“automatism” and the emergence of dynamic psychiatry

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 39(1), 51–70 Winter 2003Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10089� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

JHBS—WILEY RIGHT BATCH

shortstandard

Base of DF

Top of ID

Base of 1stline of ART

51

ADAM CRABTREE is on the faculty of the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy, Toronto. Hispublications includeFrom Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing(Yale University Press, 1993) andAnimal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research, 1766–1925: An Annotated Bibliography(Kraus International, 1988). E-mail address: [email protected].

“AUTOMATISM” AND THE EMERGENCE OF DYNAMIC PSYCHIATRY

ADAM CRABTREE

This article is about the clash of two explanatory paradigms, each attempting to accountfor the same data of human experience. In the first half of the nineteenth century, physi-ologists investigated reflex actions and applied a recently coined word, “automatism,” todescribe actions which, although seeming to arise from higher centers, actually result fromautomatic reaction to sensory stimuli. Experiments with spinal reflexes led to the inves-tigation of the reflex action of the brain or “cerebral automatisms.” Reflex actions of thiskind were used to explain everything from acting compulsively to composing symphonies.Physiological explanations of phenomena of this kind seemed insufficient to some and, inthe 1880s, Frederic Myers and Pierre Janet developed psychological frameworks for un-derstanding these phenomena, positing hidden centers of intelligence at work in the in-dividual, outside ordinary awareness, which produce what came to be called“psychological automatisms.” Their attempts to unify this psychological framework withthe existing physiological one failed. Nevertheless, their work played a crucial role inpaving the way for what Ellenberger called dynamic psychiatry, which accepts the realityof an unconscious dynamic of the psyche.� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

One of the great conundrums of human experience is that we can think, feel, or do thingswe do not want to do, and sometimes not even be aware of what we have done. Attemptsover the ages to explain this mystifying state of affairs might be grouped in three majorparadigms: the intrusion paradigm (positing influence from external beings, such as possess-ing demons), the organic paradigm (positing influence from physiological factors, such as animbalance of bodily humors), and the psychological paradigm (positing influence from men-tal/emotional factors, such as serious emotional neglect or maltreatment). Just over two hun-dred years ago, a powerful new psychological paradigm was introduced as a result of thediscovery of “magnetic sleep,” or artificially induced somnambulism. This discovery revealeda second or alternate consciousness within us that could be tapped in the somnambulistic stateand led to the idea that we all possess a potent hidden mental world that affects our lives. Ihave called this particular paradigm the “alternate-consciousness paradigm” (Crabtree, 1985;1993, pp. 86–88, 289–291). The alternate consciousness paradigm, as developed in themagnetic sleep tradition, played a crucial role in the emergence of what Henri Ellenbergercalled “dynamic psychiatry,” an approach to treatment of mental disorders that accepts thereality of an unconscious dynamic of the psyche (Ellenberger, 1970, pp. 3–253).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a new field of study took shape that was looselycalled “the physiology of mind.” Physiologists applied their methods to search for explana-tions for not only unwanted or unexpected thoughts and actions, but also other baffling ac-tivities of the mind, such as spontaneously produced answers to difficult problems and fullyformed creative works that outstrip conscious thought processes. Examining these experienceswithin the perspective of the organic paradigm, physiologists believed they could find theanswers in the functioning of the nervous system. They drew much of their experiential data

52 ADAM CRABTREE

LEFT BATCHJHBS—WILEY

shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textfrom cases involving magnetic sleep, but they did not seek their explanation in the realms of

the psychological. Rather they attended to what came to be known as the “reflex action ofthe nervous system” and particularly the phenomenon called “automatism.”

In the early 1880s, psychologically oriented investigators took up the study of automa-tism, and the two streams, the physiological and the psychological, came together in a mo-mentous way. The result was the recognition of a dynamic psychological unconscious anddevelopment of pscyhodynamic psychotherapies that translated theory into practical form.This outcome was largely the work of Frederic Myers and Pierre Janet, who developed andrefined the concept of “psychological automatism.”

I: AUTOMATISM

“Automatism” is a word of fairly recent coinage. It probably first occurred in the Englishlanguage in an article inBlackwood’s Magazine(Anonymous, 1838), where it was used as asynonym for “automaton”—something that operates from within itself and requires no out-side energy or direction. The word was soon adopted by physiologists to represent automaticor reflex action of the nervous system—first in connection with the spinal cord, then withthe brain itself.

Experiments showed that a decapitated frog would support itself in an upright position,jump when its feet are stimulated, and try to brush off objects that irritate the skin. EduardPfluger, who originated this experiment, concluded that the spinal cord possesses sensoryfunctions and the ability to respond to sensations with purposeful movement without theparticipation of higher brain functions (see Maudsley, 1876, pp. 138–139). This sensation/movement arc was called spinal reflex action. It was noted that an observer could mistakenlyattribute the frog’s movement to the activity of its brain, which can spontaneously determineprotective movements in the face of threat. It was now clear that, even without the brain, ananimal could produce combined movements in proper sequence for an identifiable purpose.

Physiologist Thomas Laycock (1812–1876), professor of medicine at the University ofEdinburgh, believed that reflexes do not occur only in the lower centers of the nervous system.His investigations convinced him that there could also be reflexes of the brain. This meantthat a person’s brain could convert stimuli from outside or inside into meaningful actionswithout the person being aware of what was occurring. He believed that these automatismsof the brain were a common part of ordinary mental experience. Laycock published his viewsin a series of articles in theEdinburgh Medical and Surgical Journalin the late 1830s; hebrought these articles together in his bookNervous Diseases of Women,published in 1840.He further clarified his ideas in an article titled “On the Reflex Function of the Brain” in theBritish and Foreign Medical Reviewpublished in 1845.

Recounting his discoveries much later in theJournal of Mental Science(1876), Laycockstated that, in 1837, when he was studying the phenomena of mesmerism and “cerebralhysteria,” he found that he disagreed with the commonly held doctrine that consciousnesswas the cause of the changes that occur in the brain, in other words that “mind considered ascause and consciousness were . . . identical” and that “reason was independent from brainfunction” (Pt. 1, p. 477). This conventional doctrine, he contended, was tied to the “oldmetaphysics,” which adopted Descartes’ view that in human beings mind and body are twodifferent substances and that consciousness, which constitutes the mind, can cause changesin the body, including the brain and nervous system. Descartes’ view engenders a particularlytroublesome question: how can two completely different substances (mind and body) interact?Descartes “solved” the difficulty by saying that the mind is connected with the living mech-

53“AUTOMATISM” AND THE EMERGENCE OF DYNAMIC PSYCHIATRY


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textanism in the pineal gland, asserting that the properties of this gland are such that through it

the mind can cause changes in the brain.Laycock had a different take. His view was that all energies involved in human mental

activities originate in the organism. He stated that physiological research produces no evi-dence to show that a separate mind or will acts on the brain and causes changes to occurthere. Rather, “the cerebral series of changes involved in mental states of the individual, andconstituting the process termed cerebral reflex action, are due to as purely physical causes asthose on which spinal reflex action depends” and this was true even of “the highest work ofintellectual faculties” (Pt. 2, p. 1). He held that ideation and volition, which purport to comefrom some other source, such as “soul,” are not causes but coincidences of cerebral conditionsor functions excited reflexively (Pt. 1, p. 486). This implied a kind of cerebral self-sufficiency:

According to my views, every living organism is anautomatonin the primary meaningof the word, just because it is living, inasmuch as it is constructed not only so that itshall be able to adapt itself to an external world, but also that the multifarious internalmechanism, whether of the brains or elsewhere, shall be in constant adaptation to eachother (p. 494).

