In the Manifeste du Surréalisme were expressed the premises, later found to be very influential in the rest of Europe and spread to other continents from America to Japan, that there was a need for a liberation of the imagination of the artist who could thus, as opposed to the realm of logic, lower himself and promote his own spontaneous, accidental, dreamlike dimension, the one analyzed by Freud himself in his patients.
The first manifesto of Surrealism was published in 1924 by the poet and art critic Breton himself, who up to that point had been a member and leader of the Dadaists in France, and after whom many among them joined the new movement. In the Manifeste du Surréalisme were expressed the premises, later found to be very influential in the rest of Europe and spread to other continents from America to Japan, that there was a need for a liberation of the imagination of the artist who could thus, as opposed to the realm of logic, lower himself and promote his own spontaneous, accidental, dreamlike dimension, the one analyzed by Freud himself in his patients. With the rise of the latter’s theories on the inner life and sexuality, the dynamics of the dream came to represent the ideal state for creation, as the meeting point between conscious rationality and the irrationality of unconscious elements and hidden desires. At the foundation of the movement was the exaltation of “pure psychic automatism,” which guaranteed for any art form that unusual combinations could be created without aesthetic or moral concerns, practicing associations between ideas and images in a fortuitous, automatic, liberating way. Surrealism aspired to change lifestyles, to transform human beings’ relationships with themselves and others.