In 1924 a fistfight broke out in a Paris theater over who owned the word surrealism. This episode explains why the stakes felt so high, tracing the movement back to the industrialized slaughter of World War I, the nihilistic protest of Dada, and André Breton’s wartime work treating shell-shocked soldiers with Freudian methods at a neurological hospital, where he came to see the unconscious as a wellspring of uncorrupted human truth.

We break down Breton’s October 1924 manifesto and its definition of pure psychic automatism, the practice of automatic writing, the Hegelian synthesis of waking and dream states, and the shock of juxtaposition captured in Lautréamont’s sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table. We then look at how painters solved the problem of automatism in a slow medium through Max Ernst’s frottage and collage and Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, the movement’s fraught alliance with the Communist Party, Aimé Césaire’s use of surrealism as an anti-colonial weapon in Martinique, the wartime exodus to New York that fed Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism, and the slogans of May 1968.

• Why post-war artists blamed bourgeois rationality for the trenches and turned to the irrational
• The rival faction led by the poet Goll and the brawl that decided who owned the term
• How frottage, collage, and induced paranoia let visual artists bypass conscious control
• Why Breton refused to let the unconscious serve as political propaganda
• Surrealism’s legacy in Negritude, magic realism, the Beat Generation, and action painting