Laycock insisted that in thus stating things he has no intention of making metaphysicalpronouncements about the existence or ultimate nature of mind or will. Such speculation, hesaid, “is no business of the physician”. (p. 496)

Unconscious Cerebration

Laycock’s 1876 article was written largely in response to the work of another physiol-ogist, William Carpenter (1813–1885), professor of medical jurisprudence in University Col-lege, Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, and editor ofThe British andForeign Medico-Chirurgical Review.Carpenter’s first presentation of brain reflex activityoccurred in hisPrinciples of Human Physiology,a broadly read work that was first publishedin 1842 and evolved through many editions. His most complete examination of the subjectoccurred inPrinciples of Mental Physiology,first published in 1874.

In the fifth edition (1855) ofPrinciples of Human Physiology,Carpenter insisted, as didLaycock, that there is a reflex action of the brain, analogous to that of lower centers of thenervous system. He emphasized that this automatic action of the cerebrum can be uncon-scious:

But not only is much of our highest Mental Activity thus to be regarded as the expressionof theautomaticaction of the Cerebrum:—we seem justified in proceeding further, andin affirming that the Cerebrum may act upon impressions transmitted to it, and mayelaborate results such as we might have attained by the purposive direction of our mindsto the subject,without any consciousnesson our own parts; so that we only becomeaware of the operation which has taken place, when we compare the result, as it presentsitself to our minds after it has been attained, with the materials submitted to the process.(p. 607)

The term that Carpenter chose to represent this kind of cerebral elaboration outside awarenesswas “unconscious cerebration.”

In Principles of Mental Physiology,Carpenter made it clear that his definition of “un-conscious” was related in an essential way to the function of “will” in mental operations. Hestated that although animals may have intelligence comparable, up to a certain point, to thatof human beings, there was no evidence that they possess will—the “volitional power ofdirectingtheir Mental operations” (p. 105). He believed that animals operate reactively, much

54 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textas humans do in reverie or dreams, being led from one thing to another by trains of thought

according to the laws of association. He stated that “so long, in fact, as the current of thoughtand feeling flows on under the sole guidance of Suggestion, and without any interferencefrom the Will, it may be considered as the expression of thereflex action of the Cerebrum”(Carpenter, 1877, p. 105).

According to Carpenter, the cerebrum is involved with the “inner life,” and its extraor-dinary development in the human species is an indication of how important the inner life isfor human beings. This inner life includes, not mere reproductions of past sensations, butnew “creations” of the mind, a “constructionof newforms by a process which, if it had beencarried onconsciously,we should have called Imagination” (p. 114). These creations, sincethey are not produced volitionally, that is, through the will, are reflex actions of the cerebrum.They could only be called conscious if the will participated in their production. Thus, forCarpenter, a large part of our intellectual activity—whether involving reasoning, imagination,or both—is essentially automatic. Carpenter believed that unconscious cerebration was atwork, for example when elaborate solutions to intellectual problems evolve overnight andspring to mind fully formed in the morning.

Carpenter also gave examples of unconscious cerebration from the experience of writers(Charlotte Bronte, for instance) which indicate that the development of a story or characteroften occurs outside the conscious efforts of the author, arising to awareness as a kind ofstriking revelation. Carpenter identified similar unconscious involvement in the work of com-posers. For example:

The whole artistic life of Mozart, from his infancy to his death . . . may becited as anexample of the spontaneous or automatic development of musical ideas, which, underthe guidance of his intuitive sense of harmony . . . , expressed themselves in appro-priate language. . . . The whole of a Symphony or an Overture would develop itself inhis mind, its separate instrumental parts taking (so to speak) their respective shapes,without anyintentionalelaboration. In fact, the only exercise of Will that seemed to berequired on his part, consisted in the noting-down of the composition when complete.(pp. 606–607)

Carpenter also believed that we encounter unconscious cerebration in dramatic mentalphenomena such as mesmerism, mediumship, and in such group experiences as “talking-tables” (where intelligible messages were derived from knocks produced by tables)1 and“planchette” (where messages were spelled out by a moving board that, when touched by thefingers, wrote or pointed to letters). According to Carpenter, these phenomena indicate intel-ligent mental activity that cannot be accounted for by the conscious thinking of the partici-pants, and so are rightly ascribed to unconscious cerebral activity.

Yet after attributing the most wonderful of intellectual creations to unconscious cere-bration, Carpenter seemed to contradict himself in the preface of the fourth edition of hisPrinciples of Mental Physiology,where he said:

Although I maintain in the present treatise that an automatic action may take place inthe cerebrum, which, without any intervention of consciousness, may evolve productsusually accounted mental, yet in all such cases,the action takes place on the linespreviously laid down by volitional direction; being exactly parallel, in the case of cerebralaction, to that secondary or acquired automatism, by which particular kinds of move-ment, originally acquired by “training,” come to be performed “mechanically”. (p. xxiii–xxiv)

1. For a description of attempts by various authors to explain table moving and table talking as the result of“reflex action of the brain,” see Crabtree, 1993, pp. 253–265.



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textAs we shall see, it is precisely this problem of attributing fresh, creative, intellectual

products to mental actions that take place “on the lines previously laid down” by consciousthinking that will cause some to doubt that these productions can be adequately explained interms of reflexive action of the brain. Carpenter did say that there is something else involvedin our highest mental life, something that is associated with what he called “Will.” Theproblem is that, according to him that something else is involved only in conscious mentalactivity and by definition does not come into play in unconsciousmental activity, so it remainsunclear how truly new and creative unconscious productions can occur along the lines he laiddown.

Animals as Automata

In 1874, Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) gave an address at Belfast to the British Asso-ciation for the Advancement of Science (subsequently published in theFortnightly Review)which was called “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History.” Huxley’stalk was based on an examination of the writings of Rene Descartes, not so much as aphilosopher, but, according to Huxley, as the greatest physiologist of his time. He examinedDescartes’ view that “brute animals aremeremachines or automata, devoid not only of reason,but of any kind of consciousness” (Huxley, 1874, p. 563).

Descartes’ line of argument was spelled out by Huxley in this way. Descartes starts from“reflex action” in man, that is, from what he called the unquestionable fact that coordinate,purposive actions may occur in us without the intervention of consciousness or volition—oreven contrary to our wishes. If, then, “actions of a certain degree of complexity are broughtabout by mere mechanism, why may not actions of still greater complexity be the result of amore refined mechanism? What proof is there that brutes are other than a superior race ofmarionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, andonly simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician?” (pp. 564–565).

Although, Huxley deplored the cruelty to animals that some people deliberately practicedon the basis of Descartes’ statements, he believed that the core idea was true. Huxley musedthat if Descartes were acquainted with certain findings of modern physiology he would havefelt vindicated in his views. If he knew, for instance, that a frog deprived of the centralhemispheres of the brain will react in most ways as it always does, he would feel justified inbelieving that activity of the whole of the brain would be sufficient to cause the frog to befully frog-like—in other words, thatall of the activities of the frog are automatic. Or if heknew of the case of injury reported by Mesnet in 1874, in which a soldier suffered a type ofdamage to his brain that caused him to periodically pass into states in which he acted appar-ently intelligently, but without consciousness, he would feel even more confident in his view:“Would not Descartes have been justified in asking why we need deny that animals aremachines, when men in a state of unconsciousness perform, mechanically, actions as com-plicated and as rational-seeming as those of any animals?” (p. 573).

Even so, Huxley was not ready to accept Descartes’ view that animals do not haveconsciousness, because, following the principle of continuity, he was not inclined to believethat in the course of evolution any natural phenomenon—in this case consciousness—comessuddenly into being, so that it is completely absent in animals and then fully present inhumans. Yet, although Huxley did not accept that animals are not conscious, he did agreethat they are automata. He said that when we assert that lower animals are guided by instinctand not reason we mean that though they feel as we do, their actions are the result of theirphysical organization. Huxley believed, in short, that they are machines, one part of which(the nervous system) “not only sets the rest in motion, and coordinates its movements inrelation with changes in surrounding bodies, but is provided with special apparatus, the func-

56 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texttion of which is the calling into existence of those states of consciousness which are termed

sensations, emotions, and ideas” (p. 574). So, said Huxley, it must be assumed that molecularchanges in the brain are the causes of all the states of consciousness of brute animals, and heinvited his audience to see brute consciousness in a novel perspective:

The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their bodysimply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any powerof modifying that working, as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a lo-comotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they haveany, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. Thisconception of the relations of states of consciousness with molecular changes in thebrain—of psychoseswith neuroses—does not prevent us from ascribing free will tobrutes. For an agent is free when there is nothing to prevent him from doing that whichhe desires to do. (p. 575)

The question of whether brute animals have souls, said Huxley, is not answered one wayor another with this view of things. If an animal does have soul, it “stands in relation to thebody as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which thebell gives out when it is struck” (p. 576).

