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A Brief History of Hypnosis

Hypnosis has been around since the dawn of recorded time, and at least to the time of the ancient Babylonians, Greeks and Egyptians. It was know to Hippocrates. Indeed, hypnosis is named after the Greek word for sleep, hypnos. It has, however, been called different names, by different cultures, different religions, and different individuals. The use of chants, drumming, and monotonous dancing rituals to change or alter consciousness fall under the definition of hypnosis. Such methods have been used successfully by the Druids, Vikings, Indian Yogis, Dervishes, Hindu priests, and holy men of all religions and denominations for centuries. In 2600 BC, the father of Chinese medicine, Wong Tai, wrote about techniques that involved incantations and passes of the hands. Accounts of what we would now call Hypnosis can also be found in the Bible, the Talmud, and The Hindu Vedas written about 1500 BC.

Below are described some of the main individuals who have been involved in the history of hypnosis, helping to taking it to its rightful place as the important and powerful therapeutic tool that it is today.

Paracelsus (1493-1541) was interested in astrology and developed the theory that the stars influenced the individual through invisible magnetic emanations and that all magnets were able to influence the individual.

Van Helmont (1577-1644) was influenced by Paracelsus: the idea of magnetic influence was expounded upon and lead to the concept of animal magnetism, magnetic emanations from the human body that could influence others. The idea of magnetic influence lead to the concept of magnetic healing through the application of magnets to the patient and also to the application of animal magnetism by laying on of hands. Over the ensuing 100 or so years there were a great number of magnetic healers practising both techniques, including Greatrakes (1629-1683) and Father Maximilian Hell (1720-1792) a Viennese Jesuit.

Friedrich Mesmer (1734-1815) was perhaps one of the most notorious of early hypnotists. He was influenced by the ideas of Paracelsus of magnetic influence of the stars and also of Van Helmont's animal magnetism. He became interested in the idea of magnetic healing after experimenting with some healing magnets given to him by Father Hell. He came to believe that illness was caused by an imbalance in magnetic fluid in the body and that by removing this imbalance through magnetic manipulation the individual could be cured. Originally he used actual magnets but later discovered that they were not necessary for producing the effects, which lead him to believe that it must be animal magnetism that was at work.

Originally practising in Vienna, he came to Paris at the invitation of the king where he became very popular and resorted to group magnetising sessions in order to cater for the large numbers who were keen to be treated by him. His magnetising sessions were elaborate involving a large oak vat or baquet in which the patients would sit. At the centre of this vat were placed chemicals and magnets. The room was lined with mirrors and background music was played. The patients held hands in a circle and Mesmer himself, wearing flamboyant lilac robes and carrying a wand would walk among them, passing magnets or his hands over them in order to heal them. Often this passing over of hands would be quite intimate and sexual in nature (the majority of his patients being women). The typical response of the patients to the treatment would be a convulsive reaction often accompanied by laughing, crying or unconsciousness which was termed a crisis. Today we would recognise it as a form of hypnosis albeit one where the patient was not as relaxed as they typically are today.

Mesmer sought approval from the scientific community for his work and submitted work to various journals. However he was mostly ignored. Nevertheless his methods attracted great interest in some quarters and it is reputed that the French government offered him large sums of money if he would disclose his secret. Since he could not explain it himself, he was of course obliged to refuse.

In 1784 a committee of eminent scientists of the day was formed in order to investigate Mesmer's methods. They discovered that the magnets only worked on the patients if they knew that they were being magnetised and therefore correctly concluded that that the magnets were irrelevant and that it was more the mental suggestion of healing to the patient that was important. However, having made this important conclusion they chose to dismiss the whole approach as bogus, ignoring all the successful healing that had taken place in the patients, albeit due to the power of hypnotic suggestion rather than magnetisation. They also declared the method to be dangerous because of the nature of the crisis that was induced and denounce the sexual overtones of the healing as immoral. After this scientific denouncing Mesmer fell into disrepute and had to leave Paris. He died penniless in Switzerland in 1815.

A consequence of this dismissal of Mesmer's work was that it discouraged scientists from studying magnetic or hypnotic healing and also made it hard for it to be used as part of orthodox medicine.

Marquis Armand de Puysegur (1751-1825), who had been a pupil of Mesmer's, discovered that the crisis state that was typically induced by his teacher was not in fact necessary and that if relaxation and calmness were suggested by the inducer then the patient developed a calm and relaxed trance state, which he referred to as artificial somnambulism or "sleeping trance" in which patients could talk and be given instructions.

