Psychic Automatism Research Articles

Artist’s Statement and Greeting Card Collages

Abstract: This Introduction to the five greeting card collages by Aube Breton Élléouët reproduced in this issue’s “Portfolio” section presents the collage artist, who describes herself as “romantistique” rather than surrealist, through a selection of the greeting card collages, chosen from each of the first three decades of the twenty-first century, that she sends her circle at the outset of each New Year. Evocative of dreams, games, female bodies, and the constellated night sky, usually set in Brittany, Élléouët’s collaged cards hark back to Surrealism’s founding artistic genre of collage, hailed by André Breton, her father, in May 1921 as representative of “a veritable photography of thought,” thus anticipating the accent on surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state” in the first “Manifesto” that defined the movement.

A (Post)philosophical Argument on Anti-Art and Digital Transgressions of self-Fashioning. From Dada to Data, or How to Curate Selves on Instagram?

This article tackles the possibility to understand the process of curating the digital self by treating virtual identities as a form of anti-art. The museification of the world engaged by social networks such as Instagram, a platform canonically devoted to visual content, seems to restore the Dada tradition of the photomontage, as well as the turn to the routine of our quotidian existence, aestheticized through live transmissions and daily vlogs. Insta-gramming became a digital practice that progressively installed what Richter used to call “the alienation of photography”, as there is no aesthetic claim for the visual content, but neither a profound ignorance of artistic criteria. Therefore, anonymous masses homogenized as co-performers of life-casting online consume results of a digital curating based on the Dada photomontage, the Futurist appetite for technology and the Surrealist automatic creation or psychic automatism. My argument is that as digital curation progressively shared with vanguards such principles, virtual identities became anti-art objects. Moreover, curating the self is no longer an artistic performance, but rather a social skill. In the last part of my study, I will bring to the spotlight two competitive narrations on digital curation, productive, respectively consumptive curation. In my opinion, these two paradigms raised by Davis are relevant for developing the commodification of the self, as well as new literary practices based on Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Consequently, I argue in favour of assuming the curation of the self by digital means as a daily practice entangling creativity and leisure, understood as creleisure, a concept coined by the artist Hélio Oiticica back in 1969. As aesthetics tends to track down such behaviours for their transgressive potential, measuring the historical shift of autocreation from Dada to Data perspectives, philosophy still has to work on the consequences of such phenomena on self-care, self-knowledge, and authenticity.

The Inner World of Pedro García Cabrera

Abstract When he signed the manifesto published in Tenerife in 1935 to mark the Second International Surrealist Exhibition, Pedro García Cabrera (1905–1981) ratified the fascination exercised on him by a movement that, he recalled in 1979, ‘representaba el descubrimiento del mundo interior del hombre’ [represented the discovery of man’s inner world]. That discovery generated three works: a story he categorized as a ‘narración surrealista,’ Los senos de tinta [Breasts of Ink; 1934], and two books of poetry that responded to Surrealism in different ways. By constructing the eight poems of Dársena con despertadores [Dock with Alarm Clocks; 1936] out of two lists of words he had assembled, he achieved what he called ‘un cierto automatismo síquico’ [a certain psychic automatism] and coined images ‘siguiendo los contornos de lo absurdo’ [following the contours of the absurd]. His experiments with words became a psychic imperative in Entre la guerra y tú [Between War and You; 1936–39], whose poems are like the ‘móviles delirios’ [mobile ravings] he mentioned in one of them, a phrase that evokes the mind that reacts to the disorder of war and imprisonment and the images generated by it.

