Surrealist Practice & Therapy extends my postdoctoral research into the therapeutic energies generated by Surrealist creative methods. Emerging from my PhD and subsequent project The Everyday Marvellous, this work explores how automatism, collage, and dream transcription can act as catalysts for psychic renewal and collective healing.

Central to this research is my developing book project,  provisionally entitled Torpedo the Mind: Surrealism, Therapy & Altered States, which reconsiders Surrealism through its uneasy relationship with the idea of therapy. The book spans literature, film, and visual art—from Breton and Crevel to Ghérasim Luca, Unica Zürn, Jan Švankmajer, and Grace Pailthorpe—tracing the ways in which Surrealist practice has continually reimagined psychic disturbance as a site of creative experiment.

Torpedo the Mind argues that Surrealism’s rejection of clinical authority produced a unique form of embodied research—an anti-therapeutic model that paradoxically generates its own healing energies. By revisiting these practices as processual, collective, and affective forms of inquiry, the project connects early Surrealism’s “revolution of the mind” to contemporary explorations of creativity as a mode of therapy and transformation.

This research situates Surrealism not as a closed historical movement but as a living, transnational experiment—its legacy alive in the work of writers and artists who continue to “transform the world, change life” through imaginative revolt.