BirthAndre Breton was born in 1896 as the son of a shopkeeper in Tinchebray (Orne). His childhood was spent in the coasts of Brittany.
PsychiatryBreton studied medicine and later psychiatry. His early interest was in being a psychoanalyst and met Freud in Vienna in 1921. During the first world war Breton served in the neurological ward in Nantes, but never qualified as a psychoanalyst.
The birth of surrealismBreton was part of the Dadaist movement in 1916, but soon went on to initiate the first of the surrealist meetings. The arguments he had as part of the Dadaist movement caused him to move on:"Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the road". Influenced by psychological theories, Breton defined Surrealism as"pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation."In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton declared that the new movement's defining principle was "psychic automatism," by which he meant thought freed from "any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern." Surrealism "is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought." And further: "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 [sur = "on", "above" in French], if one may so speak."
In the Second Manifesto Breton stated that the surrealists strive to attain a"mental vantage-point ( point de l'esprit ) from which life and death, the reral and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions."After writing the Surrealist manifestos Breton continued to publish his poems and , during the 1930s published several. These included Mad Love - which used the Cinderella myth. Breron is also famous for his prose and one of his acclaimed pieces is called Nadja (1928), which is a portrait of Breton and a mad woman, a patient of Pierre Janet. The title refers to the name of a woman and the beginning of the Russian word for hope