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Hello, see who's aimé le l'amour, who's aimé le surrealisme. If you like love you, love surrealism. Thus was the launch of the surrealist manifesto publicised in Paris in 1924.

In that document, the formally Dada is spurred on Roberto, defined his new movement. Surrealism, he said, is pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express the real process of thought.

It's the dictation of thought, free from any control by reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

Surrealism claimed to be about sex, about the unconscious, repression and desire and seems to carry more than a distant echo of the doctor from Vienna.

How much was there a notion of pure thought influenced by the writing of Sigmund Freud and the new technique of psychoanalysis being developed at the time?

Did the surrealist manage to release the secrets and wonders of the human psyche, or was there wild forrion to melting watches, floating euphoniums and automatic writing, simply a blind alley?

With me to discuss surrealism and psychoanalysis is Don Addis, Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, and consultant on the exhibition Surrealism, Desire Unbound, currently on show at the take modern.

Also here, Malcolm Bowie, Marshall Fosh, Professor of French Literature at Oxford University, and a Fellow of All Souls College, and a psychoanalyst, Darian leader, author of a forthcoming book, Stealing the Mona Lisa, what art stops us from seeing?

Malcolm Bowie, let's start with the basic platform. Whom did the early surrealist consist of who worked on the manifesto of the Breton in the early 20s? Who were they?

It's important to go back a stage from the early surrealists to the middle period dudists, if I can put it in those terms, and see an extraordinary convergence and conflagration of talents.

From Zurich, came Tristan Tsara towards the 1900s, from New York, dropping in occasionally, came the enigmatic Marcel Douchard, eagerly awaited both of them every time they visited Paris, the people they found there towards 1920 were Antré Breton and Louis Aragon.

Themselves, dudists at the time, publishing a magazine sarcastically called Litte Hartur, essentially a form of anti-literature or calling into question of literary values.

And the largely destructive, and some people would say, nihilistic energies of dud are, let's say, let's bring the whole art establishment down because art has been complicit with all the terrible geopolitical things that have been going on, all the international power relations that have been created.

They've produced the destruction and misery of the trenches and so forth. Art has been complicit with all that, let's have no art, let's abandon art and start from the era.

What the surrealists did was turn that mood of despair and aggression in a much more creative direction.

How influential was that mood of nihilistic aggression? I mean, it sounds a very tidy mix, doesn't it? First World War, Great Destruction, World War, trenches, sense of despair, therefore what is left for art to do?

Was it a neat fit that was very influential or with the Darders just a few chaps on the sort of way out on the left or right wing?

I think it was a neat fit in that they were, in some sense, mimicking various things, you know, playful and sort of cabaret format, certain of the things that were going on in the public sphere.

They were mimicking extreme forms of violence. But what they didn't know, and what I suppose looking back, one might have guessed, was that if you put very creative personalities like Dushan Sarha into situations of that kind, they come up with something positive, something forward looking.

And what you have in the case of Sarha, in Zurich before he comes to Paris, is an extraordinary, what we would now call an experiment in performance art.

As I say, multi-media artistic genre, converging on one performance situation. So there's a huge inventiveness even about Dada in its most nihilistic sounding mood.

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