Translating Surrealist Poetics

It can be argued that translations of Surrealist works entail obstacles and contradictions specific exclusively to this mode of literary production. What renders ‘Surrealist translations’ incomparable with other interlingual adventures of the literary avant-garde is the irreducible opposition between translation as a norm-governed, self-reflexive and intersubjective activity and ‘pure psychic automatism’ unconstrained by linguistic and cultural factors other than effectiveness of artistic self-expression. Hence, the translational mimesis involves mimicking the original creative process rather than its product. Indeed, the translators of Surrealist works have often no other choice than to take ‘unmimetic turns’ to convey the oneiric appeal, aleatoricity and figurativeness of the originals. Moreover, the translations of Surrealist works owe their distinctiveness to the neutralization of the opposition between foreignization and domestication in the sense established in translation studies. Their main task is rather to sustain the effect of defamiliarization and to recreate the unexpected clashes of entire semantic fields that animate Surrealist poetry. Of no less importance are the language- and culture-specific possibilities of recreating Surrealist ‘metaphors’ based on divergence and contradiction rather than correlations. Translation as a product of rational decision-making processes inevitably stumbles over the Surrealist metaphor born out of the irrational and coincidental.

Beyond thought:

The following is a remixed excerpt from a book-length manuscript titled My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence. The book is constructed as a theoretical fiction composed by the “author” Mark Amerika in collaboration with a GPT-2 language model. The book was written as an improvisational call-and-response writing performance with an AI text generator and is arranged as a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Critically reflecting on whether or not creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility, the author playfully engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. Contrary to most contemporary AI research that attempts to build AI systems that perform more like humans, Amerika flips the script and, in My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, questions how his own “psychic automatism” is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined.

Применение в медицинской практике нейролептиков и отравления ими

Антипсихотические средства (нейролептики) обладают успокаивающим, тормозящим действием на нервную систему, особенно активно действуя на состояние возбуждения (аффективные расстройства), бред, галлюцинации, психические автоматизмы и другие проявления психозов. По химическому строению они относятся к производным фенотиазина, тиоксантена, бутирофенона и др. Для нейролептиков характерны эффекты: антипсихотический (все нейролептики); седативный (хлорпромазин, левомепромазин, тиоридазин, хлорпротиксен, клозапин); потенцирующий (галоперидол (галоприл), хлорпромазин, левомепромазин, перфеназина гидрохлорид, трифлуоперазин, дроперидол, трифлуперидол, клозапин, карбидин); гипотермический (хлорпромазин, левомепромазин); противорвотный (галоперидол (галоприл), сульпирид (эглонил), хлорпромазин, левомепромазин, перфеназина гидрохлорид, трифлуоперазин, тиопроперазин, хлорпротиксен, сультопридом); α-адренолитический (галоперидол (галоприл), хлорпромазин, левомепромазин, тиоридазин, флуфеназин, хлорпротиксен, клозапин, рисперидон, дикарбина гидрохлорид); холинолитический (хлорпромазин, левомепромазин, тиоридазин, хлорпротиксен, клозапин); антидепрессивный (сульпирид (эглонил), дикарбина гидрохлорид); каталептогенный (перфеназина гидрохлорид, трифлуоперазин, флуфеназин, трифлуперидол); анальгетический (сульпирид (эглонил)). Отравления могут наблюдаться вследствие умышленной или случайной передозировки указанных лекарств у психических больных или при приеме с суицидальной целью в случае комбинированного отравления алкоголем или снотворными средствами и нейролептиками. Токсическое действие: психотропное, нейротоксическое (ганглиолитический, адренолитический эффекты подавления ретикулярной формации мозга; поражения таламокортикальной системы). Признаки интоксикации нейролептиками сходны с таковыми при отравлении барбитуратами (общий тремор, атаксия, тахикардия, артериальная гипотензия, иногда судороги, угнетение сознания с постепенным переходом в коматозное состояние). Отличительные признаки: мидриаз и отсутствие повышенной бронхиальной секреции при интоксикации нейролептиками.

The Robot Does Not Exist: Remixing Psychic Automatism and Artificial Creative Intelligence

In the just-published Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife, artists Mark Amerika and Laura Hyunjhee Kim perform as MALK, a new media remix band that ruminates on the post-digital life of the traditional scholarly book. Working against the concept of an e-book, the publication includes an original music video titled the Digital Afterlife as well as a downloadable PDF that the artists refer to as an imaginary digital media object (IDMO). The work has been released as the inaugural publication in the new MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series with Open Humanities Press. For this special issue of Media-N, MALK proposes their next IDMO track by focusing on the relationship between AI-generated forms of remix and artist-generated forms of psychic automatism. The experiment will start with the artists improvising a cluster of hand-drawn charts that conceptually blend their musings on what they refer to as “future forms of artificial creative intelligence.” The language in these charts will then serve as source material to input into an advanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer to trigger source material for a new music video and an adjoining PDF. Our question is whether the Generative Pre-trained Transformer as an advanced yet still essentially weak AI can co-write the artists’ IDMO as they address issues related to their research into psychic automatism and artificial creative intelligence.

