Automatic writing is unusual among the claims in this atlas because mainstream psychology reached a settled, non-paranormal explanation for it earlier than for almost any other psi-adjacent phenomenon, and did so through researchers who took the claim seriously rather than dismissing it. French psychologist Pierre Janet, studying dissociation and hysteria in the 1880s, and SPR co-founder Frederic W. H. Myers, developing his theory of the "subliminal self" through the 1880s and 1890s, independently demonstrated that the human mind is capable of sustained, organised, and sometimes surprisingly sophisticated mental activity, including composing coherent written text, entirely outside conscious awareness, and that this dissociated activity can feel, to the person producing it, as though it originates from an external source precisely because it is not accompanied by the normal subjective sense of deliberate authorship. This account explains automatic writing's key features without requiring any spirit source: its frequent thematic and stylistic continuity with material the writer had previously read or experienced, even when consciously forgotten, its variable literary quality tracking the writer's own underlying ability, and its dependence on a relaxed, dissociated state rather than genuine trance or unconsciousness. Because this explanation was established by psychologists working alongside, not against, the early SPR, automatic writing occupies a distinctive place in this atlas: a claim whose extraordinary version, spirit authorship, has no supporting evidence, but whose ordinary underlying mechanism, dissociated subconscious composition, is well established mainstream psychology.