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Composing the Crisis: From Mesmer's Harmonica to Charcot's Tam-tam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2020

Peter Pesic*
Affiliation:
St. John's College, Santa Fe Email: ppesic@sjc.edu

Abstract

Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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Footnotes

I thank Mark Pottinger and Rebecca Wolf for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank Viktoria Tkaczyk and Rebecca Wolf for inviting me to present an early form of this material at their September 2016 workshop on ‘Sound Objects in Transition: Knowledge, Science, Heritage’ at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, where I profited from many useful comments by the participants. I am grateful for the support of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation during the early stages of this project.

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100 R[odolphe] Radau, Die Lehre vom Schall: gemeinfassliche Darstellung der Akustik (Munich: R.A. Oldenbourg, 1869), 273, as noted by Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam, 142.

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102 Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 150, considers Mesmeric crisis to be ‘a variety of what we call today the cathartic therapy’.

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