Common Birthplace? Modern Plastic Surgery and Surrealism.

Modern plastic and reconstructive surgery certainly has a well-documented history and evolution, with its roots, thinking about the principles of nasal reconstruction by Sushruta for instance, dating back several thousand years.1 However, World War I (WWI) can undoubtedly be considered a time of major importance to advances within our specialty. Modern weaponry and trench warfare lead to severe bodily trauma and a subsequent need for plastic and reconstructive surgery. Not only medicine, but also art and the societal and political mindsets were obviously strongly influenced by the war. As such, several reports about art in plastic surgery and respective exhibitions dating from the time around WWI exist in the literature.2-5 While many illustrations and paintings were initially very graphic in nature, the nihilistic view of the horrible war also lead to the Dada movement and subsequently surrealism. These facts are well described in the literature.6 The fact that modern plastic and reconstructive surgery and the surrealist movement are actually very closely interlinked and may as a matter of fact have common roots is much less well described. The surrealist movement, which commenced in the 1920s primarily in Paris and from there spread around the world, was in part founded and consequently heavily promoted by Louis Aragon (1897-1939) and Andre Breton (1896-1966), two French writers and poets. Surrealism profoundly influenced the evolution of modern art with representatives like Dali, Picasso, and Miro, but also provided the theoretical framework for surrealist philosophy, as well as social theories and political concepts. Breton defined surrealism in his 1924 manuscript “Manifesto” as follows: “ Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside …

The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism

In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism surrealist leader Andre Breton (1896-1966) defined Surrealism as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state,’ positioning ‘psychic automatism’ as both a concept and a technique. This definition followed upon an intense period of experimentation with various forms of automatism among the proto-surrealist group; predominantly automatic writing, but also induced dream states. This article explores how surrealist ‘psychic automatism’ functioned as a mechanism for communication, or the expression of thought as directly as possible through the unconscious, in the first two decades of Surrealism. It touches upon automatic writing, hysteria as an automatic bodily performance of the unconscious, dreaming and the experimentation with induced dream states, and automatic drawing and other visual arts-techniques that could be executed more or less automatically as well. For all that the surrealists reinvented automatism for their own poetic, artistic and revolutionary aims, the automatic techniques were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism, psychical research and experimentation with mediums, and the article teases out the connections to mediumistic automatism. It is demonstrated how the surrealists effectively and successfully divested automatism of all things spiritual. It furthermore becomes clear that despite various mishaps, automatism in many forms was a very successful creative technique within Surrealism.

EEG frequency and regional properties in patients with paranoid schizophrenia: effects of positive and negative symptomatology prevalence

EEG changes in schizophrenic patients are caused by a multitude of factors related to clinical heterogeneity of the disease, current state of patients, and conducted therapy. EEG spectral analysis remains an actual methodical approach for the investigation of the neurophysiological mechanisms of the disease. The goal of the investigation was the study of frequency and regional EEG correlating with the intensity of productive and negative disorders. Models of summary prevalence of positive/negative disorders and evidence of concrete clinical indices of the PANSS scale were used. Spectral characteristics of background EEG in the frequency range of 1-60 Hz were studied in 35 patients with paranoid schizophrenia free from psychoactive medication and in 19 healthy volunteers. It was established that the main index of negative symptomatology in summary assessment was diffuse increase of spectral power of gamma and delta ranges. Deficient states with the predominance of volitional disorders were characterized by a lateralized increase of spectral power of beta-gamma ranges in the left hemisphere, and of delta range - in frontal areas of this hemisphere. Positive symptomatology was noticeably less reflected in EEG changes than negative ones. An analysis of psychopathological symptom complexes revealed the significance of spatially structured EEG patterns in the beta range: for the delusion disturbances with psychic automatism phenomena - in frontal areas of the left hemisphere, and for the paranoid syndrome with primary interpretative delusion - in cortical areas of the right hemisphere.

