ABSTRACT
For the surrealists, simulation was a roundabout way of going back to Aristotle's mimesis while avoiding any realism. This appears explicitly in a text Breton wrote with Éluard in 1930: The Immaculate Conception. Surrealism had launched praise and a defence of hysteria as a poetic mechanism, but this soon turned into a praise of paranoia. At the time, the surrealist interactions with psychoanalysis turned more aggressive when Breton entertained the suspicion that in the Interpretation of Dreams Freud had plagiarized other theoreticians of dreams. Breton appealed to Freud's ideas when he pioneered psychic automatism, the unconscious dictation of the Unconscious, and saw hysteria as a revolutionary form of artistic activity. He strenuously defended Freud's ideas against his friend Théodore Fraenkel's scepticism. He copied entire pages for him and provided him with accurate synthetic notes on Freudian concepts such as resistance, repression and sublimation. The irony was that Freud and Breton were elaborating similar strategies of power and containment.
