroy, had a critical influence on the shaping of what would become surrealism as it is defined in First Manifesto of Surrealism. A striking example is the 'dialogue' part of that text, which quotes issues such as the Ganser syndrome and echolalia. Entire sentences were actually taken from Constanza Pascal's book on La démence précoce ( Pascal, 1911).

The origins of surrealism have further been traced back to several avant-garde currents and to the defeatism and feelings of disgust after World War I ( Becker, 2000; Drèze, 2003). Wartime experiences, such as the folly of political and military forces, but also madness as a result of violence on individual men, served as inspiration ( Becker, 2000). Next to 'automatic writing', important topics were 'the science of dreams' and the development of new metaphors. Again, Breton mainly referred to Freud when he emphasized the role of dreams in surrealism, although he was well aware of the work of predecessors, such as Hervey de Saint-Denys or Vaschide ( Chevrier, 2001).

To the psychiatrists of the time, mental confusion and hallucinations were characteristic wartime syndromes. Their case studies seemed to the surrealists to be poems in prose suited just for them ( Becker, 2000). In L'immaculée Conception, published by Breton and Eluard in 1930 with a frontispiece by Dali, the chapter 'Possessions' includes essays on acute mania, general paresis, delirium and precocious dementia ( Breton and Eluard, 1930).

The importance of the theme of 'madness' is also illustrated in Breton's partly autobiographic novel Nadja from 1928 that describes the love-story of André, the narrator, with Nadja ( Breton, 1928). The two have long discussions on surrealistic themes. They wander the streets of Paris as real 'flâneurs'. In the end, it appears that Nadja is mentally ill and has to be admitted to an asylum. The protagonist André uses Nadja as a muse until her symptoms become so worrying that he has to abandon her for her forced institutionalization. After one of the long encounters with Nadja, he notes: ' October 7. -I have suffered from a violent headache which, perhaps mistakenly, I attribute to last night's emotions and also to the effort of attention, of accommodation which I have had to make' ( Breton, 1928). Nadja, who wanders around until she finds her poet and master, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia ( Wylie, 1970), hysteria ( Rabaté, 2003) and borderline personality disorder ( Stone-Richards, 2001), but it is clear that she also suffered from psychosis as she developed hallucinations. The 'real life' Nadja (Léona Delcourt) remained in psychiatric wards until her death in 1941.

Nadja includes a photograph of Henri Claude, chief psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne hospital where Nadja/Delcourt was admitted before being referred to a chronic asylum. Claude had worked in neurology (describing a midbrain syndrome) and knew Babinski well. Breton used to attend and enjoy his Sunday seminars at Sainte-Anne, but wrote an unpleasant comment below Claude's photograph emphasizing his 'stubborn forehead' ( Breton, 1928). Second Manifesto of Surrealism ( Breton, 1924) started with a mere copy of critical reactions to Nadja by psychiatrists (including de Clérambault, the developer of the 'mental automatism' in the theory of psychotic delirium) published in an issue of Les Annales Médico-Psychologiques, the oldest mental medicine journal. It is of great interest that at that time, Breton's evolution looked much closer to what would later become 'antipsychiatry' than to the current trends of clinical psychiatry, which had so fascinated him during his stay with Leroy in Saint-Dizier.

At the beginning of World War II, Breton was again called back into the medical corps of the French army ( Polizzotti, 1995). In 1941 he escaped to America, returned to Paris in 1946 and died there in 1966.

The Breton library catalogue (>2000 books) included several books on neurology, among which were two by Babinski: Titres et Travaux from 1913 and Hystérie-pithiatisme et troubles nerveux d'ordre réflexe en neurologie de guerre from 1917 co-authored by Jules Froment ( Breton, 2003). Furthermore, there were various psychiatric textbooks, including 18 volumes by Freud.

Babinski

Joseph Babinski ( Fig. 2) was trained as a histologist and anatomopathologist, but after meeting Charcot he switched to clinical neurology ( Skalski, 2007; Poirier, 2008; Philippon and Poirier, 2009). He never married and lived with his brother Henri, a mine engineer, who later applied himself to the art of cooking and wrote a famous cookery book under the pen name of Ali Bab ( Ali-Bab, 1928; Philippon and Poirier, 2009). In 1905, after the death of Henri Parinaud, a famous ophthalmologist and neurologist who had also worked under Charcot, Babinski became the tutor of the three orphaned daughters (their mother had died in 1904), Ebba, Ellen and Karen ( Poirier, 2011; Poirier and Philippon, 2011). Babinski had an interest in art, but not specifically in that of the avant-garde ( Skalski, 2007; Philippon and Poirier, 2009).

From 1885 to 1887, Babinski served under Charcot as his chef de clinique. During this period, hysteria was one of the main topics of Charcot's studies. When Freud visited La Salpêtrière during the winter of 1885-86 he added the words 'particularly on hysteria' to the title of his German translation of one of Charcot's books, as indeed 10 of the lectures in the book dealt with hysteria. At that time, Freud complained that Babinski, the new chef de clinique of Charcot, was less friendly with him than his predecessor Pierre Marie. Charcot asked Freud and Babinski to present a case, and Freud wrote to his fiancée that he was much more junior than him. Nevertheless, Babinski invited Freud to have lunch in the 'salle de garde des internes', an unusual favour at the time ( Bogousslavsky, 2011a)

Applying the anatomoclinical method, Charcot first distinguished neurological diseases as locomotor ataxia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but later he studied hysteria and hypnosis ( Bogousslavsky, 2011b). He considered hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paralyses and contractures as important symptoms of hysteria. Traumatic male hysteria was a major topic during the 1880s and the term 'grand ébranlement psychique' (great psychic shock) was introduced. Already in the early 1880s, however, Charcot suggested that 'hysteria is in large measure a mental illness' ( Micale, 1990; Bogousslavsky, 2011b).