»Man che trema«

Članek poskuša ob nekaterih pesniških zapuščinah dvajsetega stoletja spregovoriti o tisti funkciji rokopisne pisave, v kateri »manus propria« postaja »manus aliena«. S pojavom pisalnega stroja rokopisna pisava ni izgubila svojega pomena, ampak se je pokazala v novi funkciji, ki ni zvedljiva na manualnost, ampak naredi vidne psihične avtomatizme. V članku je posebna pozornost namenjena avtomatski pisavi pri nadrealistih in Fernandu Pessoi. Obenem je konceptualizirana funkcija neberljivosti, ki omogoča, da v območju zapisa vztraja nekaj, kar na ravni besednega pomena ni moglo doseči artikulacije. Če so nadrealisti od avtomatske pisave sprva pričakovali možnost osvoboditve od vezi simbolnega zakona, nas Djuna Barnes v svoji drami Antifona opozori, kako nas roka, ki jo začne od znotraj voditi neka tuja sila, postavi ravno v presečišče vseh napetosti simbolnega. Zadnji del članka je posvečen pozni pesniški zapuščini Djune Barnes, v kateri prav skrajna (a nikoli dokončna) rokopisna elaboracija natipkanih strani tekst prestavlja v nov način obstajanja, ki se upira berljivosti in transkripciji, obenem pa izničuje opozicijo med prisotnostjo in odsotnostjo, na kateri temelji logika označevalca.

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder. Film and Media Studies Series. Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. x, 765 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). In this companion volume to his earlier Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo, 2013), experimental filmmaker R. Bruce Elder counts Dada and Surrealism among the vanguard movements that heralded cinema as the ottima arte or top In his formulation, Dada and Surrealism were dissident movements whose activities sought to discover conduits that would convey the powerful of their age, a vital, life-enhancing, occult irrationalism (p. 15). The goal was less to create modernist aesthetics or experiment with forms, than to explore the variety of ways in which an objectively heterogeneous world imposes itself upon the human psyche. In this regard, Elder's conception is similar to Breton's notion of passer le pont, whereby phantoms cross the bridge to greet the wayfarer in the same way that projected celluloid images illuminated upon a movie screen force themselves upon the theatre viewer. For Elder, this makes cinema the most powerful pneumatic art. His book is not limited to film studies, however, and Elder more broadly examines a wide range of effects across Dadaist and Surrealist art, literature, and criticism. The formidable size of Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, organized into three chapters and with several appendices that constitute the final third of the book, produces its own circuitous and imposing journey. Before delving into considerations of Dada and Surrealism, Elder opens with a brief chapter on the crisis in the authority of reason engendered by the proliferation of mathematical systems, pluralities of physics, and the modern rediscovery of primitivism in the early twentieth century. In the chapter on Dada, Elder moves beyond its historical contextualization in response to the traumas of the Great War and its characterization as an anti-art movement, to emphasize its vital life principles in the construction of new art and literature. In keeping with the emphasis upon cinematic effects, Elder weaves Dadaist collage and paracinematic performance art (such as the Lautgedichte sound poem) together with film as related expressions of pneuma or induced thought. The third chapter addresses various ways that the Surrealists sought out hallucinatory aspects of reality that could be formulated into poetic images of a sur-realite (higher reality), through such notions as the occult, objective chance, the marvellous, the uncanny, and psychic automatism. In these chapters, Elder analyzes and provides commentary on various Dadaist and Surrealist films. He finds instantaneous impulses unleashed through the imagery of Francis Picabia and Rene Clair's film Entr'acte (Intermission, 1924), a blurring of distinctions between dream and waking states in May Ray's Emak Bakia (Leave Me Alone, 1926), a surreal supersession of dream and reality in Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), and heterogeneous combinations of the sacred and the profane in Bunuel's ethnographic documentary, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933). …

Brain and art.

