The production of written text without the writer's conscious predetermination of the content, if any, of the message produced. It is sometimes associated with mediums, who claim the messages come from spirits of the deceased. It was also practised by the early Surrealists André Breton and Philippe Soupault in Les Champs magnétiques (1919).
Automatic writing is the process, or product, of writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer.
Case stories
Sometime prior to 1900, William Stainton Moses, a respected priest and teacher, experimented with automatic writing. Newbrough was a New York dentist who wrote the book Oahspe through the process of automatic writing on the newly invented typewriter in 1882.
Elsa Barker in 1914 published a collection of letters that were written to her through automatic writing (so from her own hand) from Judge David Patterson Hatch (a real dead person).
Use in spiritual movements
Automatic writing is used in Spiritualism, Spiritism and the New Age movement as a form of channeling. One of the best-known automatic writers was Hélène Smith, an early 20th-century psychic who felt that her automatic writing was the attempt of Martians to communicate with Earth. Another well-known author, Neale Donald Walsch, wrote the book series Conversations with God, claiming to have used automatic writing to speak with God.
Use in therapy
Automatic writing is used as a tool in Freudian psychology and in related "self-knowledge" studies, where it is seen as a means of gaining insight into the mind of the automatic writer through their subconscious word choices.
Use in stimulating creativity
André Breton pioneered the use of automatic writing within the Surrealist movement and produced several important pieces while using the technique, most famously Soluble Fish. The ideas of Hélène Smith, the so-called "Muse of Automatic Writing", also influenced the Surrealist movement (in the Surrealist deck of cards, Smith is the "Genius of Knowledge").
Automatic writing became a part of the Surrealists' repertoire of games, and it soon developed into a number of other Surrealist games and tools that greatly influenced the movement, such as automatic drawing, automatic palimpsest, and a variety of marker-word games. (See Surrealist automatism.)
Free writing later gained popularity with writers and poets, both as a means of stimulating creative thought and as a technique for overcoming writer's block.
Criticism
Skeptics such as James Randi note that there is little evidence distinguishing automatic writing claimed to be of supernatural origins from a parlor game that is little more than sparks of creativity in the minds of the participants.
As there is no scientific evidence regarding the use of automatic writing in psychotherapy, its usage to release repressed memories is suspect as well.
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