Subject

In Andre Breton's 'medieval' malignant auras, which betoken a concept of mind that in fact predates the middle ages by many centuries, the authors have an aspect of his representation which draws on older ideas about consciousness even than those inspired by Christian doctrine in Bernanos. And these religious aspects of Bernanos's mind themselves pre-date the materialist representation we saw in Mircel Proust, with his strong interest in the states of the brain and their relationship to mental experience. These ancient ideas inhabit Breton's writing alongside the enthusiastic espousal of the very latest theories of the mind to emerge in Western thought, a Freudian cutting edge that was revolutionizing understanding of the mind in Breton's day with at least the same controversy and excitement that cognitive science has generated in the first decades of the authors' own century.