Automatism occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychology corpus, serving as both a clinical descriptor and a theoretical fulcrum around which questions of consciousness, volition, and the unconscious revolve. The term receives its most systematic theoretical articulation from William James, who credits F. W. H. Myers with coining it to designate the entire sphere of ‘uprushes’ from subliminal strata of mind into ordinary consciousness — encompassing motor, sensory, emotional, and intellectual manifestations. Janet approaches automatism clinically through ambulatory automatism and hysterical fugue, situating it within the psychic dissociation endemic to hysteria. Bleuler, working from the schizophrenia field, develops a graduated taxonomy of automatisms in dementia praecox, showing how split-off complexes produce behaviors ranging from compulsive thought to command-automatism, with the patient variably aware of their alien quality. Jung appropriates the concept to anchor his broader argument that unconscious contents — whether in double personality, automatisme ambulatoire, or complex-driven intrusions — continue operating with full psychic elaboration, a claim he marshals against purely physiological reductions of the unconscious. Damasio enters this constellation through epileptic automatism, using it to probe the dissociation of core consciousness from purposive behavior. Across all these figures, the term forces a single irreducible question: where does agency end and autonomous psychic process begin?