Huxley then asked the question he believed must have been in the minds of his audience:Did he mean to say that what we learn from brutes is applicable to man, and, if so, are notthe logical consequences of his ideas fatalism, materialism, and atheism? Were these not thelogical consequenses of this presentation? In answer to the imagined question, Huxley statedthat he did indeed believe that what is here found to be true of brute animals applies equallyto human beings. This meant that “our mental conditions are simply the symbols in con-sciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism; and that . . . thefeeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of thebrain which is the immediate cause of that act” (p. 577). But this did not have the “logicalconsequences” that some might have thought it did. We should be cautious about assigning“logical consequences,” he said, and people should realize that he has not himself concludedthat his ideas are “fatalistic” or “materialistic” or “atheistic.”

Further Debate

The views of Laycock, Carpenter, and Huxley caused a considerable stir in the scientificand popular press, and others took part in the written debate about cerebral reflex action,unconscious cerebration, and automatic productions of the brain. Articles by Bastian (1870),Cobb (1871), Davies (1873), Clifford (1874), Spalding (1874, 1876), Ireland (1875), andRomanes (1882) examined and further elaborated various aspects of human automatism, butadded little that was really new to the discussion. There were some authors, however, whoseideas are worth pausing over.

In his Physiology of Mind(1876), Henry Maudsley examined Huxley’s address andstated that although his logic was impeccable, he left his audience suspended in regard towhat mode of connection exists between consciousness and the physical body. Maudsleyclaimed that he himself had the explanation for that age-old conundrum. He wrote that thosewho have dealt with the problem have started with the false assumption that consciousness(or mind or soul) and the body are two different substances, and that consciousness can nomore affect the body than the idea of a fly swatter can swat a fly. It wasMaudsley’s contentionthat the two are not so totally unlike. He used as a guiding principle the notion, drawn fromevolutionary theory, that all things gradually and imperceptibly evolve from the lowest formsto the highest, without break. That being so, he wrote, we should consider mind to be simply



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthe highest evolution of the physical. Maudsley insisted that all emotions are physical phe-

nomena and that ideas are insensible motions of nerve molecules. He asserted that minddenotes certain vital changes of the brain and nerves and that emotions and ideas refer toparticular agitations of the white and gray matter of the nervous system. He further contendedthat consciousness is a quality or attribute of the concrete mental act, although not an indis-pensable one.

Like Laycock, Carpenter, and Huxley, Maudsley accepted the notion of unconsciousreflex action of the brain. Because of his particular approach to defining consciousness, how-ever, he seemed to be powerless to show what conscious, as opposed to unconscious, actsreally are. If someone were to ask him why certain mental acts are conscious, he would saybecause those particular mental acts have the attribute of consciousness attached to them,while others do not. Unfortunately, this was no explanation at all.

While British physiologists and philosophers were engaged in debate over the uncon-scious reflex action of the brain and automatic mental actions, the French were also becomingaware of the issue. In his bookThe Brain and Its Functions,which was originally publishedin Paris in 1876, Jules Luys wrote that automatic activities are fundamental to brain activityand underlie most of the operations of cerebral life:

If, then, we happen to experience any excitation whatever, visual, auditory, or olfactory,the appeal of the first in the series by virtue of these mysterious associations immediatelycauses the others to spring up; former memories reappear, and so blind and inevitableis the communicated movement, that this is effected without any conscious participationof the will. It does not depend upon us to incite or direct it; it follows its route by virtueof its peculiar affinities and regular anastomoses, as automatically as the sympatheticand excito-motor actions that are propagated through the plexuses of the spinal cord.(Luys 1887, p. 181)

Luys added: “Thus it is that the automatic forces of the brain, concentrated around acircle of definite ideas, develop themselves automatically, provoke the intervention of newelements, and finally create quite new methods of seeing and considering things” (p. 191).

While the ideas of Luys were broadly discussed, the French writer who had the most tosay in this area was the physician and physiologist Prosper Despine (b. 1812). Despine wasa member of the Medico-Psychological Society in both Paris and London and therefore wasknowledgeable about what was being discussed across the channel.

In 1880, Despine published a book calledEtude Scientifique sur le Somnambulisme,which is, to all intents and purposes, a treatise on automatism. Despine wrote that he had formany years been investigating “unconscious acts,” that is actions carried out with a rational,intelligent goal in mind and attained without the involvement of personal consciousness and,consequently, without the intervention of the “I,” which he defines as “the being that is awareof its own existence”2 (p. 15). He stated that when a human being carries out acts in theexternal world without the participation of the “I,” these acts must be considered to be au-tomatic, in contrast to acts willed and directed by one’s conscious being. These automaticacts are nonetheless intelligent—purposefully adapted to a goal in a manner similar to actsthat are directed by the “I.”

Despine used the word “conscious” to refer to being known or perceived by the “I.” Forhim all acts of an individual perceived by his “I” are conscious; those performed by the body

2. This, and all subsequent quotations from Despine, are my own translations. Although “ego” has frequentlybeen employed as the English translation of the French“le moi,” I have elected to use the “I” as more evocative ofDespine’s actual meanings.

58 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textof the individual without the awareness of the “I” are unconscious. From another point of

view, he suggested, the “I” might be called “spirit,” and it can rightly be said that acts doneby the active spirit, are necessarily conscious; unconscious acts are not under its jurisdiction.So, said Despine, it makes no sense to talk about unconscious acts of the spirit or the “I,” assome physiologists had been doing. All unconscious acts are purely organic and the “I” doesnot participate in them.

Despine also stated that unconscious acts, if they are to be labeled such, must be thekind thatcould have beenperformed consciously, if the “I” had been involved:

The term unconscious should logically be applied only to those acts which, being similarto those which are carried out in the external world by the will of the “I,” and which, inconsequence, are conscious, are carried out, by exception, without the participation ofthe “I” and without its knowing. (p. 25)

Furthermore, for Despine, unconscious acts always precede and prepare the way forconscious ones: “Conscious acts always have as their antecedents organic acts of which wehave no awareness” (p. 23). So we can say, for instance, that creative genius at its mostsublime derives from preceding unconscious acts, which then flow, often fully developed,into conscious awareness. Despine admitted that we do not know precisely how this kind ofinspiration operates, but we do know that it occurs.

From reading the British physiologists, particularly Laycock and Carpenter, on the reflexaction of the brain, Despine realized that he did not agree with them in certain respects. Hestated that, under reflex actions of the brain and automatic activity, the British writers includedacts that were conscious to the “I” while they were happening. For Despine, this was acontradiction in terms, since there can be no such thing as being conscious of something thatis unconscious.

For Despine, a better example of unconscious reflex action of the brain would be whathappens in somnambulism. He claimed that in somnambulism only automatic brain func-tioning occurs; the “I” is unaware of what happens during the somnambulistic state, notthrough forgetting, but through nonparticipation in acts performed during that state.

Despine insisted that the criterion of whether or not an act is automatic isnot the factthat the act is involuntary. He believed that Carpenter and Laycock get stuck on this pointwhen they were attempting to explain pathological actions. It is true, said Despine, that manypathological actions are involuntary, but so is much of normal brain function. Involuntarinesscannot be the criterion of automaticity; the true criterion is whether the activity of the brainis accompanied by awareness on the part of the “I” or the “spirit.” In the absence of awarenessby the “I,” in the absence of consciousness in this sense, we have automatic reflex brainactivity. And this is true also when, although the “I” may be aware of what is going on, itviews those occurrences ashappening to another person,and perceives them as awitness.

