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 Salv ...