It looks as if the links between Breton and Freud had been marked from the start by a series of attempts at seduction followed by rejection and absurd bickering, in short, by a movement that might call up the very logic of hysteria. Breton, as is well-known, began by studying psychiatry and it was in this function that he served as a medical intern during the First World War. We know how closely Breton had read Freud at a time when most French schools of psychiatry totally ignored him. Having started his medical studies in the fall of 1913, Breton after the declaration of war was sent to the neuro-psychiatric ward of Saint-Dizier in August 1916. In a ward supervised by a former assistant of Charcot, Breton read voraciously the psychiatric literature available, which included a summary of Freud's ideas thanks to a compendium provided by Doctor Régis (Précis de Psychiatrie) and to La Psychanalyse, written by Doctors Régis and Hesnard. Breton copied entire pages from these volumes for his friend Fraenkel, among which one finds a very accurate synthesis of the Freudian system, along with very competent definitions of concepts such as resistance (Widerstand), repression (Verdrängung), and sublimation (Sublimierung). Even if Freud was not the only thinker discovered by Breton at the time, he felt that it was his duty to defend Freudian ideas against his friend's skepticism. All this testifies to a moment of glorious discovery, as when Breton exclaims: "I am getting enthusiastic over psychiatry." (p. 59)

[...]

Like the Tel Quel members — these practitioners of the Parisian avant-garde who decided to visit China in 1974 so as to confront their Maoist utopia with reality, a fateful mistake that led to a subsequent recantation and wholesale abjuration of their radical Marxism — Breton took the initiative to visit Freud in October 1921. As one could have expected, Breton was severely disappointed by the meeting. Under the title of "Interview with Professor Freud" (1922), he published a curt account of the meeting in Littérature, later reprinted without modifications in Les Pas Perdus (1924). Not wishing to attack Freud's reputation, Breton betrays his bitterness by sticking to a purely exterior description: Freud's appearance is that of "an old man without elegance who receives in the poor consulting room one would expect from a local doctor." The French poet is unable to engage this shabby Viennese MD in any meaningful dialogue; conversely, Freud, no doubt at a loss with this young enthusiast, hides behind polite generalities; throwing a last shaft, Breton concludes the short article tongue-in-cheek by quoting Freud's tepid endorsement: "Happily, we do count a lot upon the young." (pp. 60-61)

[...]

André Breton's and Louis Aragon's joint manifesto praising the "Invention of Hysteria" was published in La Révolution Surréaliste (XI [March 1928]) to celebrate the "fiftieth anniversary of the invention of hysteria", an invention which they thus date from 1878, wand so sends us back to Charcot. They call hysteria "the greatest poetic discovery of the latter part of the century, and we do this at a time when the dismemberment of the concept of hysteria appears to be complete." In this lyrical homage to hysteria Breton and Aragon take some distance from Babinski who had reduced hysteria to suggestion, believing that Charcot was a master hypnotizer (by implication, he had hypnotized Freud as well) as well as from Freud in so far as he remains a doctor who claims that he will "cure" hysterical patients. Although he is called "the most intelligent man who has engaged this issue," Babinski is criticized and his negation of hysteria violently rejected. Charcot is praised less for the fact that the amphitheatre of La Salpêtrière was a theatrical scene in which he exhibited female patients in front of a fashionable crowd than for having created the conditions for its disclosure and propagation. As for Freud, he is not spared: Breton and Aragon oppose his conservatism to what they find truly admirable, the fact that La Salpêtrière's interns would regularly sleep with their beautiful hysterical patients. "Does Freud, who owes so much to Charcot, remember the time when, according to the survivors' account, the interns of La Salpetrière refused to separate their professional duty and their taste for love, and when night fell, the patients would either visit them outside or they would meet the patients in their beds?" No doubt, Freud would have been horrified by the insinuation that he too might have belonged to that unruly crowd. The living poetry invented by the sick women and the doctors when sleeping together culminates in these "passionate attitudes" photographed by Charcot, in which one sees stunning half-undressed women in curious poses that express a convulsive but otherworldly ecstasy.

After alluding more positively to the Nancy school, Breton and Aragon provide their own definition of a state which had so far eluded medical categorization:

Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental state characterized by a subversion of the relations between the subject and the ethical universe by which the subject feels determined in practice, outside any system of delirium. This mental state is based on the need for a reciprocal seduction, which explains the hastily accepted miracles of medical suggestion (or counter-suggestion). Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can in every respect be considered a supreme vehicle of expression.

What is crucial for our discussion is that in 1928, Breton and Aragon insist upon the quasi-normalcy of a state which is seen as a limit-experience, since for them hysteria rules out any "system of delirium" (en dehors de tout système délirant). When they praise the four phases of the classical hysterical crisis, Aragon and Breton describe the way in which the initial emission of a "superb aura" leads to a magnificent theatralization before finally subsiding and finding a "simple resolution in everyday life." In a clear foreshadowing of Lacan's notion of feminine jouissance of the 1970s, hysteria is here identified with mystical and erotic ecstasy. It appears also as the radicalization of a movement that merges poetry with everyday life. (pp. 64-65)

Jean-Michel Rabaté: "Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism," Journal of Modern Literature 25.3-4 (2002) 58-74; quotes from pp. 59, 60-61 and 64-65.