Due to antagonism between Charcot and his previous collaborator Charles Bouchard, Babinski did not pass an examination for professorship, and never had an academic title ( Iragui, 1986). In 1895, he moved to La Pitié, where he worked until his retirement in 1922. Babinski not only described the famous 'toe phenomenon' and several other tests to distinguish organic from hysterical hemiplegia, but also published on anosognosia, anosodiaphoria, hypermetria, pseudo-tabes, brainstem lesions, neurosyphilis and pituitary tumours ( Okun and Koehler, 2004). During his lifetime, neurology became recognized as a distinct discipline apart from internal medicine and psychiatry.

Babinski's first papers on hysteria were inspired by Charcot ( Babinski, 1886). However, many of the clinical manifestations he would later exclude from hysteria:

Babinski criticized Charcot's concept of hysteria as he considered his teacher's concept far too extensive by including phenomena that could not be modified by persuasion (including, e.g. trophic and vasomotor changes). He proposed the term pithiatism (curable by persuasion) for disorders created by suggestion ( Derouesné, 2009).

Babinski's ideas played an important role during World War I. Soldiers who would previously have been classified as hysterical, now received the diagnose 'pithiatism'. A negative consequence of this was the 'torpillage' (therapy using faradic and galvanic currents) to 'treat' soldiers with war neuroses ( Tatu et al., 2010).

The controversy on pithiatism and hysteria went on for several years. Babinski's ideas still influence the present practice of neurology: the diagnosis of hysteria still depends on first eliminating the possibility of an organic cerebral disorder.

Breton and Babinski: distance and admiration

Babinski inscribed a copy of his book on 'Hystéria-Pithiatism' (written in 1917 with Froment) to Breton ( Fig. 3), predicting for him a 'great medical future' ( Polizzotti, 1995).

Breton's early medical training alerted him to the concept of hysteria and psychosis as a kind of bodily speech emanating from the unconscious. This concept, however, was closer to Charcot than to Babinski. In 1928, together with Louis Aragon, Breton published a manifesto to celebrate the 'fiftieth anniversary of the invention of hysteria', which they thus date from 1878 ( Aragon and Breton, 1997). Although Charcot had studied the affection since 1872, 1878 was mentioned as the year in which his methodology moved from clinical observation to experiment, applying hypnosis as a diagnostic tool ( Micale, 1989). Breton and Aragon see hysteria as 'the greatest poetic discovery of the latter part of the century'. In their lyrical homage, they take distance from Babinski, who had reduced hysteria to suggestion, but they also call him 'the most intelligent man who has engaged this issue' ( Rabaté, 2003). A note added by Breton to the revised version of Nadja from 1963 underlines this admiration for Babinski:

In contrast to Freud, Babinski is not mentioned by name in the First Manifesto of Surrealism ( Breton, 1924). The note in Nadja, however, clearly refers to Babinski. The 'homage' unequivocally links neurology with surrealism.

This passage expresses Breton's admiration for Babinski, even to such a degree that he includes a description of the neurological examination in a surrealistic 'manifesto'. On the other hand, the passage contains some peculiar facts. According to Breton, Babinski was 'following no set plan' and was investigating his patient with a 'sacred fever'. Described in this way, a neurological examination looks like an automatic act, a mental automatism, and may become part of the surrealistic concept ( Bergengruen, 2009).

Did Breton leave medicine because of Babinski?

Breton never revealed why he left medicine. Before starting to study medicine, it appeared that his choice was already made as 'poetry in the larger sense was never far from his mind'. He appreciated psychiatric cases not for their therapeutic value, but for their applicability to the roots of artistic creation ( Bonnet, 1988; Polizzotti, 1995). At Saint-Dizier, however, he became nearly exalted when he discovered the writings of various psychiatrists and was confronted with psychiatric patients. Here, he hesitated between literature and psychiatry and was 'hoping for some external resolution to his internal dilemma' ( Polizzotti, 1995). On 20 September 1916, he wrote to Fraenkel 'My very last verses probably have been written...psychiatry enthusiasms me' ( Bonnet, 1992). However, in his private notes, Fraenkel also reported Breton's hesitations ( Fraenkel, 1990) and on 11 October 1916, Breton wrote to him about his despair to find that he was himself a 'degenerate' unable to take care of his own 'psychism' ( Bonnet, 1992). On 20 October he wrote again to his friend: 'Psychiatrists have much less genius than poets. Leroy is just an alienist and a charming man. With all their families grouped in the asylum, they make me think of factory engineers' ( Bonnet, 1992). It is interesting that after several months without writing poetry, Breton went back to poetic writing at the end of November 1916, with a poem entitled Soldat.

When back in Paris, he asked his friends and mentors Fraenkel, Vaché, Apollinaire and Valéry for advice. From his correspondence with Fraenkel it seems that his 'psychiatric exaltation' was tapered down during his stay with Babinski ( Fraenkel, 1990), who was everything but a psychiatrist. The stay at La Pitié may just have revealed to Breton that medicine in practice was not synonymous with what he had dreamt of in Saint-Dizier.

