Abstract
The Parisian neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot ignored the links of trance to mesmerism and sanitised hypnotism or ‘Braidism’ for the medical profession in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, he focused mainly on its utility in the diagnosis of hysteria. It was Hippolyte Bernheim and Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in Nancy who demonstrated its therapeutic potential, defining hypnotism as a way of enhancing a patient’s suggestibility to positive suggestions. Eventually, the Nancy school won the debate between those interested in the physiological state of hypnosis and those in the hypnotic relationship by developing the psychological concept of suggestion. The relationship aspect was critical to the success of hypnotism. The new paradigm gave a new language and concept to the nonphysical therapeutic influence of the doctor on the patient. It also led to the concept of ‘herd instinct’ in understanding crowd dynamics and auto-suggestion as a form of self-development. It was an inflection point for the public and medical legitimacy of trance.
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Notes
- 1.
William Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 3rd ed (London: Henry S. King, 1875).
- 2.
‘Suggestion’. Oxford English Dictionary. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/suggestion [accessed 8 October 2018].
- 3.
‘Suggestion’. https://www.etymonline.com/word/suggestion [accessed 26 March 2018]. Geoffrey Chaucer helped to establish Middle English vernacular with The Canterbury Tales written in the fourteenth Century. In stanza 331 of The Parson’s Tale he writes ‘Deedly synne hath first suggestion of the feend.’ John Milton was a seventeenth century poet whose Paradise Lost influenced centuries of British writers: ‘The first sort by thir own suggestion fell, Self-tempted, self-deprav'd’, Book 3, line 129.
- 4.
James Braid, Neurypnology or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep (London: J. Churchill, 1843); Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths (London: Pan, 2002) (p. 214); George Kingsbury, The Practice of Hypnotic Suggestion, Being and Elementary Handbook for the Use of the Medical Profession (Bristol: John Wright, 1891) (p. 12).
- 5.
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, Du Sommeil et des Etats Analogues, Considérés surtout du Point de Vue de l'Action du Moral sur le Physique (Paris: Victor Maisson, 1866).
- 6.
Waterfield, Hidden Depths (p. 214).
- 7.
Hippolyte Bernheim, De la suggestion dans l'état hypnotique et dans l'état de veille, 1st ed (Paris: Doin, 1884).
- 8.
Hippolyte Bernheim, De la Suggestion et de ses applications a la therapeutique, (Paris: Doin, 1886).
- 9.
Hippolyte Bernheim, Suggestive Therapeutics (London: G.P. Putnam, 1888) (p. 117).
- 10.
Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) (p. 327).
- 11.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Raciocinative and Inductive, 8th ed., Book 6: The Logic of the Moral Sciences (London: Longman and Green, 1925) (p. 643).
- 12.
Gauld, Hypnotism (p. 311).
- 13.
George Robertson, ‘Hypnotism at Paris and Nancy: Notes of a Visit’, Journal of Mental Sciences, 38 (1892) (pp. 494–531).
- 14.
Charles Lloyd Tuckey, ‘Faith-Healing’, Nineteenth Century, 21 (1888) (pp. 839–50) p. 842.
- 15.
Anon, ‘The Gouffé Murder’, Times (17 December 1890) (p. 5).
- 16.
Robert van Plas, ‘Hysteria, Hypnosis, and Moral Sense in French 19th-century Forensic Psychiatry. The Eyraud-Bompard Case’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 21 (1998) (pp. 397–407); Steven Levingston, Little Demon in the City of Light (New York: Doubleday, 2014); Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler, The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (Lincoln, NE: Bison, 2010).
- 17.
Ruth Harris, ‘Murder Under Hypnosis in the Case of Gabrielle Bompard: Psychiatry in the Courtroom in Belle Époque Paris’, Ch.10 in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry II, ed. by William Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shephard (London: Tavistock, 1987) (pp. 197–241).
- 18.
These are a fraction of the publications: Jean-Martin Charcot, ‘Hypnotism and Crime’, Forum of New York, 9 (1890) (pp. 159–68); A. Taylor Innes, ‘Hypnotism in Relation to Crime and the Medical Faculty’, Contemporary Review, 58 (1890) (pp. 555–66); George Kingsbury, ‘Hypnotism, Crime and Doctors’, Nineteenth Century, 29 (1891) (pp. 145–53).
- 19.
James Maclaren Cobban, Master of his Fate (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1890). In this topical novel, Cobban introduces a charming and urbane vampire of spiritual energy whose plans are thwarted by a British physician who trained under ‘Charbon’ [sic].
- 20.
Carlos Alvarado, ‘Nineteenth-Century Suggestion and Magnetism: Hypnosis at the International Congress of Physiological Psychology (1889)’, Contemporary Hypnosis, 27 (2010) (pp. 48–60).
- 21.
Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, Animal Magnetism (New York: Appleton, 1888) (pp. 352–5).
- 22.
George Kingsbury, Hypnotic Practice; Robert Felkin, Hypnotism or Psycho-Therapeutics (Edinburgh: Y. J. Pentland, 1890).
- 23.
John Milne Bramwell, Suggestion, Its Place in Medicine and Scientific Research (London: Grant Richards, 1903) (p. 27).
- 24.
William Crookes, ‘Address of the President Before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bristol, 1898.’ Science, 8, 200 (1898) (pp. 561–75).
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Bates, G.D.L. (2023). The Power of Suggestion. In: The Uncanny Rise of Medical Hypnotism, 1888–1914. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42725-1_4
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