The automatic image babbling talk was also a symptom and developed from this psychoanalysis as a talking cure.

) A simple typical hysterical symptom is given by Breuer and Freud: We may take as a very commonplace instance a painful emotion arising during a meal but suppressed at the time, and then producing nausea and vomiting which persists for months in the form of hysterical vomiting.32 In Janets account of hysteria (the illness in which medical/psychological problems and theories were then fought out) he argued that the subjects consciousness had been split due to psychological weakness (a double consciousness), thus the aim of automatic therapy was to help resynthesize the weaker part into the stronger part. Breuer, with whom Freud rst worked on hysterical patients in Vienna, disagreed with Janets thesis. Breuer argued that the weakness observed by Janet was an effect of the divided state of mental activity in hysteria, not its cause.33 Janet had inverted the effect for the cause. For Breuer and Freud psychological weakness was a product of hysteria; the cause lay elsewhere. Freud and Breuer argued that hysteria in men and women was not derived from mental weakness but from a repression of the function due to a psychical conict between different agencies, conscious and unconscious, a conict whose origin was primarily sexual. (An argument that Janet never accepted, even though he noted the endemic baseness in his patients crises.) Clearly missing from Janets account and scandalous when introduced by Freud was the part played by sexuality.The obstinate refusal on the part of psychologists like Janet (a repression as deep among psychologists as their patients) of recognizing any connections between hysteria and sexuality left the babbling content of hysterics without any signifying motivation. Their language was dismissed as mere gibberish, a nonsensical avoidance of work. It was signicantly this issue of sexuality, repression and symptom as signifying cause which divided Freuds theories from Janet in the path of theorization he was to take. Freud looked at the patients symptoms and listened to him or her. The surrealists went their own way, drawing their own different (non-clinical) conclusions. When they celebrated The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria in La

See Freud and Breuer, On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication (), Studies on Hysteria, p. . See ibid., especially pp. .
63