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• n  any reaction that occurs automatically without conscious thought or reflection (especially the undirected behavior seen in psychomotor epilepsy)

• In 1923 Ernst took time off from automatism to paint his big surprising "lost mural," At The First Clear Word, on two adjoining bedroom walls of Surrealist poet Paul Eluard's .
• This emphasizes that perfect automatism, that absolute lack of human consciousness or aim, which our society is rapidly achieving.
• In many cases the numb automatism disappeared.

News & Articles

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• Ye Old Criticism of Jazz
  SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.
  Sept. 29, 2013 - All About Jazz

Quotes

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• Ludwig von Mises in The People's Voice (blog)
  As Mises wrote, "The truth is that the choice is not between a dead mechanism and a rigid automatism on the one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: whose planning? Should each...
• Micheline Calmy-Rey in Swissinfo
  All forms of automatism are excluded at the risk of losing the flexibility offered by the bilateral path,said Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey at a media conference on Thursday.
• André Breton in Scotsman
  Breton, who died in 1966 at the age of 70 and is considered to be surrealism's founding father, described the movement which sprang up after the First World War as "psychic automatism in its pure state".