Automatic writing is the production of written text while the writer withholds deliberate, conscious attention from the act, the hand allowed to move, as it were, on its own. Practitioners have variously attributed the result to a spirit or discarnate guide, to a deceased person communicating through the writer, or to the writer's own unconscious mind, and this split in interpretation is central to its history. It became widely practised in the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement, where mediums used it (along with devices like the planchette and the Ouija board) as a channel for messages from the dead, and it produced some voluminous "spirit-dictated" texts. In the same period it drew serious attention from early psychology: researchers such as Frederic Myers, William James, and Pierre Janet studied automatic writing as evidence of a "subliminal self" or of dissociation, and it became a tool for exploring the unconscious before psychoanalysis.
In the twentieth century the Surrealists, led by Andre Breton, adopted "automatic writing" as a creative method meant to bypass conscious censorship and tap the unconscious directly. Scientific investigation has generally explained the phenomenon in terms of the ideomotor effect, small, unconscious muscular movements produced by expectation, rather than external spirits, but as a practice it remains significant across spiritual, therapeutic, and artistic contexts as a means of accessing what lies below deliberate thought.