History of hypnosis
The development of concepts, beliefs and practices related to hypnosis and hypnotherapy have been documented since prehistoric to modern times.
Although often viewed as one continuous history, the term hypnosis was coined in the 1880s in France, some twenty years after the death of James Braid, who had adopted the term hypnotism —which specifically applied to the state of the subject, rather than techniques applied by the operator to contrast his own, unique, subject-centred, approach with those of the operator-centred mesmerists/animal magnetists who preceded him.
Historical definitions
De Cuvillers coined the terms "hypnotism" and "hypnosis" as an abbreviation for "neuro-hypnotism", or nervous sleep. Braid popularised the terms and gave the earliest definition of hypnosis. He contrasted the hypnotic state with normal sleep, and defined it as "a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye, on one object, not of an exciting nature."Braid elaborated upon this brief definition in a later work, Hypnotic Therapeutics:
Therefore, Braid defined hypnotism as a state of mental concentration that often leads to a form of progressive relaxation. Later, in his The Physiology of Fascination, Braid conceded that his original terminology was misleading and argued that the term "hypnotism" or "nervous sleep" should be reserved for the minority of subjects who exhibit amnesia, substituting the term "monoideism", meaning concentration upon a single idea, as a description for the more alert state experienced by the others.
Pre-19th century
Predecessors to Mesmer
, a Persian psychologist and physician, was the earliest to make a distinction between sleep and hypnosis. In The Book of Healing, which he published in 1027, he referred to hypnosis in Arabic as al-Wahm al-Amil, stating that one could create conditions in another person so that he/she accepts the reality of hypnosis.In Western cultures, hypnotism evolved out of a sometimes skeptical reaction to the much earlier work of magnetists and Mesmerists. Paracelsus, a Swiss, was the first physician to use magnets in his work. Many people claimed to have been healed after he had passed magnets over their bodies. An Irishman by the name of Valentine Greatrakes was known as "the Great Irish Stroker" for his ability to heal people by laying his hands on them and passing magnets over their bodies. Johann Joseph Gassner, a Catholic priest of the time, believed that disease was caused by evil spirits and could be exorcised by incantations and prayer. Around 1771, a Viennese Jesuit named Maximilian Hell was using magnets to heal by applying steel plates to the naked body. One of Father Hell's students was a young medical doctor from Vienna named Franz Anton Mesmer.
Franz Anton Mesmer
Western scientists first became involved in hypnosis around 1770, when Franz Mesmer, a physician from Austria, started investigating an effect he called "animal magnetism" or "mesmerism".The use of the English term animal magnetism to translate Mesmer's magnétisme animal can be misleading and needs to be seen in this context:
- Mesmer chose his term to clearly distinguish his variant of magnetic force from those referred to at the time as mineral magnetism, cosmic magnetism and planetary magnetism.
- Mesmer felt that this particular force/power only resided in the bodies of animals, including humans.
After moving to Paris and becoming popular with the French aristocracy for his magnetic cures, the medical community challenged him. The French king put together a Board of Inquiry that included chemist Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin, and a medical doctor who was an expert in pain control named Joseph Ignace Guillotin. Mesmer refused to cooperate with the investigation and this fell to his disciple Dr d'Eslon. Franklin constructed an experiment in which a blindfolded patient was shown to respond as much to a non-prepared tree as to one that had been "magnetised" by d'Eslon. This is considered perhaps the first placebo-controlled trial of a therapy ever conducted. The commission later declared that Mesmerism worked by the action of the imagination.
Although Mesmerism remained popular and "magnetic therapies" are still advertised as a form of "alternative medicine" even today, Mesmer himself retired to Switzerland in obscurity, where he died in 1815. A student of Mesmer, Marquis de Puységur, first described and coined the term for "somnambulism". Followers of Puységur called themselves "Experimentalists" and believed in the Paracelsus-Mesmer fluidism theory.
Abbé Faria
Father of Modern Hypnotism. Many of the original mesmerists were signatories to the first declarations that proclaimed the French revolution in 1789. Far from surprising, this could perhaps be expected, in that mesmerism opened up the prospect that the social order was in some sense suggested and could be overturned. Magnetism was neglected or forgotten during the Revolution and the Empire.An Indo-Portuguese priest, Abbé Faria, revived public attention to animal magnetism. In the early 19th century, Abbé Faria introduced oriental hypnosis to Paris. Faria came from India and gave exhibitions in 1814 and 1815 without manipulations or the use of Mesmer's .
