The
Dadaists and the
Surrealists had opposing views on the degree of influence of the
unconscious mind, by how much they recognized "poetic interference" from the conscious world.
Hans Arp "clearly established the fact that conscious feedback played a major role in his creative credo"
1. The
Dadaists did recognize forethought in their works. Jacques Rivière discerned behind "Dada's provocative
nonsense a serious intent to apprehend an absolute psychological
reality...comprising not so much the mind's
incoherence as a
primordial coherence anterior to the development of the notion of contradiction"
2. The Dadaists differed from the Surrealists by their acknowledgment of conscious thought and the Surrealist's partially-realized,
Freudian-based position of a
conscious/
unconscious melding in the mind/brain.
1 Sellin, Eric. Reflections on the Aesthetics of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism: a Prosody Beyond Words (p 84)
2 Brown, Clifford. André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism (p 52)