Museums, concerts, dance performances and films attract billions of people worldwide. Indeed, visual art and music have been with us essentially from the beginning of our species. This must mean that Art (and hence, artists) succeed to tap into particular and powerful mechanisms in our brain. This artistic success also means that understanding the phenomenon of Art is a key challenge for modern brain research. Could we understand, in biological terms, the unique and fantastic capabilities of the human brain to both create and enjoy art? In the past decade neuroscience has made a huge leap in developing experimental techniques as well as theoretical frameworks for studying emergent properties following the activity of large neuronal networks. These methods, including MEG, fMRI, sophisticated data analysis approaches and behavioral methods, are increasingly being used in many labs worldwide, with the goal to explore brain mechanisms corresponding to the artistic experience. The 37 articles composing this unique Frontiers Research Topic bring together experimental and theoretical research, linking state-of-the-art knowledge about the brain with the phenomena of Art. It covers a broad scope of topics, contributed by world-renowned experts in vision, audition, somato-sensation, movement, and cinema. Importantly, as we felt that a dialog among artists and scientists is essential and fruitful, we invited a few artists to contribute their insights, as well as their art. In this context, we would like to highlight a key similarity between artists and scientists, in particular neuroscientists. Both art and science seek to explain—each with their own unique set of concepts and tools—the unknown. Both science and art often claim to seek the “truth.” The focus of modern brain research is to unravel the physical basis that underlies the emerging capabilities of the brain—perception, behavior, emotions and brain-related diseases, whereas the arts elaborate intricately and persistently on these brain-related properties including diseases (see several papers in this volume on art and brain damage) exploring, and in this process also expanding, the range of brain's perceptual and emotional capacity. This is a unique forte of the arts, which utilize the powerful capacity of the brain to adaptively (plastically) change following perception and action, and propose new ways to view and interpret the world. Indeed, as highlighted in the present volume, art may invoke new “brain states” that are otherwise less likely to be activated by our day-to-day “reality.” Art therefore serves to explore and expand the potential capacity of the brain, e.g., via the recent invention of abstract art (see this volume). In that sense, brain research and the arts are closely interlinked; modern brain researchers have much new to say about the phenomenon of art from a neuro-scientific perspective (hence the new term “Neuroesthetics” coined in by Semir Zeki), whereas artists have a lot to say about how the brain (they typically use the term “mind,” as do cognitive psychologists) dealing with what it perceives (consciously or unconsciously). This artistic exploration of the mind is well summarized in the surrealistic manifesto by Andre Breton who said “It is by pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thoughts without any control exercised by reason, and beyond aesthetics or moral preoccupation.” Joan Miro said that “art is the search for the alphabet of the mind.” This volume reflects the state of the art search to understand the neurobiological alphabet of the Arts. We hope that the wide range of articles in this volume will be highly attractive to brain researchers, artists and the community at large. Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Friederike Mayröcker et le surréalisme selon André Breton

Friederike Mayröcker’s work has often been defined as “surreal”, even if the signification of the adjective remains vague. This paper tries to clarify this concept by referring to Breton’s Theorization of Surrealism in the two manifestoes, and to highlight Friederike Mayröcker’s relation to this movement. The confrontation of Breton’s manifestoes with extracts from Mayröcker’s Magische Blätter and Gesammelte Gedichte leads to an analysis of keywords of Surrealism such as madness, dream, psychic automatism, association of ideas, magic, surreality, and reveals not only similarities, but also important differences in Breton’s and Friederike Mayröcker’s conception and practice of their art.