John Elliotson (1791-1868), was an English surgeon who was somewhat of a radical and keen to take on new medical ideas. He started using mesmerism to perform painless surgery though this resulted in a confrontation with the medical establishment which denounced him as a fraud and he was forced to leave his hospital post. He formed Zoist a journal dedicated to hypnosis in 1784.

James Esdaile (1808-1859) was a Scottish surgeon posted in India who read of Elliotson's work and started to use it himself to great success. He performed many operation using only hypnosis as anaesthetic. He also found that because the patient was relaxed and calm during the operation instead of having to be held down, that there was less 'surgical shock'. As a result of this he achieved a dramatically improved success rate with his operations. He reported his findings to the medical journals which continued to dismiss them out of hand. This was partly due to the discovery and use of various chemical anaesthetics at around this time such as nitrous oxide, ether and chloroform which were much more acceptable to the medical establishment as their workings could be easily understood and they were universally successful.

James Braid (1795-1860) was an important figure in the history of hypnosis. Unlike Elliotson, he was a conservative member of the medical establishment. He was originally introduced to hypnosis by a Swiss magnetiser and, whilst initially being sceptical, was convinced by the analgesia and the eye catalepsy that there was a genuine phenomenon at work and he decided to investigate it further. He initially thought that the phenomenon was related to sleep and coined the phrase neurohypnology (nervous sleep) which became shortened to hypnosis. He thought that the state was induced by fatigue in the eye muscles brought on by prolonged fixation and developed the method of induction based on this approach that is named Braidism. Whilst it is now understood that eye muscle fatigue alone does not produce a hypnotic state, the Braid induction technique is still commonly used.

He gradually came to realise that the hypnotic state was not actually related to sleep and developed the view that it depends on the narrowing of the patients field of view down to a single idea. He therefore tried to rename the state as monoideism but by this time the term hypnosis was too well established.

Braid came to realise that the patient was influenced in the hypnotic state not by any physiological effects but by suggestions from the hypnotist. This and his conservative nature and approach, together with the 're-branding' of mesmerism as neurohypnosis, made it much more acceptable to the medical establishment though there was still some opposition to his work.

A. Liébeault (1823-1904) was a country doctor who practised in France using hypnosis successfully for over 20 years. He published his results in a book and persuaded Hippolyte Bernheim (1837-1919), a prominent neurologist of the genuine usefulness of hypnosis when he successfully treated a case of sciatica that Bernheim had been unable to treat in 6 years. The two of them then worked together where they amassed a huge number of successful case histories. Bernheim founded a school of hypnosis and published work which proposed that suggestion was the basis for hypnosis and that it could be induced in just about anyone. Berheim also managed to convince Jean Charcot (1825-1893), a distinguished neurologist of this idea through the weight of case studies that Berheim had amassed. Hitherto Charcot had thought that hypnosis could only be induced in hysterical patients. Charcot's main contribution was that as a prominent member of the medical establishment, he made hypnosis a serious subject for medical study.

Emile Coué (1857-1926) French pharmacist who in 1920 at his clinic at Nancy introduced a method of psychotherapy characterised by frequent repetition of the formula, "Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better". This method of autosuggestion came to be called Couéism. Coué studied under Liébeault and Bernheim. Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have effected organic changes through autosuggestion. He developed three laws:

1. The law of Concentrated Attention: what is concentrated on tends to increase.
2. The law of Reverse Effect: the harder that one tries to do something the more difficult it becomes.
3. The law of Dominant Effect: a stronger emotion will always replace a weaker one.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had rather a negative impact on the subject. Studying under Charcot and later Berheim, he used hypnosis for a while before abandoning it in favour of his psychoanalytical approach that he developed. This new approach together with Freud's tremendous reputation and his rejection of hypnosis, rather knocked hypnosis back for a while.

Hitherto hypnosis had been practised mostly by medically trained people but with the advent of psychology as a subject more and more research was and is still being done into the subject. For example: Clark L. Hull (1884-1952) who developed methodical attempts to measure and understand hypnosis through experimentation; Alfred Binet (1857-1911), the developer of the modern IQ test and Ernest R. Hilgard.

Milton Erickson (1901-1980), was a very skilled practitioner of medical hypnosis. He was introduced to hypnosis by Clark Hull and soon developed his own hypnotic methods by experimentation on anyone who was willing. His "strategic therapy" using hypnotic techniques with or without actually inducing a trance allowed him to get directly to the core of a problem and prescribe a course of action that could lead to rapid recovery. There is now a Milton Erickson foundation dedicated to promoting his methods.

Hypnosis became officially recognised in 1955 by the British Medical Society, in 1958 by the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association.

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