Automaticity

Abstract

In André Breton’s possibly mischievous definition of surrealism (from the 1924 Manifesto discussed in Chapter 1 above), the exclusive condition for surrealism was ‘Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express […] the actual functioning of thought’ (Breton 1969: 27). Expression which was automatic refers to the possibility of articulating speech, writing, a painting, sculpture, and so on without conscious, intentional, or deliberate engagement. In other words, it removes any sort of studied wilfulness underlying craft or technique and it deflects the creative impulse or source elsewhere. The ideology of the particular type of automaticity depends on identifying this source. So the automaticity of spiritualism points to the creativity of dead souls or spirits expressing themselves through a medium; therapeutic automaticity involves early psychoanalytic techniques such as free association or ‘the talking cure’ as a means of exposing and addressing preoccupations of the unconscious mind. Surrealist automaticity often drew explicitly on this psychoanalytical frame, but in fact had a lot of points of contact with the spiritual automaticity coming out of the previous century. A confluence of circumstances led to a rise in occurrences of automaticity in the service of spiritualism in the 19th century.