Surrealism

Surrealism 8 seeks to liberate consciousness from reason (if reason and logic had produced WW1, there is a justifiable sense of urgency in the quest for liberation from that form of consciousness) through exploration of the unconscious, laid bare in the transcription of dreams 10 and through automatic writing. 11 Freud has already espoused analysis of these processes as keys to understanding the workings of the individual unconscious, 17 but it is Carl Jung who points to the revolutionary potential for such exploration in his work on the collective unconscious. 18

La Révolution surréaliste 12, ed. André Breton (Paris, December 15, 1929), cover. 26	La Révolution surréaliste 12, ed. André Breton (Paris, December 15, 1929), p. 1. 27

When Andre Breton, in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, writes ‘I believe in the future resolution of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak,’ 19 he is speaking of nothing less than the total transformation of the collective European consciousness through exposure to and synthesis with the collective unconscious.