Psychological Automatism

simple facts that we wished to study; we have only formulated the necessary hypotheses regarding these well-established facts and, as much as possible, we have verified the consequences of these hypotheses through experimentation. Research of this kind cannot be carried out by means of personal observation of the facts occurring within our own consciousness. Indeed, the phenomena it presents to us can only with difficulty be the object of regular experimentation; furthermore, they are far too complicated and take place amidst numerous circumstances that are difficult to determine; finally, and above all, they are always incomplete. Consciousness does not make known to us all the psychological phenomena occurring within us; this is a truth, indisputable today, which we hope to further confirm. It is from this that the most serious difficulties encountered by psychologists arise when they have wished to limit themselves to personal observation through consciousness. When one wishes to demonstrate that there are "uniformities of succession between states of mind"—in a word, when one wishes to make psychology a science analogous to other sciences—one is stopped by this difficulty: "it is that in the series of associations, at every moment one encounters unconscious representations 1 original: "représentations inconscientes"." Since, for many authors, an unconscious phenomenon is solely a physiological phenomenon, it is to physiology and its laws that one constantly appeals to explain the phenomena of the mind. This appeal, while often useful, seems to us sometimes premature; for, on one hand, psychology renounces finding true laws of spiritual phenomena and, on the other, physiology simply notes coincidences between a given moral fact and a given physical fact and does not actually explain the laws of consciousness. Stuart Mill, when he maintains against Auguste Comte the legitimacy of a scientific psychology 2, responds only in an embarrassed manner to this difficulty; this is because it is indeed insoluble if one only admits as phenomena of consciousness the incomplete facts provided by personal consciousness. To have simple, precise, and complete phenomena, one must observe them in others and appeal to objective psychology. No doubt one only knows psychological phenomena in others indirectly, and psychology could not begin with this study; but, based on acts, gestures, and language, one can induce their existence, just as the chemist determines the elements of the stars according to the lines of the spectrum, and the certainty of one of these operations is as great as that of the other. Our study on automatism automatism: the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention, often seen in psychological conditions will therefore be an essay in experimental and objective psychology.

One of the great advantages that the observation of others presents over personal observation is that one can choose the subjects one studies and take precisely those who present to the highest degree the phenomena one desires to examine. But individuals who thus present to an exceptional degree a phenomenon or a character that would be barely apparent in a normal man are necessarily sick. This has, I believe, no disadvantage. One must admit for the "moral" In this context, "moral" refers to the psychological or mental realm as opposed to the "physical" or biological realm this great principle universally accepted for the physical realm since Claude Bernard Claude Bernard (1813–1878) was a French physiologist who established the principles of experimentation in medicine: that the laws of disease are the same as those of health, and that in the former there is only the exaggeration or diminution of certain—

1 Lange. History of Materialism. Translation, 1877, II, 427.
2 Stuart Mill. Logic. Translation, 1880, II, 433.