Mark Polizzotti
The Doctor Is Unconscious: Surrealism’s Freudian Slips

From Tether 2, page 171

“Here’s an appropriately Freudian question: What does Surrealism want? If you ask an American, it wants to be an avant-garde art movement. For the average Frenchman, it wants to revolutionize literature. But to André Breton, its founder and prime theorist, Surrealism wanted first and foremost to be a science. In 1924, in the movement’s first manifesto, Breton baldly defined Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.” What he was aiming for, in other words, was more than a new artistic or literary technique: he sought nothing less than a roadmap of the mind. Art and poetry were not ends in themselves, but means to explore the hidden byways of human consciousness.”