The central method of Surrealism. This movement was launched by the French poet André Breton, in the Manifesto of Surrealism published in Paris in 1924. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Automatism is the same as free association, the method used by Freud to explore the unconscious mind of his patients. In the Manifesto, Breton actually defined Surrealism as 'Pure psychic automatism—the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns'. The aim was to access material from the unconscious mind. The earliest examples are the automatic writings of Breton and others, produced by simply writing down as rapidly as possible whatever springs to mind. Surrealist collage, invented by Max Ernst, was the first form of visual automatism, in which he put together images clipped from magazines, product catalogues, book illustrations, advertisements and other sources to create a strange new reality. In painting various forms of automatism were then developed by artists such as Miro, Masson as well as Ernst. Later it led to the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and others and was an important element in the European movements of Art Informel and Arte Nucleare.