As the correspondence of Breton is embargoed for 50 years after his death, as per his will, this will not be available before 2016 to search for clues why Breton left medicine. However, there are various excerpts of the letters of Breton in Fraenkel's Carnets ( Fraenkel, 1990; Bonnet, 1992).

Fraenkel repeatedly mentions the increasing literary activity of Breton during his stay at La Pitié, but does not mention the issue of abandoning medicine. It is indeed interesting to realize that during this period, Breton was frequently contacted and stimulated by Guillaume Apollinaire, who was healing from his operation from subdural haematoma, to contribute with literary papers ( Polizzotti, 1995). At the same time, Breton met Pierre Reverdy, the leading avant-garde poet in Paris, who was just founding his periodical Nord-Sud. Along with his own hesitations between a literary and a medical career, the stay with Babinski, at least was for Breton, insufficient to balance the strong 'poetic' stimuli from Apollinaire and Reverdy. It is striking that Louis Aragon, one of the three musketeers of early surrealism with Breton and Philippe Soupault, who was also a medical student, also decided to leave medicine at the same time ( Bonnet, 1992; Chevrier, 2007). When these young poets came back from the front, they were immediately taken back into the effervescent literary milieu in Paris.

One could speculate that although Babinski's technique of patient examination was admired by Breton (see above), his attitude towards unconscious life and emotions was indeed opposite to what Breton had found so fascinating in the psychiatric textbooks that he had so eagerly read during his stay at Saint-Dizier. These psychiatric readings were much closer to Breton's poetic exaltation, and it is likely that Babinski's purposefully non-psychological thinking that largely represented the medical-hospital tradition of the time, did not act as a strong reinforcement of Breton's continuation of medical studies, to say the least.

Babinski with a fake beard

Babinski's interest in 'the arts' lead to a remarkable history in which Breton played a minor role. In 1920, a play was on stage called Les Détraquées ( The Deranged Women). It was written by Pierre Palau 'with the help of Olaff' ( Fig. 4). Palau was an actor and author, but the true identity of Olaff remained unknown. The critics hated the play, but Breton liked it, and attended several performances. He discussed it at length in the 1928 edition of Nadja ( Breton, 1928; Philippon and Poirier, 2009). In the play, set at a private girls' boarding school, the lesbian headmistress and a dance instructor torture and murder a young student. Olaff's identity was revealed by Breton in 1956 in the first issue of his magazine Le Surréalisme, même. He also commented on the identity of Olaff in the 1962 reprint of Nadja ( Breton, 1928). Olaff was Babinski, and had attended the première of his own play wearing a fake beard.

Conclusion

We were unable to find much evidence for a 'neurological' influence on Breton or on surrealism. Babinski's 'sacred fever' obviously did not motivate Breton to become a neurologist or to finish his medical training. In the ongoing debate on hysteria, Breton did not choose the 'organic' explanation of Charcot, nor the 'pithiatism' of Babinski, but took out the 'pure psychic automatism' and the madness and used it as an artistic source of surrealism.

However, his long-life admiration for Babinski and the inclusion of a description of Babinski's neurological examination in the First Manifesto of Surrealism show that Breton saw him as an important source of inspiration. Whether he included the neurological examination in this text as an example of 'mental automatism' ( Bergengruen, 2009) or for a more 'medical' reason, remains a matter of speculation. There is no hard evidence for our hypothesis that Breton left medicine (partly) as a consequence of his stay with Babinski, so this also remains speculative. It is possible that this issue will become clear in a few years when the correspondence of Breton will become available.

References

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Neurology and surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Babinski

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Before he became the initiator of the surrealist movement, André Breton (1896-1966) studied medicine and worked as a student in several hospitals and as a stretcher bearer at the front during World War I. There he became interested in psychiatric diseases such as hysteria and psychosis, which later served as a source of inspiration for his surrealist writings and thoughts, in particular on automatic writing.

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The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism Tessel M. Bauduin (2015)

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The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism Tessel M. Bauduin (2015)

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https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=cpo

Surrealist Automatism was a technique used by the surrealists meaning to draw and create without thinking, letting the unconscious mind create.

‘In 1924 André Breton (1896-1966) published the Manifesto of Surrealism, thereby formally positioning a group of young aspiring poets and artists who had been undertaking collective creative experiments since 1919, as an avant-garde movement. In this first manifest, he provided two definitions of Surrealism; defining it, to begin with, methodologically, as ‘psychic automatism.’ Subsequently, he formulated it along the lines of a religious creed, elucidating that as a psychic mechanism or state of mind, Surrealism served as a solution for the problems of life. Moreover, in Surrealism the reality of dreams, ‘neglected associations,’ and the play of thought were to be considered superior.’

In his 1933 essay ‘The Automatic Message’ Breton described automatism as a misfortune due to the difficulty in keeping it authentic, how can we be sure what we are doing is automatic? However he stood by automatic writing ‘as the core practice of Surrealism until the end of his life, continuing to practice it on many occasions’

‘Automatic writing is a magic dictation, wrote Breton in a 1922 essay, and it is thought that dictates from the unconscious. He refers to ‘heeding’ the voice of one’s own unconscious also;13 while in the 1924 Manifesto he declared that the aim was to obtain from himself a monologue ‘akin to spoken thought.’’

