automatism

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automatism

Wikipedia

From automat(on) + -ism.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ɔːˈtɒmətɪzəm/

automatism (countable and uncountable, plural automatisms)

1. (uncountable) Automatic or involuntary action.
2. (uncountable) The power of initiating vital processes from within the cell, organ, or organism, independent of external stimulus.
3. (uncountable) The doctrine that animals are automata, operating according to mechanical laws.
4. (uncountable, art) A surrealist painting technique whereby one attempts to move the brush, pen etc. without conscious control over it.
   • 2013, Alice Fabre, Metal Language:

     Overcoming the gravity of representation and the figurative, automatism and acquired reflexes, she mixes brute force and translucid emotions to paint an ontological, disquieting, enigmatic human figure free from artifice, universal in its expression.

5. (countable, psychology) An action performed subconsciously, without any apparent direction from the mind; a thought which appears spontaneously in one's consciousness.

   Synonym: telergy

   • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature , New York, N.Y.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co. , →OCLC, page 234:

     [G]eneralising this phenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of automatism, sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to 'uprushes' into the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the mind. The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion, so-called.

• automaticism
• surautomatism

Borrowed from French automatisme.

automatism n (uncountable)

1. automatism