Psychological Automatism

Preface to the Second Edition

This work, which was presented at the Sorbonne The historic University of Paris, the center of French intellectual life as a doctoral thesis in philosophy, was published for the first time in July 1889. We believe we should leave it as it was and print it again without serious changes. It would be necessary to modify it and, above all, to expand it greatly to bring it up to date with new research and discussions. Furthermore, most of these recent discussions have been studied in other works we have published since that time, which naturally serve to complete our first labor. On the other hand, some of the studies contained in Psychological Automatism original: "l’Automatisme psychologique"; the author's seminal work on subconscious actions would lose some of their interest if one forgot the date on which they were published. Presented by us for the first time in 1886 and 1887, and having had the honor of being reproduced since then by a great number of authors, they would appear a bit commonplace today. We therefore desire that our work retain its date, and that is why we have only allowed ourselves insignificant modifications in this second edition.

In this preface, we will limit ourselves to indicating briefly which points of our book seem to us today to require modifications and additions. In a general manner, one may remark that most of the descriptions contained in this work are very simple, while the phenomena one usually observes appear very complex. This is true, and this defect—which seems necessary to us—was largely intentional and sought after. No doubt, it is always a bit hypothetical to choose from among innumerable details those that one believes to be interesting and to neglect the others, but without this hypothesis, no presentation is intelligible. We have not described all these details because some seemed useless to us and others still incomprehensible. For example, in studying the movement disorders of an anesthetic limb A limb that has lost physical sensation, often due to psychological rather than physical causes in these case studies in a patient, Léonie, we described the facts that we thought we could classify and interpret. We passed over other bizarre phenomena in silence, such as those of synkinesis Involuntary movements in one part of the body that occur simultaneously with voluntary movements in another part, or we made only a brief allusion to them; this is because we had not observed a large enough number of these facts to be able to interpret them. Since then, we have had the opportunity to study this phenomenon more completely in other works. The simplicity of our descriptions also results from the choice of subjects. From among a great number of observations, we chose to present those that were simple and, in a way, typical. It is easy today—and we have done it ourselves—to speak of complications and irregularities, but we would not have been able to make ourselves understood if we had not first presented the most intelligible cases.

To explain the various modifications of consciousness during somnambulistic states A state of "sleepwalking" or a trance-like condition often induced by hypnosis in 19th-century psychology, we have often recalled the psychological theories of Maine de Biran who, as we said, was interested in the study of these phenomena. Here is an interesting text that proves our assertion and which we had neglected to cite. In a curious and little-known memoir "on the faculty of foresight," Deleuze gives the list of witnesses who signed the report of a somnambulistic session, and among these names is found that of Maine de