Free Download | Nadja | Andre Breton

It is necessary to rebel against a life of pretense to understand what makes you a unique and valid person. Andre Breton writes that he "haunts" other people because they only know his ghostly shadows, the artificial roles he plays as a social man. He seeks to surprise himself in his banal interactions with people by opening himself to experiences that reveal his unconscious mind.

Breton was influenced by Freud's focus on the subconscious, but rejected psychoanalysis because it sought to interpret unconscious mental content and therefore neutralize spontaneous emotional content. In "Nadja," a surrealist novel published in Paris in 1928, the narrator walks the Parisian streets at random seeking unexpected cues to positive unconscious processes, not focusing on negative aspects as do psychoanalysts.

These processes are idiosyncratic and the only events that distinguish and validate the person. They are repressed and must be sought actively.