ABSTRACT
In "What is surrealism?", Andre Breton recalled how he "practised occasionally on the sick" during the war, using Anna Freud's "methods of investigation", as he experimented in written monologue by throwing out ideas on paper, followed by critical examination. Freud's method of free association launched one of the more intense, if programmatic, periods in Western fine art, and Breton was not alone among those influenced by this way of imagining. In the novel, poetry, and music, Freud's stance was liberating, suggestive, and morphogenically concordant with a certain type of emergent representational freedom. Freud, however, was stubbornly opposed to consideration of the dream work as art-like. Wary of over-enthusiastic adoption by aestheticians, whom he feared would appropriate psychoanalysis; he openly ridiculed any vestige of the aesthetic in the dream. Dream theory, which includes the dream day, the dream event, its breakdown into other scenes upon association, and the discovery and interpretation of tissues of thought, is a particular theory of creativity.