Unlike Mesmer, Faria claimed that hypnosis 'generated from within the mind' by the power of expectancy and cooperation of the patient. Faria's approach was significantly extended by the clinical and theoretical work of Hippolyte Bernheim and Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault of the Nancy School. Faria's theoretical position, and the subsequent experiences of those in the Nancy School, made significant contributions to the later autosuggestion techniques of Émile Coué and the autogenic training techniques of Johannes Heinrich Schultz.
19th century hypnotism
The 19th century saw increasing interest from the medical establishment in applications of hypnosis. Récamier, in 1821, prior to the development of hypnotism, was the first physician known to have used something resembling hypnoanesthesia and operated on patients under mesmeric coma. In the 1840s and 1850s, Carl Reichenbach began experiments to find any scientific validity to "mesmeric" energy, which he called Odic force after the Norse god Odin. Although his conclusions were quickly rejected in the scientific community, they did undermine Mesmer's claims of mind control. In 1846, James Braid published an influential article, The Power of the Mind over the Body, attacking Reichenbach's views as pseudoscientific. James Esdaile reported on 345 major operations performed using mesmeric sleep as the sole anesthetic in British India. The development of chemical anesthetics soon saw the replacement of hypnotism in this role. John Elliotson, an English surgeon, in 1834 reported numerous painless surgical operations that had been performed using mesmerism.James Braid
Hypnotism and monoideism
The Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the term "hypnotism" in his unpublished Practical Essay on the Curative Agency of Neuro-Hypnotism as an abbreviation for "neuro-hypnotism", meaning "sleep of the nerves". Braid fiercely opposed the views of the Mesmerists, especially the claim that their effects were due to an invisible force called "animal magnetism", and the claim that their subjects developed paranormal powers such as telepathy. Instead, Braid adopted a skeptical position, influenced by the philosophical school of Scottish Common Sense Realism, attempting to explain the Mesmeric phenomena on the basis of well-established laws of psychology and physiology. Hence, Braid is regarded by many as the first true "hypnotist" as opposed to the Mesmerists and other magnetists who preceded him.Braid ascribed the "mesmeric trance" to a physiological process resulting from prolonged attention to a bright moving object or similar object of fixation. He postulated that "protracted ocular fixation" fatigued certain parts of the brain and caused a trance – a "nervous sleep" or "neuro-hypnosis".
Later Braid simplified the name to "hypnotism". Finally, realizing that "hypnotism" was not a kind of sleep, he sought to change the name to "monoideism", based on a view centred on the notion of a single, dominant idea; but the term "hypnotism" and its later, misleading Nancy-centred derivative "hypnosis", have persisted.
Braid is credited with writing the first ever book on hypnotism, Neurypnology. After Braid's death in 1860, interest in hypnotism temporarily waned, and gradually shifted from Britain to France, where research began to grow, reaching its peak around the 1880s with the work of Hippolyte Bernheim and Jean-Martin Charcot.
Braid on Yoga
According to his writings, Braid began to hear reports concerning the practices of various meditation techniques immediately after the publication of his major book on hypnotism, Neurypnology. Braid first discusses hypnotism's historical precursors in a series of articles entitled Magic, Mesmerism, Hypnotism, etc., Historically & Physiologically Considered. He draws analogies between his own practice of hypnotism and various forms of Hindu yoga meditation and other ancient spiritual practices. Braid's interest in meditation really developed when he was introduced to the Dabistān-i Mazāhib, the "School of Religions", an ancient Persian text describing a wide variety of Oriental religious practices:Although he disputed the religious interpretation given to these phenomena throughout this article and elsewhere in his writings, Braid seized upon these accounts of Oriental meditation as proof that the effects of hypnotism could be produced in solitude, without the presence of a magnetiser, and therefore saw this as evidence that the real precursor of hypnotism was the ancient practices of meditation rather than in the more recent theory and practice of Mesmerism. As he later wrote,