Psychological Automatism

never this way; I always turn right when leaving the Haymarket; nor is this the way to your house. I had barely turned this way when I caught sight of you—how strange! —... "But you have apparently been asleep these past few days," Svidrigailov original: "Sviérigaïlof" replies; "I myself gave you the address of this tavern original: "trackis," likely a French transliteration of the Russian 'traktir' and it is not surprising that you came straight here. I told you the path to follow and the hours when I could be found here, do you remember?" — "I forgot it," said Raskolnikov original: "Raskolnikoff" with surprise. — "I believe it; on two occasions, I gave you these directions; the address was mechanically engraved in your memory and it guided you without your knowledge. Besides, while I was speaking to you, I saw clearly that your mind was elsewhere 1." We have attempted, moreover, in this work, to provide a fairly complete history of the various studies on magnetism Animal magnetism or Mesmerism, an early precursor to hypnotism, spiritism The study of communication with spirits, often linked in the 19th century to psychological research, and hypnotism, which prepared the way for the knowledge of these subconscious phenomena.

Our two chapters on these questions—we ask permission to remind the reader—were the reproduction of older studies published from 1886 to 1888 in the Philosophical Review. We sought to determine as much as possible, through observations and experiments, the nature of these seemingly mysterious facts. By always following the same method, we felt it necessary to insist first on the simplest and clearest cases. We described acts and sensations that seemed entirely ignored by the subject, completely outside of their personal perception. These totally subconscious phenomena formed, through their development and combinations, a second psychological existence, sometimes a second personality that manifested at the same time as the normal personality. But we did not stop at the study of these typical forms of the phenomenon; in the following chapter on "the various forms of psychological disaggregation," we attempted to describe and classify the numerous varieties and combinations of these phenomena with one another. We have said and repeated many times that this second group of phenomena was extremely suggestible; that the name and even the personal form were determined by exercises and suggestions; that this personality, thus formed, educated itself and took on habits; that in experiments it collaborated constantly with the normal personality (p. 374, 426). Very often, phenomena determined in one of the layers of consciousness had an action, a remarkable repercussion on the other system of phenomena. The whims and preferences of the subconscious personality, as well as the conscious personality, intervene at every moment to complicate the experiments.

We are happy to see that most of these facts have been observed again by many authors who have kindly repeated our experiments under the same conditions. We cannot point out all these works, which have been very numerous in recent years; we will only recall a curious work by Mr. William James on automatic writing Writing produced without conscious intent, often used in psychological research to access the subconscious. Most of the details that seemed important to us in our observations—the anesthesia In this context, a lack of physical sensation in a limb while it performs an automatic task that accompanies an automatic act, the ignorance the normal subject has of such actions, the movements that persist subconsciously in the limbs—

1 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, II, 219.