In automatic writing ‘one has to write quickly not only to keep up with thought’s velocity, but also to keep from listening to the voices of reason, aesthetics or morals.’ In Breton’s words it connects with the ‘essential self-murmur'(From the surrealist manifesto). Breton claims ‘[w]rite quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.’

Sensory automatism involves dreaming and hallucinating

‘Writing, speaking and other physical movements, including walking, are active sensory automatisms’

‘Thus suspended in an extended moment of slumbering or almost-falling-asleep, they quickly and immediately wrote down sentences, without apparent thought or pause for re-reading or editing’ - writing their thoughts in a tired, dream-like state just before falling asleep was a strategy that accessed the subconscious. This was a further exploration of automatic writing conducted by Breton and Soupault for the 1920 ‘The Magnetic Fields’

[w]rite quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.’ (Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto) this would lead to a ‘rational intervention’ of the creative process.

In many ways the surrealists avenged the misfortunes and abuses of psychiatric medicine by subverting their techniques of drawing out hysteria to be used creatively. ‘In Surrealism expressions of the subliminal, considered to be expressions of unrestrained creativity, in whatever form, means or context, were always framed as poetical. With the reframing of hysteria as an invented disease, its performative qualities only increased.’ By using these techniques to show their own ‘madness’ the surrealists delegitimised their medical significance as techniques for treating ‘hysteria’ and equally led to further developments in the field of psychology.

The surrealists also validated the feminine and subverted gender norms - ‘with an overwhelming majority of hysterics, patients, and mediums being women, one should also not underestimate the importance of the surrealist validation of such traditionally feminine (and therefore, perceived as weak) faculties as intuition, imagination, hallucination, the dream, and the subliminal generally, as relevant, creative and authentic. In the surrealist assumption of the passivity of automatism, there is a certain amount of genderbending going on.’

2. DREAMS ARE A GATEWAY TO THE SUBLIMINAL – the surrealists would write down their dreams and share them at meetings. However, similar misfortunes of intervening with the subconscious could occur here as the act of writing down and remembering a dream could change it.

The sleeping sessions (1922-1923) – the surrealists would enter a state of ‘hypnotic slumber’ induced by a séance where participants would holds hands in the dark, at which point the participant would be asked questions, perhaps begin speaking on their own or start to draw. The surrealists did not believe in spiritualism or contact with the dead, and used these seances purely to access their own subconscious. They considered the voice of the dream to be the inner voice. Robert Desnos was particularly good at entering this state, talking for long periods in detail, which Breton lauded in the Manifesto as getting closest to ‘the Surrealist truth’ ‘It shows further that Surrealism is, or to be surrealist is, to directly communicate one’s unconscious.’ There were also accusations of fraud and faking it in this sessions, as the behaviour was sometimes so extreme.

These sessions ended as they became darker in tone, leading to violence, predictions of illness and death, and an attempt at group suicide that was prevented just in time. What does this say about the subconscious? Accessing it can be liberating and terrifying. One surrealist described how they became ‘manic’ and seemed lost as ‘they go into trances to meet one another and converse like people in a faraway world where everyone is blind’ where ‘knives have to be snatched from their hands’ (Aragon, A Wave of Dreams).

Automatic writing was a rebellion against literary elitism, as anyone could do it – it required no literary skill or vision.

The surrealists admired mediums, the institutionalised insane and children as they thought their could access ‘the primitive mind’ in a way the bourgeouis French men could not. ‘The logic of the claims and predictions of mediums and clairvoyants was thought to operate in a manner similar to dream narratives: irrational, strange, absurd and marvellous, and adhering to an inner logic that lies outside of accepted (bourgeois) boundaries of rationality and coherence but may be experienced as logical all the same.’

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by Michael DeForge, daily comics that range from snippets of conversations that make little sense without context or go nowhere, to more concrete ideas and serious topics, however always drawn and written in a bizarre and confusing way.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTmfvsirotv/

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This sort of nonsense is part of what I enjoy in uncanny/surreal worlds and stories as a lighter aspect that also amplifies the feeling of things being unnatural and jarring, whilst also comical.  https://webcomicname.com/

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Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things 

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Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things 

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disjointed narratives that don’t quite add up create a surreal and uncanny atmosphere.
ttps://www.indiewire.com/2020/09/charlie-kaufman-explains-im-thinking-of-ending-things-1234584492/

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http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2020/6/10/the-furniture-shirley-and-the-haunting-of-her-own-grim-house.html The depiction of Jackson’s inner world and thoughts in this film tell a story of mental illness and agoraphobia that is both comical and unnerving, Jackson’s interactions with others are very free and unhinged, as she often goes along with the public perception of herself by making herself seem more ‘crazy’ for her own entertainment. Equally her one-track mindset of going down rabbitholes of researching for her book, such as her obsession with a local murder, also play into the idea of escaping your own world into another which relates to my project and the blur between reality and imagination, as Jackson tries to figure out the victim’s inner psyche and writes a book about her that is entirely fictional since she didn’t know her.

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Anomalisa (2015) movie by Charlie Kaufman

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Anomalisa (2015) movie by Charlie Kaufman

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https://epochemagazine.org/02/anomalisa-or-the-effort-of-recognition/

Anomalisa – the main character’s inner world flavours how people and voices sound, every character having the same face and voice being a reflection of his depression numbing his perception of others. One character briefly has a different face and voice which excites him, but then their voice reverts to the same as everyone else as the excitement wears off.

