Modern Hystory
Modern History
Perhaps it is fitting since hypnosis suffered from the superstitions of Christianity during the medieval period that a priest would be the one to renew interest in the subject in modern times. Father Gassner believed that all illnesses were ultimately manifestations of evil and thus had their origins in Satan. Moreover, these manifestations were actual demons inhabiting the unfortunate host. Gassner was able to perform exorcisms with the blessings of the Church because he gave all credit to God’s power working through him. Gassner was exceptional from other priests of his day not so much for his beliefs but for his willingness to allow outside observers witness his cures. Physicians from all over would sit in his auditorium like facilities where he would dress up in black cape, touch the patient with a ‘gold’ crucifix and commanded him to ‘die’. The patient would then collapse and lose his pulse and heart rate, as attested to by several physicians who were on hand. Then more sacred words were pronounced and the patient would be ‘reborn’ free of the evil that afflicted him. Franz Mesmer would be in audience on several of Father Gassner’s performances throughout the 1770’s.
Franz Anton Mesmer was born in 1734 the son of a game warden near Lake Constance in Austria. He studied medicine and law and was fascinated with the effect of heavenly bodies on humans. Mesmer didn’t believe Gassner’s explanation neither for the ailment nor the cure but believed that the cures were authentic. Finally, Mesmer was eventually convinced that it was the metal crucifix that effected the cures. He published Schreiben Uber die Magnetiker in 1775 and made an immediate stir in the medical community even though he was forced to leave Vienna in 1777 because a jealous court doctor, Von Stoerck, convinced the emperor that he was a fraud (even though Mesmer cured the blindness of Martha Theresa Paradis, a young pianist, who Von Stoerck failed to cure). Still, he made his way to Paris where he published his most famous work, Mémoire Sur La Découverte Du Magnétisme Animal, and set up a clinic in Place Vendome only two years later. But his troubles would return. In 1784 a committee with such dignitaries as Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Guillotin, after whom the infamous Guillotine was named, was set up to investigate his methods and declared him a fraud (although Franklin wrote a minority decision declaring Mesmer’s ideas interesting and worth pursuing). A witness to the proceedings, D’Elson, concluded that what was necessary was “passive obedience” on the part of the patient and patience on the part of the practitioner. Moreover, that a natural setting was best to induce this trance state. Nonetheless, Mesmer was much discredited after that and he left France to travel England, Germany, and Italy before finally settling down in Switzerland where he died in 1815. Mesmer’s theory of Animal Magnitism, that diseases are a result of blockages in the flow of magnetic forces in the body, was completely disregarded soon after but his technique of inducing trances, the ‘mesmeric pass’ continued to enjoy adherents. His student and collaborator, the Marquis de Puysegur, called this trance state ‘artificial somnambulism’ and continue to cultivate the hypnotic aspects of mesmerism while discarding the magnetism behind the theory.
James Braid, an English physician, was introduced into mesmerism by a French practitioner, La Fontaine, in 1841. Braid is known for renaming mesmerism, hypnotism a year later, after the Greek word for sleep. Towards the end of his career he realized that hypnotic trance states are very different from sleep but by then the word had too much currency and he was unable to find a more accurate name. Additionally Braid realized that hypnosis was only a tool and not a panacea for all illnesses. It would take a fellow Edenburgh graduate of impeccable scientific credentials in the person of John Elliotson, who, in addition to being full professor at the University College Hospital in London and president of the Royal Medical and Surgical Society, introduced the stethoscope into use, to establish serious study of hypnosis by the scientific community, founding the first journal dedicated to the subject, Zoist. This, however, did not prevent his dismissal from University College Hospital in 1846 because of his championing the cause of hypnosis.
The next to pick up the standard was Dr. James Esdaile, another British physician based in India who performed more than 300 operations using only hypnosis for anesthesia. Although he died at the precocious age of 50 of tuberculosis, after writing his seminal Medicine and Surgery, the British Medical Association endorsed Braid’s and Esdaile’s approaches in 1891.
