Lacan's "New Relay": Salvador Dalí and René Crevel

In 1933, Lacan met Dalí for the first time. Dalí welcomed Lacan in his hotel room in Paris with a piece of cigarette paper stuck to his nose. In 1975, when the two met again for the second time in New York, forty-two years later, Dalí asked Lacan: ‘Why didn't you say anything that time we met and Ι had a bandage on my nose?’ ‘Because Ι knew there wasn't anything wrong with you,’ Lacan replied. ‘Fantastic! You're the only one who didn't say anything!’ In this chapter, I will investigate the early Lacan’s theory of psychosis, focusing on the concept of Personality, to show why even though Dalí was provoking the young psychiatrist, Lacan thought ‘there wasn’t anything wrong’ with Dalí.
What does it mean to be psychotic for the early Lacan? Through close readings of Lacan’s doctoral thesis, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (1932), and other early unpublished texts. I attempt to unearth the many clues to Lacan’s surrealist and modernist practice. I investigate Lacan’s early theory of psychosis in relation to his critics of the time, including Henri Ey. On the 28th, 29th, and 30th September 1946, Lacan was at a conference in Bonneval in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France, at the invitation of Henry Ey. It was on the first day of this infamous conference that Lacan would deliver his paper entitled: “Propos sur la Causalité Psychique,” republished in 1966 in Écrits. In response to Lacan’s paper, Ey declared: ‘if we were to follow Lacan in his conception of psychogenesis there would be no more psychiatry.’ What was it about Lacan’s thesis that elicited such a response? Throughout my chapter, I comment on Lacan’s modernist style. His early focus on language, proximity to René Crevel and Dalí, and Lacan’s enigmatic hermeticism.