Properly speaking, "automatism" is not a concept, but rather a term that, like the adjective "automatic" or the adverb "automatically," has several definitions. It can mean "mental operations or activities without the involvement of the will, activities rendered automatic by habit, regularity in the completion of certain acts, or a set of involuntary activities or impulses" (LantériLaura, 1992).
The term "automatism" refers to an activity carried out without the participation of the will. Once the activity is triggered, it becomes a mechanism that functions by itself. This notion of automatism, derived from the philosophic and medical traditions, provided the eighteenth century with a model, though reductionist, for global and hegemonic knowledge of the physical and biological worlds and, in the biological world, for human behavior. (La Mettrie published Man a Machine in 1746.) Later, because of advances in chemistry that revealed very different levels of organization in the two worlds, the model of automatism seemed on the contrary to control only vegetative life, corresponding to the autonomic nervous system, and involved only one part of the life functions, that of muscular mechanics. In this era, a simultaneously morphological and functional opposition was conceived between a less automatic superior level and a more automatic inferior level.
From John Huglings Jackson's work on epilepsy in the nineteenth century emerged a highly elaborated representation of the function and dysfunction of the central nervous system and the discovery of a specific attack—related to lesions—on the automatisms in question. Thus a disorganization of a hierarchical structure suppressed a function and freed what the suppressed function had previously controlled—one automatism disappeared and the other remained uncontrolled.
This notion of an automatism proper to the functioning of the central nervous system found several examples in the field of psychiatry, for instance, the work of Valentin Magnan and his notion of impulse, that of Jules Seglas defining the relation between verbal hallucinations and aphasias, the psychological automatism of Pierre Janet, and finally the mental automatism of Georges de Clérambault and the work of Henri Ey, which was greatly influenced by John H. Jackson.
What is involved is a definition of automatism that situates it as mechanism that is "under control." It becomes pathogenic and pathological as soon as such control ceases. Meanwhile, there emerges another definition of automatism that situates it instead on the side of the creative force, of a more lively and original inspiration.
The word automatisch appeared very rarely in Freud. In one of its earliest occurrences (the case of Dora, 1905e [1901]), it is apparent that he is borrowing vocabulary that is not his own: "I give the name of symptomatic acts to those acts which people perform, as we say, automatically, unconsciously, without attending to them, or as if in a moment of distraction" (p. 76). Then, in the metapsychological texts, the word is used in three limited senses: a) the regulation of (unconscious) automatic processes by the pleasure principle (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920g); b) so-called "automatic" anxiety when it is a question of the origin or the "automatic" appearance of anxiety (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1926d); and occasionally, c) the process of repression (1926d).
The noun Automatismus, "automatism," is also very rarely found in Freud's works. When Freud refers to it in Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety in relation to the process of repression, he prefers the term "compulsion to repeat": "The new impulse will run its course under an automatic influence—or, as I should prefer to say, under the influence of the compulsion to repeat. It will follow the same path as the earlier repressed impulse, as if the danger-situation that had been overcome still existed" (p. 153). In the New Introductory Lectures (1933a [1932]), the term is directly connected to the principle of pleasure-unpleasure, in a sense essentially based on the (automatic) mode of regulation of unconscious processes, but that merges with anxiety and repression.
The term was used more frequently by Jacques Lacan, specifically starting in the fifties, when, under the influence of cybernetics, the question of automatons was on his mind. And so pure automatism became an essentially psychotic phenomenon.
Today the term, still being enriched by new mathematical models, could clarify for us a certain mode of the functioning of mental processes.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. SE, 7: 1-122.
——. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.
——. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20: 75-172.
——. (1933a). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 22: 1-182.
Lantéri-Laura, Georges. (1992). Psychiatrie et connaissance. Paris: Sciences en situation.
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. (1746). Man a machine. La Salle, IL: Open Court Classics, 1912.
—PASCALE MICHON-RAFFAITIN
