Doctrinal scholars have focused on mental state/impairment "defences" such as insanity,
automatism, diminished responsibility, infanticide, and sometimes intoxication, without taking a step back to analyze the conceptual underpinnings of this category of "defences" as a whole.
According to Fried, a very "different stylistic regime is in force" (6) in Salammbo, inasmuch as every aspect of the text that Flaubert could control is "exclusively the product of conscious intention, of the faculty of will," resulting in a novel "devoid of the effects of habit and
automatism that are continually at work in Madame Bovary" (117).
However
automatism would be diffif cult to prove where the medical condition is pre-existing.
His landmark treatise on
automatisms, which includes references to psychology and parapsychology authors (e.
Automatism has come to denote in the criminal law 'conduct of which the doer is not conscious' and therefore not voluntary.
Rigidities and
automatism emerge--for example, to comic effect--not as the polar opposite of some putative 'pure life' but as instances of petrifaction within the processes generated by the difficult co-implication of subject and Other.
Within five pages, these poor women have become "beingless beings": "These two beings have been rendered even more beingless by their presence, courtesy of the book's
automatism, in a scene from which they are absent" (117-8).
If an addiction is an
automatism, then our job as treatment professionals is twofold: first, to educate alcoholics and addicts about the nature of their condition and what they have to do; second, to hold them responsible for maintaining abstinence.
The cosignatory of this manifesto stands out because of the attention he paid to automatic writing and
automatism in general.
Another
automatism of photography, carried over to film, was the capturing of time, of a single duration, in the image.
Hoffmann (1776-1822), the nineteenth-century French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), the late twentieth-century British writer Angela Carter (1940-1992), and the contemporary Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (1964-)--that prominently employ metaphors for mechanistic and biological
automatism as vehicles for reflecting upon the nature of the imagination.
