ABSTRACT
In surrealism, automatic writing is the means to attempt a notation of psychic expression without control by conscious thought or reason. Thus the automatic image is that which is conjured up as the psychical thought, the 'mental image'. The concept of automatic writing was not new. Automatic writing was a practice common in French psychiatry and nineteenth-century spiritualists. For spiritualist mediums, automatic writing was a means to explore occult phenomena not hidden human thoughts. Well known in the history of surrealism, one first key dispute around the new 1924 journal La Revolution surrealiste was the iconoclastic assertion of its first editor, Pierre Naville, that a 'surrealist painting' was a contradiction in terms: Everyone knows that there is no Surrealist painting, he claimed. While Breton had privileged a rebus-type pictorial 'dream-image' for his own automatic image example in the Surrealist Adanifesto, it was a different matter in the essay on Surrealism and Painting.