II: PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM

The concept of the automatic action of the cerebrum was put forward by physiologiststo explain thoughts and actions which, although seemingly intelligent, do not originate inconscious thinking. Up to 1880, physiologists writing about automatisms had agreed on cer-tain things. Using spinal reflex action as their model, they agreed that there are reflex actionsof the cerebrum. They also agreed that brain reflex action is or could be unconscious to theindividual who experiences it—thus Carpenter’s “unconscious cerebration.”

But there were also points of disagreement and debate, particularly in regard to what the



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textterm “unconscious” signifies. Carpenter emphasized the nonparticipation of the will, the in-

dividual being unable to choose or direct the thoughts or actions involved. Despine, on theother hand, claimed that “conscious” means known to the “I.” He insisted that actions can benonvoluntary, but still known to the “I” and therefore not “unconscious”; consequently, theycannot be considered reflex or automatic actions of the cerebrum. Others, most notably rep-resented by Huxley (who concluded that both animals and human beings are conscious au-tomata), also questioned the meaning of consciousness, and arrived at the conclusion thatconsciousness is simply a symbol of the cerebral activity that occurs, never its cause (as thesteam whistle has no influence on the machinery of the locomotive). A variation on this viewwas that of Maudsley, who said that consciousness is simply an attribute of cerebral activity,not something substantial in its own right.

Many physiologists (e.g., Carpenter, Maudsley, and Despine) attributed to cerebral reflexactivity not just simple mental processes that merely carry through with a line of logic alreadybegun or recombine ideas already available to consciousness, but also spontaneously occur-ring, complex, and original creative products, such as the stories of Charlotte Bronte or thesymphonies of Mozart. Yet there appeared to be some difficulty in categorizing such bril-liantly intelligent works as the result of mere reflex action of the brain in which, as Carpen-ter—with seeming self-contradiction—says, “the action takes place on the lines previouslylaid down by volitional direction; being exactly parallel, in the case of cerebral action, to thatsecondary or acquired automatism, by which particular kinds of movement, originally ac-quired by ‘training,’ come to be performed ‘mechanically’” (Carpenter, 1889, p. 296).

It is precisely questions about the extent to which reflex action can explain this kind ofcomplex intelligent activity that came prominently into question in the 1880s. That question-ing was most compellingly exemplified in the writings of two men: F. W. H. Myers andPierre Janet.

F. W. H. Myers

Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901), a Cambridge classicist and cofounder of the BritishSociety for Psychical Research, was an investigator of the mind widely respected by psy-chologists of his time, whose current obscurity is somewhat puzzling.3 William James con-sidered Myers’ development of the concept of the Subliminal Self to be “the most importantstep forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science”(James, 1985, p. 190; see also James, 1986, pp. 89–106, 192–202). He believed that “Myerswill always be remembered in psychology as a pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mentalwilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it” (James, 1986, p. 202) The reasonfor what might today seem like puzzlingly extravagant praise from James lies to a great extentin how Myers dealt with the issue of automatism.

Myers believed that those who wrote about the “physiology of mind” were laboringunder a mistaken assumption: that there is but one consciousness in each individual person

3. The extent of the influence of Myers’ work on his contemporaries may be hard to comprehend today. A recentevaluation of his place in psychological history is that of Oppenheim who states: “He was indeed [quoting WilliamJames] ‘one of the great systematizers of the notion of the unconscious mind.’ Apart from this achievement, however,the means by which he constructed his theory of the subliminal self would hardly have won acclaim from thescientific fraternity of the day” (Oppenheim 1985, p. 255). Oppenheim believes that Myers’ interest in the soul andthe problem of survival of death discredited him in the eyes of many scientists. A more penetrating analysis of theview of Myers held by his contemporaries and the fate of his psychological ideas can be found in Taylor’s analysisof scientific psychology of the day (Taylor, 1996) and in Meheust’s penetrating study of the sociological forcesaround animal magnetism, hypnotism and psychical research throughout that period (Meheust, 1999).

60 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of text(Myers, 1885d). If consciousness is unitary and if consciousness and intelligence are coex-

tensive—then what? In that case, when we perform a seemingly intelligent action withoutbeing aware of doing so, that intelligence must be spurious and the action must be based onpurely physiological interactions. What appears to be intelligent must be mechanical; giventhe assumption, said Myers, we can arrive at no other conclusion. But if consciousness is notunitary, if there can be multiple centers of consciousness, the whole picture changes.

Myers, in a few important essays in the 1880s, introduced a new perspective on humanautomatism, maintaining that a purely physiological approach could not do justice to the dataat hand and insisting that physiology must be supplemented with a strong psychologicalperspective. He believed that what was needed was a new understanding of automatism, onethat would allow room for the existence of hidden personal intelligences, coequal to oureveryday conscious mind, which function concurrently with ordinary consciousness andwhich may at times break through into our usual awareness. This intelligent activity, arisingfrom inner personal centers, is in no way inferior to that of normal consciousness, saidMyers.In fact, at times we glimpse an intelligence and inventive brilliance that exceeds that of oureveryday, conscious self. In other words, automatism, understood in this new way, involvesan inner consciousness (or several of them) that is unconsciousonly in relation to ordinaryeveryday consciousness,and is an intelligent center of consciousness in its own right.

It was Myers’ belief that the activity of these hidden personal centers of consciousnesshave physiological correlates that can and must be explored. He also held that any adequatepsychological understanding of automatism must take the findings of physiology seriouslyand not incorporate psychological explanations that contradict those findings. Also, Myersinsisted that any truly adequate psychological theory must be scientifically based and usemethods that involve investigating empirical data, proposing explanatory hypotheses, anddevising experiments that will test the validity of those explanations.

Myers held that psychology, if it is to be truly scientific, must investigateall types ofhuman experience and not dismiss any that are sufficiently established as data, no matter howunusual they may appear to be at first glance. One of Myers’ great desires was to bringtogether under one psychological theory the extremely diverse spectrum of human experi-ence—normal, pathological, and extraordinary. William James believed that Myers’ ap-proach was remarkably successful:

Myers’ great principle of research was that in order to understand any one species offact we ought to have all the species of the same general class of fact before us. So hetook a lot of scattered phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others out-lawed from science or treated as isolated curiosities; he made series of them, filled inthe transitions by delicate hypotheses or analogies, and bound them together in a systemby his bold inclusive conception of the Subliminal Self. . . . Unconscious cerebration,dreams, hypnotism, hysteria, inspirations of genius, the willing game, planchette, crystalgazing, hallucinatory voices, apparitions of the dying, medium trances, demoniacal pos-session, clairvoyance, thought transference—even ghosts and other facts more doubt-ful—these things form a chaos at first sight most discouraging. No wonder that scientistscan think of no other principle of unity among them than their common appeal to men’sperverse propensity to superstition. Yet Myers has actually made a system of them,stringing them continuously upon a perfectly legitimate objective hypothesis, verified insome cases and extended to others by analogy. (James, 1986, pp. 195, 197–198)

James pointed out that Myers used a new conception of automatism to unify his understandingof human experience (p. 198), a conception that Myers arrived at in the 1880s and refinedup to the time of his death in 1901.