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Initially I was unsure exactly how to define the topic I wanted to explore, however I knew it was a vague concept that I had touched on in a painting I made shown above. When trying to define this I came up with the following:

‘Exploring the human condition, sense of self and mental health through creating surrealist and absurdist worlds and characters with emotionally overlapping atmospheres. Also an aspect of making the everyday fantastical. This could take the form of a visual diary/poem that collects my own and others’ stories of emotional confusion, mental illness and feelings of personal growth.’

Although still vague and convoluted, this gave me a starting point to begin researching from, and led me to look into works by artists, authors, film-makers and psychologists to define how these atmospheres/worlds are accessed and what interests me about them. This is pictured to the left in the form of a mind-map exploring the links between these themes and references that felt relevant.

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https://wsimag.com/art/13260-leonora-carrington

‘A prolific painter, the exhibition looks at how the artist established her distinctive take on surrealism; characterised by eccentric beings which shift between plant, animal, human and object; between reality and otherworldliness.’

‘connected by motifs alluding to invented worlds, domestic objects and settings, an interest in assemblage and a sense of mystery.’

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Henry Darger – one of the most famous outsider artists

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Henry Darger – one of the most famous outsider artists

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Death and destruction mixed with childhood innocence a common theme in Darger’s work, creating a jarring and disjointed atmosphere.

https://www.mam.paris.fr/en/expositions/exhibitions-henry-darger

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my addition to the padlet - thinking about tangential connections between different sources that interest me. This helped develop my idea of what my project was really about. The eeriness and surreal aspects of these sources seemed to be what interested me most.

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Jan Svankmajer-Food Pt.2 (1992)

https://vimeo.com/12680446

Similar to my approach to the soup with forks – replacing objects in scenarios to make them strange, funny, unusable and sometimes uncanny.

Jan Švankmajer’s ‘Darkness, Light, Darkness’ (1989)

https://vimeo.com/212875761

Creative use of size, space that connects to agoraphobia as the main character is contained to a house.

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https://vimeo.com/15613340
Homage to 1920s surrealist cinema that has atmosphere of eerie confusion mixed with comedy and laughable surrealism. The masked banquet in particular – the way the characters are designed, sitting around their tables and getting ready to kill the intruder, then instead deciding to dance. This nonsensical narrative structure also focuses on the main character’s inner psyche, inner world and subconscious. The box he enters representing his inner world.

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Winner of Best Short Film Award at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, FILM(dzama) rekindles the lost form of surrealist cinema made popular in the 1920’s by Dali/Bunel and Man Ray.  Motivated by the sheer magic, humor and disobedience of visual artist Marcel Dzama’s work, Deco Dawson has created a stunningly original, entirely fictional biography of the artist.

Written, Directed, Produced by: Deco Dawson
Music by:  Patric Caird

Original Release Date:  Sept 7, 2001

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https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-24-spring-2012/between-terror-and-ecstasy
- ‘The hallucinatory grip governs the contrasting psychological modes, between terror and joy, of metamorphosis. Dorothea Tanning, for example, introduces creatures in the process of metamorphosis into the ‘metaphysical’ space of Giorgio de Chirico. The Surrealist object, assembled, cobbled together, is not a sculpture, but a hallucination materialised and given concrete form. It is the elsewhere of realism permanently installed, in the defamiliarised domestic space.’

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‘The artists have reinvented and reconfigured familiar domestic objects to create provocative sculptures and installations.’
https://www.dezeen.com/2010/07/05/the-new-decor-at-hayward-gallery/

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Drawing an environment I am familiar with from memory (in graphite) then adding imaginary parts in colours.

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Creating a map for this world - initial ideas

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I went with the abstract concept of a map to nowhere as my world is an inner world, it exists in the subconscious and has no specific location.

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This workshop captured the essence of what I was trying to define about my topic. My interest behind atmosphere, inner worlds and eerie realities was based around me wanting to create a reflection of my own inner worrld that is immersive and unsettling. The principles behind world-building that Isabel Greenberg described, of using a deeper ‘secondary imagination’ to realise this world,  were also beneficial to me in creating a highly imaginary half-reality. One was to first draw an environment that was familiar to me in one colour, then in a different colour add imaginary parts. This task in particular helped me to create this eerie half-reality based on both my own real world and my inner world.

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Task 1  - listing an inventory of objects relating to my text

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Task 1  - listing an inventory of objects relating to my text

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Task 2 - writing a poem from the perspective of soup

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Task 2 - writing a poem from the perspective of soup

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Translating a text that I can't understand - playing with nonsense

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Translating a text that I can't understand - playing with nonsense

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After writing the short story and discovering that writing seemed to be an effective way for me to generate ideas, I wanted to explore more experimental writing techniques which the Play with Text workshop with Jen Franklin helped me to do. Using the original story as a basis, I could push the ideas into more absurd territories with the techniques of Oulipo and through creating lists visualising the environment the text takes place in. Writing a poem from the perspective of soup gave the story an absurd component that added to the feelings of comfort, as at this point its tone leaned further into feelings of discomfort.

The final step of this workshop was to create an illustration depicting something that I had written. I decided this would be a good opportunity to visualise the soup eating dinner party guests, showing the soup as a living entity and highlighting the absurdity of this scenario. I continued the theme of my previous illustrations of using a black background, as the contrast of a dark, eerie void-like background and bright colour characters mixes the feelings of comfort and discomfort that I am interested in. This illustration is mostly successful in capturing this atmosphere, however I felt the naive style I had drawn it in hindered the immersiveness of this atmosphere. Creating more realistic-looking environments with surreal elements would create more of a contrast and be more gripping.

