The préface of Robert Desoille

Abstract

While trying to study the reasons for which Gaston Bachelard did not answer favorably the request which had been made to him by the poet Pierre Oster, to preface a book of Hervey de Saint-Denys devoted to the dreams, one comes from there to present his relationship with the surrealist movement and the psychoanalysis. If Gaston Bachelard has many convergences with Surrealism, it therefore did not marry all the theses of the movement. Thus, it does not express for Hervey de Saint-Denys same enthusiasm as André Breton, who had seen in this author of the nineteenth century, one of the large precursors of the oneiric activity. More precisely, in the experimentation of the dream, it is of Tristan Tzara that Gaston Bachelard will smell himself
nearest. And this proximity is to be put in prospect with Breton cleavage/Tzara, itself revealing of aesthetic and political choices. It will be the same for the psychoanalysis. Friend of the first circle of the French psychoanalysts, Gaston Bachelard will not limit himself to their practice to consider the psychological analysis. Thus it will speak in its books, with a marked sympathy, work of Robert Desoille who developed with the daydream directed a therapy completely independent of the psychoanalytical cure. It is thus released from this study, that the philosopher, while showing an exceptional capacity of reception to the activities mental and creative of its time, always privileged its own way as well in the poetic one in the psychological analysis.