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textMyers began his public discussion of automatism in the journals of the day. He had been

conducting experiments relating to automatism principally in two areas: hypnotism and au-tomatic writing. In an article written in 1884, he discussed in detail a case of automatic writing(which he called the “Clelia” case) that seemed to involve some sort of telepathy (a word hehimself coined). He referred to Carpenter’s notion of unconscious cerebration in connectionwith this case, which he considered an example of hidden intelligent activity, yet he hintedthat he was not fully satisfied with Carpenter’s explanations and began to move in a newdirection:

Throughout all these investigations we must keepunconscious cerebrationsteadily inview, and we shall, I think, find ourselves confronted with many of its results, and beinduced continually to enlarge its field of action. We shall, I venture to say, come toregard this term less and less as expressing asubsidiary,more and more as expressinga substantive and primaryoperation of our intelligence; and we shall come, perhaps, tofind super-consciousas a necessary a term assub-conscious,if we would indicate thetrue relation to each other of the processes in which our being consists. (Myers, 1884,pp. 218–219)

A considerable portion of the data used by Myers in his discussion involved the type ofexperiences that had been recorded by spiritualists for many decades. Myers did not shy awayfrom such data, but neither was he inclined to explain them as spiritualists did. Discussingthe process of writing with a planchette, Myers said that this operation has five possibleexplanations: (1) the message is consciously written in the ordinary way, (2) the message isautomatically written with the contents supplied by the operator’s unconscious cerebration,(3) the message is automatically written with the contents supplied by some higher uncon-scious faculty of the operator which might be called clairvoyance, (4) the message is auto-matically written with the contents supplied by telepathic impact from other minds, and (5)the message is automatically written with the contents supplied by “spirits” or extrahumanintelligences (Myers, 1884, p. 224). In attempting to come up with an explanation that coveredthe mass of material that arose from automatic writing and other automatisms, Myers inclinedtoward explanations 2, 3, or 4. With the vast bulk of data, he was content with explanation2. If warranted, he would add an element of explanation 3. In some extraordinary cases, healso called upon explanation 4. More rarely, and only when he felt compelled to do so by thedata, he would consider explanation 5.

In an article published the following year, Myers wrote that he believed there now existedsufficient evidence to warrant speaking of “proof of the concurrent action of a secondary selfso entirely dissociated from the primary consciousness that the [automatic writer] is almostbaffled by his own automatic replies” (Myers, 1885a, p. 239). In another article that sameyear, he again stated his dissatisfaction with Carpenter’s explanation of complex mental au-tomatisms, saying that in the Clelia case he was “already overpassing very considerably therecognized limits of unconscious cerebration” (Myers, 1885b, p. 25). Here Myers began todevelop his notion of a second, inner center of consciousness:

It must be repeated, then, that this conclusion is already far enough from the accreditedview as to the extent of the brain’s unconscious operation. Asecondary self—if I maycoin the phrase—is thus gradually postulated,—a latent capacity, at any rate, in anappreciable fraction of mankind, of developing or manifesting a second focus of cerebralenergy which is apparently neither fugitive nor incidental merely,—a delirium or adream—but may possess for a time at least a kind of continuous individuality, a pur-posive activity of its own. (p. 27)

62 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textIn an article in theFortnightly Reviewin 1885, Myers began to outline an approach for

studying in an adequate fashion the breadth and depth of human experiences:

The method to which I refer is that ofexperimental psychologyin its strictest sense—the attempt to attack the great problems of our being not by metaphysical argument, norby merely introspective analysis, but by a study, as detailed and exact as in any othernatural science, of all such phenomena of life as have both a psychical and a physicalaspect. Pre-eminently important for such a science is the study of abnormal, and I mayadd, ofsupernormal,mental and physical conditions of all kinds. (Myers, 1885c, p. 637)

Writing in theProceedings of the Society for Psychical Researchin 1887, Myers pointedout that automatisms are not limited to abnormal or extraordinary phenomena, but that or-dinary life is replete with various kinds of automatic action (Myers, 1887, pp. 214–216). Inthe following year, again writing in theProceedings,Myers examined in detail a newlypublished article on unconscious acts written by Pierre Janet and published in theRevuePhilosophique(Janet, 1888). He noted that Janet’s researches bore closely on the views hehimself had been setting forth in various articles and saw in Janet’s experiments confirmationof his own ideas. He said that Janet’s hypnotic investigations, and also those of EdmundGurney, demonstrated “the persistence of the hypnotic self, as a remembering and reasoningentity, during the reign of the primary self” (Myers, 1888, p. 377). Further, Myers contendedthat secondary personalities were not the exclusive property of the hysterical or the insane,as Janet tended to believe, but were present in the healthy and productive:

I hold that hypnotism (itself a word covering a vast variety of different states) may beregarded as constituting one special case which falls under a far wider category,—thecategory, namely, ofdevelopments of a secondary personality.I hold that we each of uscontain the potentialities of many different arrangements of the elements of our person-ality, each arrangement being distinguishable from the rest by differences in the chainof memories which pertains to it. The arrangement with which we habitually identifyourselves,—what we call the normal or primary self,—consists, in my view, of theelements selected for us in the struggle for existence with special reference to the main-tenance of ordinary physical needs, and is not necessarily superior in any other respectto the latent personalities which lie alongside it,--the fresh combinations of our personalelements which may be evoked, by accident or design, in a variety to which we can atpresent assign no limit. I consider that dreams, with natural somnambulism, automaticwriting, with so-called mediumistic trance, as well as certain intoxications, epilepsies,hysterias, and recurrent insanities, afford examples of the development of what I havecalled secondary mnemonic chains,—fresh personalities, more or less complete, along-side the normal state. And I would add that hypnotism is only the name given to a groupof empirical methods of inducing these fresh personalities,—of shifting the centers ofmaximum energy, and starting a new mnemonic chain. . . . Thus, in a word, nothingwhich my organism does or suffers is unconscious, but the consciousness of any givenact or endurance may form a part of a chain of memories which never happens to obtrudeitself into my waking life. (pp. 387–388)

Here we see Myers developing his notion of the “Subliminal Self,” that locus of mentalactivity that lies beyond the margin or “below the threshold” of ordinary awareness.

In establishing his vision of the individual psyche as consisting of multiple centers ofconsciousness, Myers kept insisting that a view of human consciousness as unitary is mis-taken. He knew that this stand would be met with opposition from a many philosophers. Healso recognized that some might take his position as a denial of the existence of the soul:

It has been assumed—by some with indifference, by others with horror—that this view



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textof our personality as a complex, a shifting thing,—a unity upbuilt from multiplicity,—

an empire aggregated from the fusion of disparate nationalities,—must bring with italso a presumption that there is nothing in usbeyondthis ever-changing identity, whosecontinuance depends but on links of perishable memory, on organic syntheses which anaccident may distort or decompose. I do not myself think that this analysis of our terrenepersonality—pushed even as I am pushing it now—does in reality introduce any ad-ditional difficulty whatever into the hypothesis of a transcendental Self behind the phe-nomena;—of what we call a human soul. (Myers 1887, p. 260)

Having outlined his view of human multiplicity, Myers undertook the clarification ofhis conception of automatism. In an article on the “Daemon of Socrates” written in 1889,Myers wrote that the automatisms he had been exploring since at least 1884 were the kindthat “parallel automatically whatever our conscious will, our conscious perception can discernor decree” (Myers, 1889, p. 522). He continued:

As soon, however, as we begin thus widely to extend the province of our specific au-tomatism, we feel at once the need of some general definition which may indicate whatit is that we are really seeking,—in what point the automatisms which here concern usdiffer from the multitude of actions, images, ideas to which such terms asautomaticorreflexare commonly applied. (pp. 522–523)

Myers then described the characteristics of these automatisms. First of all, they areindependent automatisms, that is, they are not simply symptomatic of some pathology orchange within the body. Second, they are “message-bearing” or “nunciative” automatisms,not bearing messages from something outside, but from one stratum of our personality toanother. They originate in some deeper zone of one’s being and emerge into consciousnessas “deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown, without any accompanying perceptionof the elaborative process which has made them what they are” (p. 524). Third, some of themessages are what Myers called “veridical,” that is, they correspond with objective facts notnormally known by the individual. This type of automatic event is not to be seen as super-natural, however, but rather “supernormal,” operating according to laws as yet unknown, butwhich presage a stage of evolution not yet fully realized.