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Following on from the success of writing and automatic writing in particular, I used phrases and elements of my writing in the letterpress workshop to further visualise these ideas and how this text could be incorporated into my illustrative work. Using the physical letters and playing with the randomness of the outcomes was a more tangible and experimental way to engage with this than doing it in Photoshop. Making mistakes by accidentally writing things backwards and using stencils to create shapes allowed me to play with the text and push the ideas further.

After the workshop I continued experimenting with these images digitally as I wanted to see if I could push the ideas further, inverting them to create the void-like background I find effective and overlapping different pieces to create a more disjointed feeling. However, ultimately this was just refining the images and didn’t lead to me generating any new ideas. As a whole, this workshop was ultimately more useful as a thought activity to help me push my ideas further rather than to create artwork that actually captures the atmosphere and world-building I am interested in.

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In my research, I looked into the techniques and concepts behind surrealism as it is the natural reference for mixing elements of the real and imagined. I became particularly interested in the cross-over between surrealist techniques and psychological techniques used in mental hospitals in Victorian times. The technique the surrealists used the most from this period was ‘automatism’ - a neurological technique originally used by doctors to further understand their patients’ mental states by getting them to write down their thoughts without thinking too much, and getting into a sort of ‘flow’ state of writing. The surrealists used this to connect with their own subconscious and generate stranger ideas, also creating a spinoff from this in automatic drawing.

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After reading about automatic drawing I first thought I would try it simply through getting out one colour of paint and painting without thought on scraps of paper. This approach was less successful than I had hoped, it felt forced to try to draw without thought and I think closeness to drawing inhibited me to fully let go and draw ‘automatically’. The concepts I came up with did not interest me and fell flat.

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One excerpt from many automatic writing sessions

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In the Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton explained how to conduct automatic writing correctly, claiming it needed to be at a fast pace to ‘keep up with thought’s velocity but also to keep from listening to the voices of reason, aesthetics or morals’ (Breton, A. 1924). This meant not allowing yourself any control over what the writing would be about, the tone of it, and how embarrassing or bad it could be.

I explored automatic writing with this guidance in mind at various times of day and through typing. Automatic writing was very successful and gave me most of the ideas for this project. I found that whilst writing I would get into a flow state and could explore different ideas and thoughts easier than with drawing. When re-reading my writing after I had stopped, I noticed there was a range of tone and subject matter that spanned from silly observations to quite serious and dark thoughts. Due to the fast pace of the writing it allowed me to write down many over-lapping thoughts to the point where, on re-reading it, I didn’t remember writing several parts. These observations tell me that this method acted as quite a clear stream of consciousness. This connected with the subconscious in ways I hadn’t experienced before, and felt close to how Andre Breton described it as a ‘magic dictation’ that connects to ‘essential self-murmur’ (Bauduin, T. 2015).

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Psychologist Russel Hurlburt was interested in inner voices and came up with an experiment/investigation he called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). In this experiment, Hurlburt gave his subjects a beeper that would go off intermittently throughout the day, when they hear dthe beep they would record their current thought in as much detail as possible (Fernyhough, C 2016). Fernyhough , author of ‘The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves’ had looked into many experiments attempting to uncover the inner voice organically, and described this method had been one of the most unique looks into the psyche (Fernyhough, C. 2016).

This method interested me and I began to set alarms to document my own thoughts at random intervals. However the results were quite mixed, as I often had forgotten what my thought was as I was writing it down or as the beeper went off. Equally as I was setting my own alarms I had a rough idea of when they were going to go off, meaning my thoughts were sometimes about the experiment. When re-reading these thoughts, I was quite surprised at how dark many of them were, which did give me some insight into my subconscious. They were quite simple dark thoughts and gave me little to work with creatively, as this was not the direction I was interested in.
However, this did make me start to think about my thoughts in a different, more conscious way, and gave me some insight into how inner worlds work.

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Writing down dreams and writing down thoughts just before sleep/in a sleepy state

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Writing down dreams and writing down thoughts just before sleep/in a sleepy state

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The surrealists also spoke of writing down dreams and keep themselves awake for long periods to wear out the brain and get more absurd and surreal ideas. I tried this method a few times, and most of these thoughts were difficult to understand the next day as writing in a sleep state also leads to poor communication of ideas.

However, I wrote down one dream (pictured above) that I remembered quite vividly (though didn't write down how vivid it was) which gave me an idea for a story that I then wrote about travelling to a social event and having a horrible journey.

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Following on from my initial endeavours in automatic writing, drawing, DES and recording dreams, I wanted to write a story inspired by some of the ideas generated. This story was also written in a semi-automatic way, as there was little consideration of narrative structure, punctuation or it making sense and it was written at a fast pace to allow any thought I had to be written down.

The story was based loosely on the dream I had about the horrible journey to an event I didn't want to go to, focused on exaggerating this to the extreme and pushing the world around that story into something more complex. This ended up with the character arriving at the event, which was a dinner with people they don't know where everyone was eating soup with forks. In hindsight I think this scene was inspired by a scene in Charlie Kaufman's 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' where the family are eating dinner for a long time, but the amount of food keeps increasing and they are behaving in a very confusing, uncanny way. This atmosphere intrigues me as it combines social anxiety with uncanny feelings, which I think highlights what it's like to live with social anxiety. This story is successful in uncovering my own subconscious, as when looking at is closer and in hindsight and I can see how it highlights my own mental health issues in any many ways as there is anxiety about leaving the house and socialising with people I don't know. Portraying these things in an extreme and discomforting way gets across how extreme these feelings can be which I think is successful in this story.

