Surrealist myth: Historical continuities, modern significance

For the Surrealists, the unconscious was not the seat of psychopathology, but the key to health, both individual and collective. Freudian psychoanalysis seeks to achieve a measure of psychic health for the individual through making the unconscious conscious, thereby resolving partially the inherent conflict between the pleasure principle of the unconscious id and the reality principle of the conscious ego. Surrealism hoped to obtain this same end on a collective basis through the use of symbols generated by the unconscious and expressed poetically in literary and visual art. "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality," Surrealism's chief spokesman, Andre Breton wrote in the Manifesto.