Myers also provided a categorization of automatisms (pp. 534–535) that would becomecentral to the later formulation of the Subliminal Self, which can be found in articles in theProceedings of the Society for Psychical Research(Myers, 1892a, b, c, d, e; 1893a, b; 1895a,b) and his posthumously published opusHuman Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death(1903). He stated that there are two principal kinds of automatism: “active” and “passive,”or, put slightly differently, “motor automatisms” and “sensory automatisms.” Passive or sen-sory automatisms occur when the “message” takes the form of some kind of hallucination,an automatic experience of hearing, seeing, or any of the other kinds of sensing of which weare capable. Thus, dreams are common but striking examples of sensory automatism. Activeor motor automatisms, on the other hand, include such experiences as automatic writing,automatic speech, and automatic meaningful gestures. With both kinds of automatism, “au-tomatic” means deriving from an inner center of consciousness unavailable to the one’sordinary consciousness.

To sum up, having become dissatisfied with the definition of and explanation for automa-tism given by the physiologists, Myers added a new dimension—the psychological. In doingso, he radically revised the meaning of “automatism.” What was now needed was to give thisconception a new name and supply further experimental verification. These were providedby Pierre Janet.

64 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textPierre Janet

Pierre Janet (1859–1947), French physician and psychologist, served as director of thelaboratory of pathological psychology at the Salpeˆtriere (1890–1898) and as professor ofexperimental and comparative psychology at the Colle`ge de France from 1902 on. In 1904he founded theJournal de Psychologie Normal et Pathologique.His books and otherpublications are numerous, in no small part because he had a long life and published hisfindings over a protracted period of time. As significant as many of his writings are, nonesurpass in importanceL’Automatisme Psychologique,his doctoral dissertation published in1889.

This book was foreshadowed in three important articles published in theRevue Philo-sophique(Janet, 1886, 1887, 1888). Here Janet described his work with several women,diagnosed as hysterics, using various hypnotic techniques. The first article, titled “Uncon-scious Acts and the Doubling of the Personality During Artificial Somnambulism,” was basedon studies conducted on a 17-year-old woman over an extended period of time. The woman,called “L” by Janet, was subject to hysterical attacks that could last for hours. She was easilyhypnotized and Janet used trance states to benefit her therapeutically. During somnambulism,“L” showed many of the symptoms common to that state. When awakened, she would notremember her somnambulistic state or anything that occurred during it. Janet said that, in thiswork, he had the bizarre impression that he was having two conversations, each interruptedand then started again: one during the waking state and another during somnambulism. Therewas, he said, a continuity of memory in each state that maintained itself over any number ofexperiments. Things that occurred during these researches convinced Janet that an intelligencewas at work in “L” that was different from her everyday self and whose actions and thoughtswere unavailable to her ordinary consciousness. Referring to an experiment in which “L”seemed to count and calculate unconsciously, Janet wrote:

In [somnambulists], outside of their consciousness, there exists—we do not knowhow—a persistent memory, an attention always awake and a judgment quite capable ofcounting the days, even doing multiplication and division. . . . In L’s head there ap-parently exist important psychological operations that are outside her normal conscious-ness.4 (Janet, 1886, p. 586)

Janet recommended that researchers seek out similar “automatic phenomena” since theyare very important for psychology. He also said that the kind of experience he was studyingwas not a “pure automatism, which does not manifest great intelligence,” but rather involvedoperations that required concentrated thinking. For that reason, he felt justified in talkingabout a second consciousness and in recognizing that hypnotism involves a doubling ofconsciousness. Janet also referred to Myers’ “very ingenious work” on automatic writing, andused that as a starting point for talking about how he employed automatic writing in his workwith “L.” The facts show, said Janet, that what correctly describes “L’s” experiences withmemory is not an absence of memory on her part, but rather the presence of two conscious-nesses, the ordinary and the hypnotic, which interact in such a way that the ordinary con-sciousness is never aware of the contents of the hypnotic.

In the second article, Janet continued his discussion of a second consciousness not knownto the waking self. He asserted that the doubling of the self found in his researches is not anartifact produced by suggestion in his interaction with the subject, but rather a characteristicof hysteria. The second intelligent center has the qualities of a personality and is aware of

4. This and all subsequent quotations from Janet have been translated by the author.



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthings not known to the waking self. The second personality can, in fact, cause the individual

to perceive or do things without revealing its existence. In addition, it may be aware of eventsin the individual’s life unavailable to ordinary consciousness. Also, typically, sensations towhich the ordinary self is anesthetic, the second self experiences—what the former cannotsee or do, the latter can. Janet called this a “systematized anesthesia” and described it as acontraction of the field of consciousness of the ordinary self. This “dissociation” of somephenomena of consciousness (Janet first used this term in its modern psychological sense)from everyday awareness means that they cannot be synthesized by the “I.”

In the third article, Janet examined “unconscious acts,” those actions with all the char-acteristics of psychological fact, except that they are not known by the person executing theact at the moment it is being executed. There are four kinds of unconscious acts: (1) thosearising from posthypnotic suggestion, (2) those arising from anesthesia, (3) those arising fromdistraction (engaging the attention elsewhere), and (4) those that arise spontaneously. Thefirst three result from the intervention of the experimenter, the fourth occurs in daily life.Janet insisted that these acts originate not with ordinary consciousness, but with the secondarypersonality, or what Janet preferred to call the “subconscious” personality, He looked at thissubconscious personality as a “new” psychological reality separate from normal conscious-ness with special characteristics, such as (1) often being more rudimentary than the ordinaryself, (2) being very suggestible, (3) exhibiting tastes, moods, and other qualities that differfrom the normal self, (4) having more memories of the person’s life than are available to theordinary self, (5) knowing about the ordinary self (although the ordinary self knows nothingabout it) and refusing to be identified with it, (6) not being created by hypnotic sleep, and(7) considering itself separate from, and sometimes even opposed to, the ordinary self. Fromfurther observation, Janet also came to the conclusion that there can be any number of thesesubconscious personalities in one individual.

L’Automatisme Psychologiqueappeared in 1889, the year following the third article.One of the striking things about this book, which was the thesis for Janet’s doctor of philos-ophy degree, was the sudden appearance of a new organizing framework for the research hehad conducted up to that point. Although “automatism” was mentioned only a few times inthe three articles, in the book “psychological automatism” became the central unifying prin-ciple for his data.

We do not learn from the text just how this change in emphasis occurred. However,there are good reasons to believe that the writings on automatism by Frederick Myers, whichwere well known to Janet, had a decisive influence on the shift. Myers had worked collabor-atively with Janet on a series of experiments on hypnotization at a distance conducted onJanet’s patient Le´onie at Le Havre in 1886 and they read each others articles as they appearedin the journals of the day. Up to 1889 Myers was the only author to clearly formulate apsychological framework for human automatism—a formulation perfectly suited to Janet’sdata. In view of these factors, it is reasonable to conclude that Janet used that formulation indeveloping the framework of this 1889 thesis.

The usual view of the priority of ideas between Myers and Janet in this area is thatMyers derived his ideas about inner centers of consciousness from Janet (e.g., Moore, 1977,p. 149). However, an examination of the published material of the two men in the crucialyears from 1884 to 1889 indicates that the influence went mainly the other way, particularlyin regard to the development of a psychological conception of automatism. Myers’s initialinquiry into the psychological aspects of automatism occurred in 1884 and quickly evolvedinto the well-developed form we see in his article of 1888. Janet’s appreciation of this wayof looking at automatism seems to have occurred somewhere between the writing of his article

66 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texton unconscious acts published in 1888, where the notion of psychological automatism is

absent, and the writing ofL’Automatisme Psychologique.It would perhaps not be far-fetchedto say that Myers’s 1888 article, dealing specifically with Janet’s experiments, was the stim-ulus for Janet’s working out his new “psychological automatism” framework for the presen-tation of his experimental findings. Janet’s new unifying principle proved to be veryproductive in the development of his fascinating and highly influential view of the psyche ingeneral and hysteria in particular (see Ellenberger, 1970, pp. 331 ff.)