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The task in the worldbuilding workshop of first drawing a real space and then adding imaginary aspects can also be used a way to combine automatic drawing with something more real. As my focus was on real spaces mixing with a subconscious half-reality and agoraphobia, setting these drawings in the real space that is my home would allow me to combine a comfortable environment with surreal and absurd uncomfortable elements.

I decided to basically trace on top photos I had taken around my house as if the drawings where photographs. I then added things on top of these drawings based on ideas I had in automatic writing and exaggerating things that had happened in the house (like a fox running up the stairs), but also simply by doing automatic drawings on top. This combination of reality and subconscious helped me to solidify and form an atmosphere of comfort v. discomfort that is uncanny. As Freud stated, the uncanny occurs when something is also real but not quite. Creating more real environments and then manipulating them with imaginary aspects was a successful strategy in achieving this.

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Trying to uncover what my topic is

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Inspired by a fox that came into my house, exaggerating the scenario

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Adding intestines to the empty cupboard - from a line in my automatic writing

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the 'garden' where I live gives me oblique and uncanny feelings due to the random objects left by landlords (doors and bricks) and the way the plants grow through the chair. I exaggerated this by creating a fire in the chair. However in this case the illustration creates a more calming feeling that the original image.

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For this drawing I replaced the painting with a window, and added a levitating person on a chair inspired by the idea of empty chairs in my automatic writing. This creates an eerie atmosphere that feels somewhat comforting due to the soft glow of the light and the tranquil colour scheme.

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To develop and visualise ideas I had formed in automatic writing, I made some rough sketches of these ideas. When looking over these as a group they gave me a strong sense of a house slowly falling apart and entering a surreal realm, and therefore a stronger sense of a world with atmosphere. I wanted to illuminate this environment in the most immersive way possible to suck the viewer into the atmosphere.

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I then went on to visualise these ideas further by making this illustration pictured right. The aim was to exaggerate the atmosphere which I think the dark and glowy aesthetic achieves. Equally this made me think more about using text in my work as it contextualises the visuals.

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Aesthetically these illustration explore and expand upon my visual languague by adding more realistic elements. This is a new way for me to work visually that I think is efficient.

Conceptually, these illustrations as a collection give off a feeling of agoraphobia and half-real headspaces existing within a comfortable environment.

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After the first animation I was curious to continue exploring this medium as it seemed to reach the immersive goals of atmosphere that I was looking for. Equally I thought that with more time I could learn to use it in a way that was more effective.

This started with an egg animation that I made automatically simply by making something in the restraints of my own animation skills. The idea came from some eggs someone had left open in my house, again taking an aspect of reality and subverting it.

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I had a dream about something coming out of the shower drain, though I wasn’t sure exacly what. I took this concept literally, animating a black, grainy void coming out the drain that swallows the whole screen. The graininess and blurriness connect directly to the vagueness of the dream.

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I then went on to make an animation of my kitchen, taking visuals directly from a previous drawing and the world-building workshop outcome. The subversions in the kitchen are taken directly from automatic writing about empty cupboards, having an empty stomach, an overflowing sink and a thought I had before bed about leaving the freezer open. When expanding this drawing to a wider aspect ratio I added the floor tiles on the left going into a dark void-like space to further illustrate that this is a dream-state environment.

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The final animation I created also took direct reference from automatic writing about overflowing sinks, airing out the room and curtains blowing. The movement of the curtains and water is deliberately unrealistic to give an uncanny atmosphere and relate directly to dream physics.

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For the sound effects, I looked at the sounds used in Jan Svankmajers’ animations which are quite cartoonish and a music project called ‘Ominous Mulittudes’ that uses many fields recordings of familiar sounds, edited to create eerie atmosphere. I took the field recording approach, recording sounds around the house of drains, fridges opening, floor panels creaking, tapping on windows and more. These were then edited with effects and sometimes used realistically (the drain used for the shower drain) and sometimes used

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https://vimeo.com/665009016

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In the final animation I rearranged the order of the videos and arranged the sound to make it as fragmented as possible, however giving some sections a sense a flow both visually and sonically. As a whole this video addresses my venture into the subconscious and presents it clearly, the surrealist contextual knowledge clearly informing this. The lack of structure and plot  and the combination of tranquil colours and comforting environments with eerie obstructions executes an atmosphere of an uncanny, fragmented subconscious.

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When looking into Parallax's brand image both in their social media presence and their website, I noticed the general aesthetic was soft and light, using a combination of washed out pastels and bright yellow. This gives a fun and carefree feeling.

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The majority of the references I was most interested in were films and videos, I reflected on why these formats were so interesting to me and realised it was because the combination of moving visuals and sound allow for a much richer sense of atmosphere and more immersive world-building.

Initially I started animating with very little knowledge of how to do it and what I was making. Buses had come up in my drawings a lot so I used this as a strating point, and to learnt the different tools in After Effects. This was also a form of automatic animation as I went in without a plan.