The Surreal Paris of August Strindberg’s “Jacob lutte”

The Surreal Paris of August Strindberg’s “Jacob lutte” Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams One Balmy Sunday Evening in November in the late 1890s, the Jardin du Luxembourg was turned into a surreal vision of fantastic images and unexpected juxtapositions in August Strindberg’s “Jacob lutte” (“Jacob Wrestles”),1 a fragment attached to his novel Légendes from 1898. This surreal vision exposes and lays bare the protagonist’s inner spiritual struggle and dreamlike thoughts in a manner reminiscent of the ideas in André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme published in 1924, twenty-six years later. In this article, I want to highlight how Strindberg turned the 6th arrondissement in Paris into a surreal city- and park-scape in order to allow the narrator’s inner religious battle to rise to the surface and be expressed in dreamlike visual images without the narrator being able to control the process with his mind or logic. Strindberg is the mastermind of this subconscious visual experiment, which I would like to call pre-surrealistic. My purpose is to underscore that Strindberg holds a rightful place in the sequence of official precursors to the surrealist movement, which usually includes the “supernaturalisme” of Gérard de Nerval; the symbolism of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé; as well as the work of Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and the painters Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Strindberg should be added to this [End Page 347] list.2 Indeed in 1898, he boldly claimed to have moved beyond realism and naturalism and created a new literary -ism, supranaturalisme. Few seem to have taken notice. In the first chapter of Légendes, Strindberg / the protagonist proudly states: “C’est à moi donc de jeter la passerelle entre le naturalisme et le supranaturalisme en proclamant que le dernier ne constitue qu’un développement du premier” (161) [“It is thus up to me to build a bridge between naturalism and supernaturalism, by expounding that the latter is just a development of the former” (6)].3 Why is it important to add Strindberg’s name to the list of precursors to surrealism? Strindberg’s interest in the subconscious and in mixing dreams and reality in both his writing and his painting makes him a forerunner to the groundbreaking movement of surrealism, which not only influenced all the arts, but also called into question such fundamental aspects of the human mind as how we understand and create and see things and events. Many writers before Breton felt the need to move beyond realism and naturalism, but they did not succeed in uniting a group of fellow artists to compose a manifesto. The ground was better prepared for Breton, in part as a result of his acquaintances with Freud, who since 1916 had been an influence on his revolutionary ideas of creation based on free association, dream analysis, and the subconscious as the basis for liberating the imagination. Breton did for the arts what Freud did for the understanding of the subconscious. In his first manifesto from 1924, Breton defined surréalisme as automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. (Manifestes 40) psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, be means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (26) Creating through free association and letting dreams serve as a basis or structure for a work of art was certainly not new. Strindberg expressed [End Page 348] the ideas quite memorably and poetically in his “Erinran” to Ett drömspel (A Dream Play) from 1901 (although “Erinran” was not added until 1907)—yet still, nonetheless, more than twenty years before Breton: Allt kan ske, allt är möjligt och sannolikt. Tid och rum existera icke; på en obetydlig verklighetsgrund spinner inbillningen ut...

Positive syndrome of schizophrenia and epilepsy

An analysis is carried out of a set of psychic phenomena appearing always in the same way: an experience suddenly invades the consciousness, unfolding automatically and with great intensity. This psychic automatism, of which the patient is a passive observer, is accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of strangeness. Our hypothesis is that these phenomena are the expression of partial seizures with a psychic content. A comparative study is then made of the phenomenology of these partial seizures with a psychic content, on the one hand, and of that of positive syndrome of schizophrenia, on the other. It reveals a wealth of clinical information indicating an overlap between the two conditions. This inclines us to postulate of an existence of shared etiopathogenic mechanisms for both pathologies.

Melancholic major depression and epilepsy

An analysis is carried out of a set of psychic phenomena appearing always in the same way: an experience suddenly invades the consciousness, unfolding automatically and with great intensity. This psychic automatism, of which the patient is a passive observer, is accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of strangeness. Our hypothesis is that these phenomena are the expression of partial seizures with a psychic content, and the name Paroxysmal Psychic Automatisms is proposed for all of them. A comparative study is then made of the phenomenology of partial seizures with a psychic content, on the one hand, and of that of melancholic major depression, on the other. It reveals a wealth of clinical information indicating an overlap between the two conditions. Finally, a set of well-established scientific data is analysed concerning epilepsy and depression, especially epidemiological and psychopharmacological information, which takes on a new meaning in the light of the hypothesis developed in this paper.

