The Seba library treats Automaton in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Fromm, Erich, McGilchrist, Iain, Auerbach, Erich).
in the last chapter of this book we shall continue the discussion of the automaton with regard to the cultural scene in our own democracy… the authoritarian character and the automaton
Fromm establishes the automaton as one of his two primary psychological types — alongside the authoritarian character — whose analysis is essential to understanding both Nazism and modern democratic culture.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
Intense activity is often mistaken for evidence of self-determined action, although we know that it may well be no more spontaneous than the behavior of an actor or a person hypnotized.
Fromm argues that the automaton’s apparent vigour and self-direction are illusory, masking an inner condition in which goals, desires, and thoughts have been assimilated from the social order rather than genuinely chosen.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE • • 157 1. AUTHORITARIANISM • • • • • ]63 2. DESTRUCTIVENESS 3. AUTOMATION CONFORMITY
The table of contents situates automation conformity — the condition of the automaton — as a distinct mechanism of escape within Fromm’s tripartite schema, structurally equivalent to authoritarianism and destructiveness.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
Men are ‘automated corpses’ – my mo… ‘I walk like a machine’, says one patient; ‘I’m a psycho-machine’, says another.
McGilchrist draws on psychiatric phenomenology to show that depersonalisation produces first-person experiences of self-as-automaton and perception of others as inert machines, connecting this to a loss of embodied instinctual vitality.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Men are ‘automated corpses’ – my mo… ‘I walk like a machine’, says one patient; ‘I’m a psycho-machine’, says another.
Duplicate passage confirming McGilchrist’s clinical-phenomenological account of automaton-experience as a symptom of disorganised, depersonalised consciousness divorced from the élan vital.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
on the whole he is no automaton producing comic effects. He even develops, and grows kinder and wiser while his madness persists.
Auerbach uses the automaton as a negative criterion for literary character, arguing that Don Quijote’s developmental complexity and dignity place him categorically beyond the mechanical comic type.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Bourgine and Stewart (2004) expand the tesselation-automaton model from two to three dimensions and give a mathematical treatment of the model as a random dynamical system.
Thompson applies the computational concept of a tesselation automaton to model autopoietic membrane formation, using the term in its strictly mathematical-biological sense rather than in a depth-psychological register.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside
Bourgnine, P.: on 3D tesselation automatons, 110–112; on autopoiesis and cognition, 125–126; in light of Rosen, 144
An index reference confirming Thompson’s sustained engagement with three-dimensional tesselation-automaton models as technical tools within the theory of autopoiesis, wholly distinct from the psychological usage.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside