Automatic Writing

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.

Automatic writing was the workhorse technique of nineteenth and early twentieth century Spiritualism, and it generated an enormous body of material, some of it of genuine literary and psychological interest.

The most ambitious project built on it was pursued by researchers at the Society for Psychical Research, who collected scripts produced independently by several automatists in different countries over some three decades. The claim was that fragments in different scripts were meaningless alone and fitted together into classical allusions when combined, which was offered as evidence of a single discarnate intelligence coordinating them. Sceptics answered that the fragments were interpreted by people who knew what they were hoping to find, and that with enough text and enough erudition connections can always be constructed.

A separate and unusually careful case concerned a Swiss medium who produced an entire language, script and cosmology attributed to Mars. The psychologist who studied her demonstrated that the language was built on the grammar of her own native French, and treated the whole production as an achievement of an unconscious creative faculty rather than as fraud or as contact. It remains a model of how to take a phenomenon seriously without accepting its own account of itself.

The mechanism generally accepted is the ideomotor effect, in which expectation produces small muscular movements the person does not experience as their own. The same effect drives the pendulum and the planchette.