Regardless of what other surrealist colleagues have done with the basic premises of surrealism, Breton's own major statements were without ambiguity, and he adhered to them very closely throughout his life. Surrealism's major hypothesis was that man, in his status as everyman, was naturally endowed not merely with a grain of opium but with a psycho-sensory mechanism of utmost flexibility, which modern civilization had reduced more and more to rigor and uniformity of performance, thus adding to the insufferable human condition of brevity and mortality the burden of conformity and tedium. If it was futile to rebel against the mortality, he could confront the tedium of human experience….

To revive his powers of natural intoxication Breton explored dreams, automatic writing, aleatory walking, the free play of eidetic association of natural entities and man-made objects; these activities involved the auto-psychoanalysis of the non-psychotic and the non-neurotic, and aimed to...