This book offers a new perspective on a long-debated issue: the role of the occult in surrealism, in particular under the leadership of French writer André Breton. Based on thorough source analysis, this study details how our understanding of occultism and esotericism, as well as of their function in Bretonian surrealism, changed significantly over time from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.

MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge 1989.

This article deals with the clinical use of ‘automatic writing’ by the French psychologist Pierre Janet at the fin de siècle and its later appropriation by Surrealist poets during the inter-war period. Of special interest are the acknowledged influences of Surrealism’s leading representative. Why did André Breton, in his mythical love affair with Freudianism, systematically silence his indebtedness to the Janetian model of the mind? In order to examine this question we turn to a little-studied theme: Janet’s increasing distance from Spiritism and psychical research. In seeking to establish his new discipline within a medical framework, Janet erected barriers between the psychological sciences and such seemingly ‘extra-scientific’ fields. In so doing, he placed himself at odds with other members of the intellectual community who saw in the automatic manifestations of the mind a source of exalted creativity.

In the 1930s, several key fashion photographers were practicing Surrealists: Man Ray, Georges Hoyningen-Huené, Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton, and Erwin Blumenfeld. Each photographer explored surrealist-influenced fashion photography and drastically changed the way fashion was seen in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazine. While scholars believe the assimilation of surrealist aesthetic devices in fashion photography commercialized Surrealism during the thirties, such photographic output has yet to be assessed in relation to surrealist thought and practice. This thesis argues that Ray, Hoyningen-Huené, Horst, Beaton, and Blumenfeld did not photograph fashion in the surrealist style to promote desire for the commercial product. Instead, they created new pictures that penetrated, radicalized, and even destroyed conventions of mass culture from inside the illustrated fashion magazine.

Jorge Luis Borges openly rejected surrealism as “snobbish chitchat,” and most scholars have taken such statements of his at face value. Research into the surrealist magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Victoria Ocampo’s papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library, show just the opposite. This article uses archival and published sources to trace the literary network that brought Pierre Menard from the surrealists to the pages of Sur, in order to reveal Borges’ intimate connection to the surrealists from whom he always sought to distance himself. This connection crystallizes in the ambiguous figure of the Comte de Lautréamont, apostle of plagiarism as artistic method, who himself was the subject of a graphological analysis by the real Dr. Pierre Menard, published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in the very month that Borges published his seminal story in Sur.

This essay offers a new analysis of Max Ernst's 1923 composition "Men Shall Know Nothing of This". As the first emblematic example for the Surrealists' fusion of alchemy and psychoanalysis, the work played a seminal role in the gradual shift from Paris Dada to the rise of the Surrealist avant-garde. Informed by Ernst's early studies of Psychology and History of Art at the University of Bonn, the work marked Ernst as a key player on France's artistic scene and firmly placed an engagement with psychoanalysis at the forefront of the Surrealists' artistic and political agenda. Previous approaches to the painting have nevertheless traced its cosmological symbolism to one specific prototype: Freud's 1911 study on the so-called Schreber case, in which he analysed Schreber's neurotic obsession with the solar principle as an unconscious fixation on the father-image, supposedly indicative of an 'inverted Oedipal complex'. My paper argues against this dominant reading of Ernst's composition as a 'pictoral transcript' of Freud's case-study, first postulated by Geoffrey Hinton in 1975 and never seriously challenged in recent research on the artist. I aim to demonstrate that Ernst's psychoanalytically informed painting has to be considered instead as a sophisticated blend of several iconographic sources, resulting in the highly abstracted image of the alchemical androgyne as symbol of perfect oneness and harmony. Ernst's emphasis on the merging of microcosm and macrocosm, the male and the female, the human and the divine ultimately embraced the idea of alchemical symbolism as an unconscious expression of what C.G. Jung later termed the animus/anima archetypes. The use of an alchemical metaphor, which resonated with ideas of metamorphosis and gradual transformation into ever higher states of psychic perfection, was thus a particularly potent symbol for Surrealism's artistic and political aspirations, clearly signaling a new direction for the French avant-garde of the early 1920s.

This thesis explores the emergence of the Cobra Movement in the Netherlands, where the War and the Holocaust were especially brutal, and where the Post-War socio-political atmosphere was toxically stagnant. It is my purpose to contradict the interpretations of Cobra art that deem it cheerfully optimistic in favor of my own interpretation of the movement as a post-traumatic response to the Post-War Dutch condition. A thorough examination of the War and Reconstruction in the Netherlands informs the atmosphere from which Cobra emerged. I then expand on trauma theory to provide psychological evidence for my own interpretation of Dutch Cobra as a spiritual, philosophical, and political response to the Dutch experience of World War II and the reconstruction years. I identify the movement’s two central goals to be spiritual and artistic rebirth, and the systematic restructuring of society through the dissolution of traditional artistic institutions. Dutch Cobra turned to Danish avant-gardism and modern philosophy for ideas that could be transformed into tools to achieve their goals. The resulting Dutch Cobra ideology proposed a quasi-Marxist social revolution through art, and integrated Danish concepts such as anti-aestheticism, spontaneity, folklore, intersubjectivity, and materiality. Works by Corneille Beverloo, Karel Appel, and Constant Nieuwenhuys are visually analyzed to demonstrate Dutch Cobra’s central goals and the ideology developed to achieve them. These visual analyses also situate the movement within its post-traumatic, socio-political context. At its core, this thesis demonstrates the Dutch Cobra artists’ unwavering desire to heal both society and themselves. This thesis received Highest Thesis Honors and won the Madeline Caviness Thesis Prize.

The dissertation explores the aesthetic anthropology of Georges Bataille and his collaborators in the Collège de Sociologie, a distinguished group of intellectuals including Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossowski, and Walter Benjamin among others. At the dissertation's outset the role, influence, discovery and indeed invention of the Marquis de Sade as the almost mythic prefiguring for so much French aesthetic thought in the period beginning after World War One and up until even the present day is advanced. Before Freud in Vienna, Sade in Paris: the central thematic axis of the following addresses Eros noir, a term for reflecting on the danger and violence of sexuality that Freud theorizes with the “death drive.” The deconstruction of the nude as an object and form in particular in the artwork of Hans Bellmer and the writing and art of Pierre Klossowski comprises the latter two chapters of the dissertation, which provides examples of perversion through the study of simulacra and phantasms. The thwarted pursuit of community in the vacated space of Nietzsche's death of a God is a persistent leitmotif of the following in the account it offers of the thought of Georges Bataille and other members of the Collège de Sociologie. Eros noir, at the fatal cusp between ascendant manifest sex and a latent diminished Christianity, underwrites much of the French intellectual contribution to the symbology of cultural modernism.