Psychological Automatism

Introduction

It is almost always the highest forms of human activity—will, resolution, and free will—that have been studied by philosophers. Naturally, interest was focused on the manifestations of activity that were most useful to know in order to understand human conduct, responsibility, and the moral value of actions. However, although this way of approaching the question is perhaps the most natural, it is nonetheless the most difficult and the most dangerous: the highest and most important phenomena are far from being the simplest; on the contrary, they present many modifications and incidental developments that prevent a clear understanding of their true nature. Today, the most elementary facts, in psychology as in other sciences, are sought out by preference, for it is known that knowledge of them—being easier to acquire—will greatly clarify the knowledge of more complex forms. It is human activity in its simplest, most rudimentary forms that will be the subject of this study.

This elementary activity, whether observed in animals or studied in humans by alienists A historical term for early psychiatrists or doctors specializing in mental illness, from the idea that the patient was "alienated" from their reason., has been designated by a name that must be retained: automatic activity. This name, indeed, even according to its etymological sense (the Greek word autos [self] and mat [effort], from mateuo [to seek, to strive], according to Littré Émile Littré, author of a famous 19th-century French dictionary.) seems to apply quite well to the characteristics presented by these actions. Indeed, a movement is designated as automatic if it presents two characteristics. First, it must have something spontaneous about it, at least in appearance; it must take its source within the moving object itself and not originate from an external impulse. A mechanical doll that walks on its own will be called an automaton; a pump that is moved from the outside cannot be one. Second, this movement must nevertheless remain very regular and be subject to a rigorous determinism, without variations or whims. Now, the first efforts of human activity have precisely these two characteristics: they are provoked, but not created, by external impulses; they emerge from the subject itself, and yet they are so regular that there can be no question of the "free will" claimed by the higher faculties.

However, another meaning is usually added to the word automatic which we do not accept as readily. For some authors, an automatic activity is not only a regular and rigorously determined activity, but also a purely mechanical activity that is absolutely without consciousness. This interpretation has been the source of numerous confusions, and many philosophers refuse to recognize an automatism in the human mind—which is nonetheless real and without which many phenomena are inexplicable—because they imagine that admitting automatism means suppressing consciousness and reducing man to a pure mechanism of extended and unfeeling elements. We believe that one can simultaneously admit both automatism and consciousness, and thereby satisfy both those who observe in man a form of elementary activity that is entirely determined, like that of an automaton, and those who wish to preserve for man, even in his simplest actions, consciousness and sensitivity. In other words, it does not seem to us that—