Ebook: Automatic Writing: An Approach to the Unconscious

Physician named Dr. Anita Mühl of the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, used automatic writing as a tool to treat hospitalised neurotics and psychotics. Mühl discovered that the material her patients wrote automatically – which consisted mainly of short poems, short stories, drawings and musical compositions – often contained elements that illuminated the problems they suffered from. She found, moreover, that discussing and exploring this material with her patients was of considerable therapeutic value.
Mühl’s patients wrote in a variety of different ways, some of which were very odd indeed; as she explains in her own words: “The subject may display a sudden facility for using the opposite hand or for using both together and may even produce two personalities at once, each making use of a different hand and each representing a different sex. He may write mirrorwise with either or both hands and he may write backwards correctly and speedily…”
One of Mühl’s patients, a woman “of such refinement and charming manner,” who suffered from various sexual difficulties, produced automatic writing that contained “the most obscene and filthy language.” Analysis of this material revealed that the patient had been repeatedly sexually assaulted as a child, and that this was the cause of her problems. Although she had only the vaguest recollections of these humiliating and distressing incidents, her unconscious mind had recorded it all in great detail.