Psychological Automatism

...of a patient who, during their seizures, adopted the poses found in paintings they had seen. Since then, we have had the opportunity to observe this phenomenon in an extremely clear manner ¹. However, we have also noted that this general dependency was modified by a thousand specific influences. Some of these studies can be found in our work on movement disorders in hysterics The term "hysterics" refers to patients diagnosed with hysteria, a common but controversial 19th-century diagnosis for various emotional and physical symptoms and in the recent works of many authors regarding the muscular sense and its relationship to movement.

A study on psychological automatism psychological automatism: the performance of actions without conscious intent or awareness, often repetitive in nature led us to study primarily the phenomena of habit and the association of ideas, in which images follow one another in a regular sequence—in short, that activity which tends to preserve and repeat. But we have always sought to demonstrate that, for us, this category of phenomena and this form of activity did not exist alone in the human mind. "Thoughts that previously formed part of the same whole, of the same act of knowledge," we said, "are suggested by one another." "Automatism does not create new syntheses; it is merely the manifestation of syntheses that were already organized at a time when the mind was more powerful." In a word, this automatism is only the consequence of another entirely different activity which previously made it possible and which, moreover, almost always accompanies it today. Not only do these two activities—one which preserves the organizations of the past, the other which synthesizes and organizes the phenomena of the present—depend on each other, but they also limit and regulate one another. It is only the diminution of the current activity of synthesis The mind's ability to combine individual thoughts into a coherent whole, a weakening manifested by all sorts of symptoms, that allows for the exaggerated development of the old automatism. The conception of these two activities—a hypothetical conception, no doubt, but one that allows us to summarize and classify a great number of facts—has already been frequently expressed by philosophers whom we have often cited: Leibniz, Maine de Biran, Hamilton, Taine, Ferri, Fouillée, Paulhan, etc.; it has also been explained in a more or less clear fashion by alienists alienist: an early term for a psychiatrist or psychologist. These specialists were led to this psychological theory by the study of certain patients who seem agitated and active from one point of view, yet who, by a striking contrast, are inert and immobile from another. We have often cited Moreau (of Tours) in this work: he still seems to us to be one of those who best interpreted this philosophical thought from a medical perspective. We regret not having also pointed out other alienists who expressed similar ideas.

"Dreams," said Macario, "have a great analogy with distractions, which are, so to speak, the dreams of the waking state. Both flow from a series of ideas that are born and arise in a mechanical way, without the soul paying deliberate attention to them; hence the confusion and disorder found in these two passive states of the mind." ²

Delasiauve interprets in the same manner the automatic impulses that appear during illnesses characterized by stupor and intellectual inertia.

¹ Lecture on suggestion in hysterics. Archives of Neurology, 1892, II, 448.
² Macario. On sleep and dreams, 1857, 292.