The Original Creative Principle

The following imaginary interview is linked to an hour long drawing workshop carried out during the 2002 NSEAD Annual Conference ‘Creativity in Art & Design Education’. The intention was to get closer to the experience by raising questions. I hope those who participated may recognise it as, in some way, connected to their experience.The American Artist, Robert Motherwell maintained an interest in psychic automatism throughout his life. Although he remained suspicious of its mystical connotations [1] fundamental principles appeared to inform his working methods. Motherwell identified a number of key issues which serve to define its potential in the origination and development of paintings and drawings. He saw the process as “...very little a question of the unconscious, but much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.”[2] Motherwell’s analysis and, to some extent defence, of the process is as follows:1. It cuts through any a priori influences — it is not a style2. It is entirely personal3. It is, by definition, original4. It can be modified stylistically and in subject matter at any point during the process.The proposed drawing workshop seeks to explore Motherwell’s approach and by definition, exposes a related and learning and teaching strategy. The process serves as a catalyst for creative thinking, exploiting analogy, simile and metaphor in the generation of artistic and personally defined contexts or narratives.

Mind and mood in modern art, II: Depressive disorders, spirituality, and early deaths in the abstract expressionist artists of the New York School

This article documents the high prevalence of mood disorders in a group of 15 of the mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School. These artists, using the technique of psychic automatism (based on free association) in order to reveal unconscious material, created a psychologically and spiritually significant art that addressed the mythic themes of creation, birth, life, and death. Over 50% of the 15 artists in this group had some form of psychopathology, predominantly mood disorders and preoccupation with death, often compounded by alcohol abuse. At least 40% sought treatment and 20% were hospitalized for psychiatric problems. Two committed suicide; two died in single-vehicle accidents while driving; and two others had fathers who killed themselves. Many of these artists died early deaths, and close to 50% of the group (seven of 15) were dead before the age of 60. The material presented in this article suggests the following formulation and hypothesis. Depression inevitably leads to a turning inward and to the painful reexamination of the purpose of living and the possibility of dying. Thus, by bringing the artist into direct and lonely confrontation with the ultimate existential question, whether to live or to die, depression may have put these artists in touch with the inexplicable mystery that lies at the heart of the "tragic and timeless" art that the Abstract Expressionists aspired to produce.

Shall We Escape Analogy

Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's Enigme dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does not exist prior to it (waiting to be represented or expressed). This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol13/iss1/9 SHALL WE ESCAPE ANALOGY Rosmarie Waldrop Providence I want to talk about the refusal of metaphor which Claude RoyetJournoud and Anne-Marie Albiach dramatize in their work (the latter most explicitly in Enigma, the first part of her book, Etat (State]). It is a stance they share with a number of French (as well as American) poets, but as editors of the magazine Siecle a mains and, in Claude Royet-Journoud's case, of the radio program Poesie ininterrompue, they did in fact much to focus the concerns of their generation.' I find this attitude of particular interest because, for the long stretch from Romanticism through Modernism, poetry has been more or less identified with metaphor, with relation by analogy. In linguistic terms, this has been an emphasis on the vertical axis of the speech act: the axis of selection, of reference to the code with its vertical substitution-sets of elements linked by similarity, rather than on the horizontal axis of combination, context, contiguity, syntax, and metonymy. By contrast, it is the latter that this generation of poets tends to foreground and, by implication, a view of the poem as constructing a world through its process, rather than expressing or representing an experience or world existing prior to its formulation.' In a narrower historical context, the change of attitude is focused in a reaction against Surrealism or, among English-speaking poets, against Imagism, strong schools whose mainstay was the image, and especially metaphor. It was with the explicit program of searching for alternatives to Surrealism that Claude Royet-Journoud founded the magazine Siecle a mains. Opening books by Claude Royet-Journoud or Anne-Marie Albiach, we are immediately struck by the amount of white space on the page. So much so much white! wailed a reviewer of Le Renversement.' It seems indeed a far cry from Breton's psychic automatism which, in its desire to catch the functioning and speed of the