In the introduction toL’Automatisme Psychologique,Janet stated that his treatmentwould be psychological and would take its cue from the approach of other sciences. He alsoidentified automatism as the psychological phenomena on which his science was focused:

Today in psychology and the other sciences the preference is to research the most ele-mentary facts, because we know that this more easily attainable knowledge will greatlyclarify the more complex forms. It is human activity in its simplest andmost rudimentaryforms that will be the object of this study. This elementary activity, whether noted inanimals or studied in man by psychiatrists, has been designated by a name that is im-portant to maintain—that of automatic activity. (Janet, 1889, pp. 1–2)

Janet explained that the term “automatic” refers to a movement with two characteristics:(1) it is spontaneous in the sense that it moves itself and does not need an impulse fromwithout and (2) the movement is regular, operating in a predictable, determined way. Whathappens when you apply this understanding to human acts? Investigators agree that humanautomatisms come from within the individual and are not created by an outside force. Theyalso agree that there is a kind of determinism and predictability about them. But, said Janet,they differ in the details of their understanding of precisely how automatisms occur. Someauthors see human automatisms as not only self-produced and determined, but also mechan-ical and without consciousness. This view has caused a great deal of confusion, and led manyphilosophers to deny the possibility of human automatism since, in their view, that wouldreduce human beings to a pure mechanism of extended, feelingless elements, without con-sciousness. Janet intended to take a different approach:

We believe that one can accept simultaneously both automatism and consciousness andthereby give satisfaction to those who note in humans an elementary form of activity ascompletely determined as an automaton and to those who want to conserve for humans,in their simplest actions, consciousness and sensibility. In other words, it does not seemto us that in a living being the activity that manifests on the outside through movementcan be separated from a certain kind of intelligence and from the consciousness thataccompanies it inside,and our goal is to not only to demonstrate that there is a humanactivity that merits the name of automatic, but also that it is legitimate to call it apsychological automatism[Janet’s italics]. (pp. 2–3)

Janet said that the study of automatisms cannot be adequately carried out by introspec-tion, because “consciousness does not give us knowledge of all the psychological phenomenathat take place in us” (p. 4), for we continually run into thoughts and feelings that cannot beaccounted for in terms of conscious thinking. Neither can physiology alone provide themethod of approach, for it “simply notes coincidences between mental and physical facts anddoes not really explain the laws of consciousness” (p. 5). The true method was different:

In order to have simple, precise, and complete phenomena, it is necessary to observethem in others and appeal to objective psychology. Without doubt one knows psycho-logical phenomena in others only indirectly and psychology cannot begin here. But onecan infer their existence from acts, gestures, and language, just as the chemist determines



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthe elements of the stars from the rays of the spectrum, and the certainty of one set of

operations is as great as the other. Our study of automatism, therefore, will be an attemptat experimental and objective psychology. (p. 5)

For Janet, this meant studying both the healthy and the ill, and for that reason “experimentalpsychology will necessarily be, from many points of view, an abnormal psychology” (p. 6).

In his view of automatism, Janet disagreed with Prosper Despine, with whom he carriedon a running debate inL’Automatisme Psychologique.Despine saw somnambulists as com-pletely unconscious and considered their actions totally physically automatic (see above).Janet insisted that this view cannot be maintained when you see somnambulists speak, resolveproblems, manifest spontaneous sympathies and antipathies, act as they want, and sometimesresist commands: these are not the actions of an automatic puppet. Despine had argued thatsomnambulists have no memory afterwards for what they have done when somnambulistic,and therefore their “I,” their consciousness, is not involved. Janet countered that sometimespeople do remember what they have done during somnambulism, and that in any case, mem-ory, or lack of it, is no proof or disproof of consciousness. Janet claimed that Despine madethe mistake of imposing the notion of the unity of consciousness on the data, whereas thescientific approach must recognize that the data may reveal that there are a number of con-sciousnesses in one individual (pp. 22–30).

In order to pursue a study of automatic actions, suggested Janet, we would do well toturn our attention to somnambulism, where we often observe actions that appear to be themanifestation of a character and depend on a personality, but one different from that of thewaking person:

In effect, we see in somnambulists the automatic life of the spirit enlarged and extendedto form a particular memory, to give birth to a character and a new personality. Todiscover the nature and the principal characteristics of this new form of psychologicallife is to see under another aspect the activity of the elements of our thought. (p. 67)

Janet called these new forms of psychological life variously “secondary personalities,”“secondary selves,” “subconscious personalities,” and “new psychological existences.” Hebelieved that his work with hysterics revealed that they possessed states of consciousness thatwere distinct from one another, with different views, values, and abilities. He described themas groupings of psychological phenomena in a synthesis that experiences itself as an “I.”These personalities are not known to ordinary consciousness and carry on with a life of theirown. Yet they can affect ordinary life by producing behavior, causing emotions, and creatingsensations that are not within the control of the everyday conscious self. To that ordinary selfthese effects are experienced as psychological automatisms. Restating his discussion in thearticle of 1888, Janet said that these automatisms are the source of “unconscious acts.” Anunconscious act is one “having all the characteristics of a psychological act save one: that itis always unknown to the person himself who executes it at the moment itself when it isexecuted” (p. 225).

Given that “unconscious” acts have a consciousness of their own within the individual,Janet preferred to speak of these actions as “subconscious” happenings, having a conscious-nessbelownormal consciousness (p. 265). Here he used one half of the “sub-conscious/super-conscious” duality referred to by Myers in 1884 (see above). Janet went on to say thatsecondary personalities can be multiple:

There can be many simultaneous subconscious personalities just as there can be manysuccessive ones. . . . Theconscious life of one of these subjects, of Lucie [“L”], for

68 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textexample, seems to be composed of three parallel streams, one under the other. When

the subject is awake, the three streams exist: the first is the normal consciousness of thesubject who speaks to us; the two others are groups of sensations and acts more or lessassociated among themselves, but absolutely unknown by the person who speaks to us.When the subject is put to sleep in the first somnambulism, the first stream is interruptedand the second surfaces. It shows itself in broad daylight and lets us see the memoriesit has acquired in its subterranean life. If we move on to the second somnambulism, thesecond stream is interrupted in its turn and only the third subsists, which then forms thewhole conscious life of the individual. Here one does not see anesthesias or subconsciousacts. (pp. 333, 335)

Janet held that psychological automatisms are manifestations of pathology: we find au-tomatisms in hysterics and the insane; if we were to encounter a completely healthy person,we would find no trace of them. From this we can see what characterizes

. . . the state of perfect psychological health: the power to synthesize being very great,all psychological phenomena, whatever their origin, are united in the same personalperception,and consequently the second personality does not exist. In such a state therewould be no distraction, no anesthesia (systematic or general), no suggestibility and nopossibility of producing a somnambulism, since one could not develop subconsciousphenomena, which would not exist. (p. 336)

In this matter, Janet was more optimistic than Myers, who did not believe that weexperience such complete unification under one self in this life. Janet did admit that, in reallife, relatively normal people can now and then develop subconscious phenomena and ex-perience psychological automatisms, and in this way he kept the door open to exploring thesephenomena among the general populace. However, Janet’s admission seems to be at bestgrudging, and he did not give up his position that subconscious phenomena almost alwaysresult from some form of pathology. The position of F. W. H. Myers—that psychologicalautomatisms were a part of ordinary life and that perfectly healthy people could be goodsubjects for hypnosis and automatic writing—would come to be broadly accepted, as ex-emplified in the writings of as Max Dessoir (1889), Alfred Binet (1890), Boris Sidis (1898),Theodore Flournoy (1900), Morton Prince (1905, 1914), and William James (James, 1996;Taylor, 1983).

Conclusion

The investigation of automatism was begun by physiologists. They framed the questionsand posed the answers and in doing so developed a terminology for communicating on thesubject. Myers and Janet inherited that framework and language, but neither was content withwhat the physiologists gave them. Both Myers and Janet believed that a purely physiologicalexplanation for automatism could not do justice to the broad spectrum of data involved,particularly those human actions that were characterized by spontaneity, intelligence, andcreativity.

