Surrealism has long been seen as its founder André Breton wanted: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty Hal Foster reads it from its other, darker side, as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. He restages the difficult encounter of Surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis and redefines its crucial categories, the marvelous, convulsive beauty and objective chance, in terms of the Freudian uncanny. With the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti in mind, he develops a theory of the Surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy, which leads him to propose as a summa of Surrealism the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to connections between sadism and masochism and between Surrealism and fascism. He then reads the Surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on mechanization and commodification.