Automatic Writing
Automatic writing is a mediumistic and literary practice in which the hand writes without the conscious control of the author. The writer claims to let an external entity, the unconscious, or a spiritual guide express itself. Popularized by the Surrealists in 1919, its roots in fact run deep into the spiritualism of the nineteenth century.
Origin and etymology
The first modern experiments in automatic writing occurred in the wake of spiritualism. In the United States, as early as 1848, the Fox sisters of Hydesville sparked a worldwide spiritualist craze. In France, Allan Kardec codified in 1857 in The Spirits' Book the conditions for a form of writing dictated by disembodied entities. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, scientifically studied the phenomenon with Frederic Myers and William James. In 1919, André Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the first text produced through rapid inner dictation, founding Surrealism. Breton defined it in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) as pure psychic automatism.
Evolution and tradition
In the nineteenth century, mediums such as Hélène Smith, studied by the psychologist Théodore Flournoy (From India to the Planet Mars, 1900), produced complex narratives attributed to Martian or Eastern spirits. In the United States, Pearl Curran wrote from 1913 onward a substantial body of work attributed to Patience Worth. In Surrealism, Breton, Aragon, and Desnos practiced automatic writing as a poetic method without spiritualist pretensions. Psychoanalysts — Pierre Janet, Carl Gustav Jung — saw in it an avenue of access to the unconscious. Today the practice persists in New Age mediumistic circles, sometimes under the name channeling.
Practical use
The typical procedure consists of settling in a quiet place, pen in hand on a sheet of paper, breathing deeply, and letting the hand move without conscious intention. The first attempts generally produce scribbles or loops, then, after several sessions, words and sentences. The Surrealists recommended maximum writing speed, with no rereading or punctuation. On Tarotoui, automatic writing can be offered as a complementary exercise to a spread: noting without filtering what the card evokes for you, sometimes by scratching out twenty lines quickly without thinking.
Going further
The current scientific consensus attributes automatic writing to the ideomotor effect, an involuntary motor mechanism identified by William Carpenter in 1852. The brain can produce meaningful content without conscious participation, which implies no supernatural intervention. The Society for Psychical Research itself reached cautious conclusions after decades of inquiry. The psychological and creative interest nonetheless remains recognized, particularly in expressive psychotherapy.