Thoughts on Automatism

I was first led to the concept of Automatism through the surrealist movement. In my third year of university, I read André Breton’s text The Surrealist Manifesto and I remember thinking that this kind of writing felt so profound. There was an energetic quality to the way he approached the movement and he really cultivated a space of possibility in all aspects. I remember there was a raw yet human quality to each sentence and a certain ironic deviance towards language as a concept. Surrealism was created in 1924, and continued through World War II. Breton often described the Manifesto and more specifically the movement of surrealism as an assimilation of dreams with reality.

 He argued that this imagined space was productive and full of possibility; that the greatest quality we have as humans is our ability to imagine. The act of imagining took place in the subconscious register and the Manifesto was urging people to look beyond the realities that were presented to them. The definition of automatism identifies a certain unconscious  control over the body; a liminal space which is both undefined and intuitive. The term also suggests that psychoanalysis contributed the term free association to experiences  of automatic drawing or writing

While I’m not convinced that automatism has to do with the ego, or even the misrepresentation of ones “self”. I think it’s valuable to note that psychoanalysis and Automatism are rooted in theories of the mind. I also find it compelling that Breton who  was the pioneer of the Surrealist movement advocated for and placed great value on the imaginary realm.

 The imaginary in psychoanalysis is quite a complex and often times confusing concept that represents a traumatic encounter with the embodied self; This idea that we have an imaginary  concept of the self and this imagined state is severed when we come to understand ourselves as also having this body.  What fascinates me here is the element of the body and mind recognition. How is it that we can create without thinking about what we are creating? And where do we go in our minds? In every instance of automatism there seems to be one foot so to speak in the “real” to have the ability to produce written or image driven work.

 I can’t help but think for a brief moment about the psychoanalytic concept of the other. I want to briefly touch on  this not as a scholar of psychoanalysis by any means but more as a general point about the subject,  object relationship. When I talk about these two states of being, I move between seeing and being  seen.

When you create and you are completely conscious, you are conscious of the other. In this case, I think about the other existing as the receiver of my work and the preconceived idea I have within myself about what I think the other wants to see. It can become this very vicious cycle. I do believe the reason for Breton’s urgency in writing this Manifesto had a lot to do with the fact that this automatic and unconscious state is rare. It doesn’t happen when you consciously want it to happen and it’s often fleeting. The fact is that we don’t have control over it  and perhaps that’s why it’s such a magical experience when we can get there.