The automatic image internal monologue.

6 Cazaux posited a fundamental distinction between the poem and automatic writing, and makes a positive case for automatic images as psychic expressions of past experiences (their cause). In contrast, poetry in its general sense, he argues, also operates on the past, but the material of a poem is more often related to the desire to create something and present it. Poems are composed of signs which make words that gure as the substitute of a dened moment of a poets experience.The signs are inseparable from the signifying intention to enable that moment of interior life which the poet is intending to display to be refound by the reader.62 In contrast, surrealism negated the intention of creation. In surrealism, automatism remains, he argued, the inanimate content of an object, a non-knowledge where intentionality is not applicable. Proper surrealist automatic writing resembled a delirium or mental alienation with no proper nality. Thus for Cazaux, poetry and psychological literature are linked in cognitive thought whereas proper automatic writings produced by the surrealists were the products of psychical expression. To this end of achieving the material representation of psychical thought, the surrealists experimented with different methods and techniques of automatism, just like the psychiatrists. They modied and tried different means of achieving states of psychic automatism. What began as automatic writing in a state of distraction, turned to recording of verbal utterances in hypnotic trances, automatic drawing, dream recitals, chance encounters and the production of dream-objects, all so many means of making surrealist images. These various techniques, as part of an ongoing practice within s surrealism, developed into an issue as to whether a psychical automatism could occur with such a thing as visual surrealism.
Visual Surrealism

Well known in the history of surrealism, one rst key dispute around the new journal La Rvolution surraliste was the iconoclastic assertion of its rst editor, Pierre Naville, that a surrealist painting was a contradiction in terms: Everyone knows that there

Cazaux, Surralisme et psychologie. Ibid., p. .

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