Automatic writing

Automatic writing consists of letting the hand write without conscious control, in a state of relaxation or trance. In nineteenth-century Spiritualism, so-called writing mediums saw it as a way of receiving messages from spirits. The Surrealists took it up as a literary method, with no Spiritualist aim, in The Magnetic Fields by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, published in 1920. Psychology interprets it as the expression of unconscious material. It is still practiced in mediumship and personal development.