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We generally assume, correctly it turns out, that Surrealism depends on ideas that came from psychiatry. The mistake that is always made is to assume that the psychiatry we know is the psychiatry André Breton and his friends understood. Freudian free association, which seems to parallel Surrealist automatic writing, requires the participation of two persons—a doctor (analyst) and a patient (analysand). The automatic techniques described by both Breton and André Masson are practiced by a single individual and duplicate methods of French dynamic psychiatry rather than Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic psychiatry (psychoanalysis). Dynamic psychiatry was the predominant method of mental treatment in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It commenced with Jean-Martin Charcot's study of hypnosis (his dramatic demonstrations at the Salpêtrière attracted Freud to Paris) and reached its zenith with the work of Pierre Janet. Dynamic psychiatrists, such as Janet, drew on observations of spiritualist mediums, and the analogy of artist and medium was to be central for both Breton and Masson.
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