MEANING
1. Action performed without ordinary conscious direction or deliberate control.
2. An artistic method that reduces deliberate conscious control to encourage spontaneous expression.
Use it for
A hand moving without felt intention; disrupted agency; repeated movement whose cause is uncertainContrast observable motion with the character's inability to direct or remember it.
Words that belong together
- motor automatism
- epileptic automatism
- acts of automatism
On the page
The clinician described the repeated lip movement as an automatism.
His journal used automatism for the drawing he could not remember making.
The witness reported an automatism, not a deliberate signal.
Nearby words
Related words
Word forms
- Base
- automatism
Usage notes
Primary category: horror. Clinical and legal meanings require context; an automatic movement is not necessarily a complex unconscious crime. Also a term in art for spontaneous production. Uncountable for automatic/involuntary action as a process; count noun for an individual such act. Plural automatisms.
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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