The physiologists sought their answers within the framework of the organic paradigm.Myers and Janet, oriented within framework of the psychological paradigm, asserted thatphysiology, as Janet put it, “simply notes coincidences between mental and physical factsand does not really explain the laws of consciousness” (Janet, 1889, p. 5), and that, to accountfor what we experience, we must instead pursue a psychological investigation of mental lifein its own right.

Both Myers and Janet had hoped for a reconciliation of the psychological and the phys-iological, a hope that might be seen as enshrined in the very term “psychological automatism.”Their hope was not to be realized. Their explanations are at bottom psychological, and the



shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textappreciative references to physiology that occur throughout their writings do not constitute a

unification of these two approaches. Nevertheless, the development of the concept of psy-chological automatism played a significant role in the evolution of modern dynamic psychi-atry. It provided a framework and language for talking about intelligence beyond normalconsciousness and a basis for a psychotherapy that could effectively treat the distress thatoccurs when that intelligence originates actions that are out of harmony with conscious life.

REFERENCES

Anonymous. (1838). On the supposed sensibility and intelligence of insects. Blackwood’s Magazine, 43, 589–606.Bastian, C. (1870). Consciousness. Journal of Mental Science, 15, 501–523.Binet, A. (1890). On double consciousness: experimental psychological studies. Chicago: Open Court.Carpenter, W. (1855). Principles of human physiology, fifth edition. London: John ChurchillCarpenter, W. (1877). Principles of mental physiology, fourth edition. New York: D. Appleton & Company. [orig-

inally published in 1874]Carpenter, W. (1889). Nature and man: Essays scientific and philosophical. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

[originally published in 1875]Clifford, W. K. (1874). Body and mind. Fortnightly Review, 16, 714–736.Cobb, F. P. (1871). Unconscious cerebration: A psychological study. Macmillan’s Magazine, 23, 24–37.Crabtree, A. (1985). Mesmerism, divided consciousness, and multiple personality. In Heinz Schott (Ed.), Franz

Anton Mesmer und die Geschichte der Mesmerismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.Crabtree, A. (1993). From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic sleep and the roots of psychological healing. New Haven:

Yale University Press.Davies, W. G. (1873). Conscious and “unconscious cerebration.” Journal of Mental Science, 18, 202–217.Despine, P. (1880). E´ tude scientifique sur le somnambulisme, sur les phe´nomenes qu’il presente et sur son action

therapeutique. Paris: F. Savy.Dessoir, M. (1889). Das Doppel-Ich. Berlin: n. p.Ellenberger, H. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: the history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New

York: Basic Books.Flournoy, T. (1900) Des Indes a` la planete Mars; Etude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie. Paris: Fe´lix

Alcan.Huxley, T. (1874). On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history. Fortnightly Review, 22, 555–580.Ireland, W. (1875). Can unconscious cerebration be proved? Journal of Mental Science, 21, 366–387.James, W. (1901). Frederic Myers’s service to psychology. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 17,

13–23.James, W. (1985). The varieties of religious experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.James, W. (1986). Essays in psychical research. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Janet, P. (1886). Les actes inconscients et le de´doublement de la personnalite´ pendant le somnambulisme provoque´.

Revue philosophique, 22, 577–592.Janet, P. (1887). L’anesthe´sie syste`matisee et la dissociation des phe´nomenes psychologiques. Revue philosophique,

23, 449–472.Janet, P. (1888). Les actes inconscients et la me´moire pendant le somnambulisme. Revue philosophique, 25, 238–

279.Janet, P. (1889). L’automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologie expe´rimentale sur les formes infe´rieures de

l’activite humaine. Paris: Fe´lix Alcan.Laycock, T. (1840). A treatise on the nervous diseases of woman; Comprising an inquiry into the nature, causes,

and treatment of spinal and hysterical disorders. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans.Laycock, T. (1845). On the reflex function of the brain. British and Foreign Medical Review, 19, 298–311.Laycock, T. (1876). Reflex, automatism, and unconscious cerebration. Journal of Mental Science, Pt. 1, 21, 477–

498 and Pt. 2, 22, 1–17.Luys, J. (1887). The brain and its functions. New York: D. Appleton. [originally Le cerveau et ses functions, Paris:

Germer Bailliere, 1876]Maudsley, H. (1868). The physiology and pathology of mind, second edition. London: Macmillan and Co.Maudsley, H. (1876). The physiology of mind. London: Macmillan and Co.Meheust, B. (1999). Somnambulisme et me´diumnite, 2 vols. Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthe´labo pour le Progre`s

de la Connaissance.Moore, R. L. (1977). In search of white crows: Spiritualism, parapsychology, and American culture. New York:

Oxford University Press.Myers, F. W. H. (1884). On a telepathic explanation of some so-called spiritualistic phenomena. Proceedings of the

Society for Psychical Research, 2, 217–237.Myers, F. W. H. (1885a). Automatic writing. Contemporary Review, 47, 233–249.Myers, F. W. H. (1885b). Automatic writing II. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 3, 1–63

70 ADAM CRABTREE


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textMyers, F. W. H. (1885c). Human personality. Fortnightly Review, 38, 637–655.

Myers, F. W. H. (1885d). Human personality in the light of hypnotic suggestion. Proceedings of the Society forPsychical Research, 4, 1–24.

Myers, F. W. H. (1887). Automatic writing. III. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 209–261Myers, F. W. H. (1888). French experiments in the strata of personality. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical

Research, 5, 374–397.Myers, F. W. H. (1889). Automatic writing. IV. The daemon of Socrates. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical

Research, 5, 522–547.Myers, F. W. H. (1892a). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 1: General characteristics and subliminal messages.

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 7, 298–327.Myers, F. W. H. (1892b). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 2: The mechanism of suggestion. Proceedings of

the Society for Psychical Research, 7, 327–355.Myers, F. W. H. (1892c). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 3: The mechanism of genius. Proceedings of the

Society for Psychical Research, 8, 333–361.Myers, F. W. H. (1892d). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 4: Hypermnesic dreams. Proceedings of the Society

for Psychical Research, 8, 362–404.Myers, F. W. H. (1892e). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 5: Sensory automatisms and induced hallucinations.

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 8, 436–535.Myers, F. W. H. (1893a). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 6: The mechanism of hysteria. Proceedings of the

Society for Psychical Research, 9, 3–25.Myers, F. W. H. (1893b). The subliminal consciousness. Chapter 7: Motor automatism. Proceedings of the Society

for Psychical Research, 9, 26–128.Myers, F. W. H. (1895a). The subliminal self. Chapter 8: The relation of supernormal phenomena to time;—

retrocognition. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 11, 334–407.Myers, F. W. H. (1895b). The subliminal self. Chapter 9: The relation of supernormal phenomena to time;—

precognition. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 11, 408–593.Myers, F. W. H. (1903). Human personality and its survival of bodily death. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green.Newton, P. (1995). Freud: from youthful dream to mid-life crisis. New York: The Guilford PressOppenheim, J. (1985). The other world: spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Prince, M. (1905). The dissociation of a personality. New York: Longmans, GreenPrince, M. (1914). The unconscious: The fundamentals of human personality, normal and abnormal. New York:

Macmillan.Romanes, G. (1882). Professor Huxley’s Essays. Nature, 25, 333–336.Sidis, B. (1898). The psychology of suggestion. New York: D. Appleton.Spalding, D. (1874). Automatisms of animals and men. Nature, 10, 520.Spalding, D. (1876). Maudsley’s “physiology of mind.” Nature, 14, 541–543.Taylor, E. (1983). William James on exceptional mental states: The 1896 Lowell Lectures. New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons.Taylor, E. (1996). William James on consciousness beyond the margin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

“automatism” and the emergence of dynamic psychiatry

Documents