In France things were slightly different. After the resounding rejection of Mesmer’s Animal Magnitism theories, all ideas associated with him were equally deemed taboo and in 1840 the French Medical Academy banned public discussion of hypnotism until the twentieth century. Nevertheless some extraordinary physicians persevered. One such doctor was Ambroise-Auguste Liebeault.
Liebeault has been called by many the ‘Father of Modern Hypnosis’ because of his amazing contributions to the practice of hypnosis. One of his most famous observations concerning the art is that ‘all the phenomena of hypnotism are subjective in origin.’ A humble physician he began practicing hypnosis even before graduating medical school in 1850. He would treat poor patients for free using hypnosis exclusively. The vast number of cures over the many years of his practice began to attract attention outside the small village where he practiced. Although not strongly inclined towards research, he did publish a book early in his career on the subject of hypnosis which only sold a copy, it has been said, but the purchaser would make a huge impact on the word of medicine. Benheim, a famous doctor who had heard of his successes in the countryside, bought the book with the intention of exposing him as a fraud. Intrigued by the book he asked Liebeault to work with a patient suffering from sciatica that Benheim had treated for six months to no avail. When Liebeault cured the patient shortly after treatment began, Benheim studied under Liebeault and became his pupil and closest friend. Together they published another book that quickly won universal acclaim and founded what has been called the “Nancy School”. Liebeault realized that deep trances were unnecessary for the majority of illnesses and was known to hypnotize his patients with a wave of the hand and the words, ‘sleep my little kitten’.
Emile Coué is less known but is responsible for some very interesting discoveries. He was the first to point out the power of autosuggestion and affirmation as a form of treatment. He would say, ‘Day by day in every way I am getting better and better.’ In this way, he explored the power that we all have to heal ourselves which anticipated the self-help and new age movements by half a century. Humble by nature, he held that the role of the hypnotherapist was to facilitate in the patient’s self-healing. But perhaps most important to the study of hypnosis is his notion that the imagination is greater than will. If a person is asked to walk a straight line across a room, he will generally have no difficulty in doing so, but if he is told that he is walking a tight rope with his eyes closed, he will teeter and perhaps even fall. In this way, he anticipated the placebo effect.
Concentrating on disorders of the nervous system, he was able to define and study major diseases, some of which bear his name: peroneal neuropathy (Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease), neuropathic joints (Charcot joints) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also called Charcot’s disease). Charcot was probably the most famous neurologist of his day, treating celebrities in his private practice and while traveling abroad. The first university chair for the study of neurological diseases in France was created for him in 1882; his students included Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette and Pierre Marie. Sigmund Freud counts among his many illustrious students.
It was late in his career that he became enamored with hypnosis as a treatment for hysterics. For reasons that are inexplicable, Charcot’s normally scrupulous scientific trails and procedures characterized by his clinical work at Salpêtrière was not applied and some of his conclusions proved spacious and borderline irresponsible. Dr. Joseph Francois Felix Babinski, student of Charcot, denounced many of Charcot’s hypnotic cures and inadvertently further discredited the use of hypnosis in France.
Later, the Austrian physiologist, Josef Breuer while treating Anna O., a hysterical patient who suffered many symptoms discovered that hypnosis could be used to access forgotten painful memories. In a famous instance, Anna O. could not drink water because she believed herself physically incapable of it, living on fruit to survive. Breuer hypnotized her and regressed her to remembering that a governess had allowed a dog to drink from her glass. She awoke from the trance and immediately started to drink water. He, then, treated all her symptoms from a similar perspective until they were cured. It was his innovation to use hypnosis to address the causes of the symptoms rather than treating the symptoms themselves.
Undoubtedly, Breuer’s greatest student and collaborator is Sigmund Freud. Born in Freiberg, Moravia, he moved with his family to Vienna as a young boy where he would live until he fled to England in 1938 to escape Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.
His interest in hypnosis developed from his studies of hysterics. He co-authored Studien Uber Hysterie with Breuer in 1895 based mostly on Breuer’s work. Freud, who was not very good at hypnosis, favored free association and later abandoned hypnosis all together. It was the enormous success of Freud’s psychoanalytic approach based on free association and dream interpretation that led so many to mistakenly view hypnosis as a tool for simple suggestion.