This resulted in an animation of a bus arriving from a ‘void’, bending and stretching when it arrives, and then being sucked into the void again. The way the physics don’t make sense and then bus changes its structure as if it’s made from putty is an aspect I really enjoy, and also links to aspects of surrealism very clearly. However, my limitations in animating were clear here as some parts of the animation are not as seamsless as they could be, for example the headlights on the bus don’t quite move in the same way as the bus making it clear they are not actually attached to it. Equally, although this animation creates a sense of atmosphere, it doesn’t tell a story and doesn’t directly link to the research I have been doing.

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For the music, I created a playlist of ambient and unsettling music that achieved an atmosphere I wanted. Many of these songs had long, droning chords and many overlapping edited instruments. The ones I found most effective sounded quite disjointed, sometimes quite unstructured. This gave the idea to try to make ‘automatic’ music by recording myself playing the keyboard for a long period of time, simply playing random chords and melodies I came up with on the spot. The results were mixed but included sections that droned on with many suspended chords and dissonant chords that have an eerie quality I enjoy. These chords would sometimes be played continuously in a loop as I tried to figure out what to do next, then abruptly changing into new melodies. This was effective in achieving an unsettling atmosphere due to the intermittent structure. I went on to pitch shift and add effects to these recordings, curating and editing them to intensify the atmosphere. Although the results are very simple and I am by no means a musician, they allowed me to experiment musically in a way that I haven’t before and create unique ‘automatic’ sounds as another layer of surrealist context.

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Reflection on unit 9

Knowledge I have acquired:

Practical: skills in after effects, better writing skills and some vague knowledge of processes in letterpress etc. Also further establishing my own style aesthetically.

Organisational: This project has in many way made me more aware of the pitfalls of my work habits. Having a set schedule is not helpful for me when doing something creative, but can be helpful in the writing parts of the project. I tend to work in intense bursts where I focus on nothing in my life except my project. This is not how I would necessarily want to work, as sometimes it affects me negatively in my work/life balance. In future I would like to try to set time limits on the days I work and roughly follow a schedule of 5 days a week, trying to keep this more regular and limiting the intense bursts.

Contextual – incorporating both artistic (surrealist) and scientific (psychology and neurology) knowledge into my practice has expanded my creative process but also made me more aware of the context it lies in.

Social – where would this project exist socially? This project has also taught me a lot about how to communicate certain atmosphere better. In unit 10 I hope to further expand upon this by creating a more concrete story and world, that can be accessed both in a gallery setting and online.

Conceptual – many conceptual ideas about the relationship between art and mental health, using art as a tool to communicate.

Practice – process? Automatic drawing and writing may become a part of my practice  permanently as they remove some of the inhibitions I usually experience when trying to come up with ideas, allowing for more experimental and exciting ideas.

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Following the brief for the WIP show, I decided to make a very quick sculpture in the 'automatic' sense. I started out with wire as a material, shaping it to see what it felt like and then getting the idea to create a fork. As I continued trying to work on it without a plan, it continued to change and become a stranger shape. After I felt it was finished I made some salt dough to use as a stand, and added red acrylic paint to link to the soup with forks concept.

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Overall this outcome took a very direct instruction from the brief, as I deeply disliked it and felt it should be in the bin. However, the challenge of exhibiting something I am not entirely happy with gave me a more social context for my work and how I want to be seen as an illustrator. I felt this work did not represent me well, and taking part in a show for the first time since the pandemic made me more aware of how my other work might present this way.

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In my sketches I was aware of the spookiness my style sometimes leans into, trying to dial it back and focus on keeping some weirdness that is still comfortable. This was a challenge for me that made me reflect on my visual habits, thinking about simple things like how I draw hands and how to make them less creepy. When decided which of these sketches to develop, some of them were still too creepy, such as the multiple hands coming out of the camera, and had to be discarded.

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The illustrations I submitted in the first round were a much softer, friendlier version of my style. These focused on the film process, both shooting and developing the film. When submitting these I was aware they would perhaps push slightly outside of Parallax's brand image, but wanted to perhaps push the boundaries of what they could consider and make something that stands out from the many other submissions they would receive.

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The feedback I received for these illustrations was quite mixed. They seemed interested in some aspects of the illustrations, like the hand coming out of the camera, but also felt some of the designs were too far off-brand. I followed up on this feedback as it felt somewhat unclear, asking them to specify which illustrations felt off-brand and how they did.

This gave me a better idea of what wasn't working, as I found out it was more to do with the general tone of the illustrations than something specific. They affirmed that the general tone they wanted was 'lighter' and 'playful' compared to the 'dark' and 'spooky' quality of my illustrations. When looking back at what I had submitted with a bit more distance, I could exactly the dark and spooky quality they were referring to. This was unintentional and something that felt ingrained in how I draw figures, but not something I wanted to be restricted to.

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Softening and de-creepifying the characters

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Softening and de-creepifying the characters

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I began re-drawing the illustrations by softening the angular features of the people, making the fingers less spindly, the general shapes of all the objects more rounded rather than crooked and the faces friendlier and softer. This immediately changed the tone, and although out of my own style preference I could see how it fit the brand image better. I then began removing the heavy use of black, using more of the softer colours in their previous branding.

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Changing the way I write the text also made the tone lighter and more playful. Previously it had been angular and crooked, so instead I made the writing more rounded and made the letters wider to create a cuter appearance. I also added more textured details and played with the colours more than the previous submission, using this as a tool to give my illustrations more personality rather than simply making everything creepy.

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