Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  One of the most intelligent pro-mesmeric responses was Doutes d'un Provincial, a treatise written anonymously by Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan (1737–1807). He argued that the commission had exaggerated the importance of convulsions, which were much rarer in the provinces than in Paris. In other words, the commission should have focused on cures, not crises. If they did not want to question d'Eslon's ‘distinguished patients’, there were plenty from lower classes available. And he pointed out that medical science was not immune to mistakes: for instance, in the past inoculation had been condemned before its value was established. Another pamphlet from the provinces, by Antoine Esmonin de Dampierre, cited Puységurian experiments on magnetic sleep. Whereas the main commission had stressed touch, imagination and imitation as the only factors necessary to explain Mesmer's results, de Dampierre argued that the production of a somnambulistic state at a distance refuted the idea that touch was necessary, and that imagination and imitation could hardly be involved in magnetizing animals and infants.

  The Wilderness Years

  It would be safe to say that 1784 was a year Mesmer would rather forget. Nor did the publicity, both favourable and adverse, show much sign of dying down. Not only did the pamphleteering continue, but at the Carnival of 1785 an exhibit had a clownish doctor sitting backwards on an ass making magnetic passes in the direction of people walking behind, who parodied going into convulsions.

  By now Mesmer was thoroughly disgruntled with Paris, and probably suffering from one of the bouts of depression that accompanied his setbacks. He felt that they didn't deserve him; they had failed to give official recognition to himself and his great discovery. The Paris society, already torn apart by dissension, did not survive for very long, and this too must have confirmed for Mesmer that it was all over with Paris. While Mesmer was on a visit to Lyons in August 1784 (where he completely failed to mesmerize Prince Henry of Prussia, who offered himself as a sceptical guinea pig), Bergasse took over and invited non-members to come along to some of the meetings. When Mesmer returned, he accused Bergasse of breaking the secrecy contract. To Bergasse's mind, however, the secrecy clause had only been temporary, its purpose being to prevent the doctrine being too widely disseminated until private subscribers had raised enough money to pay for Mesmer's teaching, which was agreed to be the sum of 10,000 louis d'or or 240,000 livres (a domestic servant or an agricultural labourer might earn about 40 livres a year at the time). This sum had now been reached and surpassed – and so Bergasse thought the time for secrecy had passed too. ‘Bergasse and Kornmann saw that amount as the purchase price for the system, while Mesmer saw it as a reward to the discoverer who was still to maintain his proprietary rights.’ They fell out, and despite conciliatory moves by other members, the society fell apart. Bergasse, Kornmann and Jean-Jacques d’Éprémesnil, the most influential members, formed a splinter group, which began to propagate a political form of mesmerism, preaching the reform of society along Rousseauan lines of harmony with nature; the Revolution was looming, after all. Before long they had admitted members who had nothing to do with animal magnetism, but were purely political, such as the future Girondist leaders Etienne Clavière and Antoine-Joseph Gorsas.

  Bergasse and others, such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot, read politics into mesmerism first because its stand against the medical and scientific authorities was seen as a model for resistance to and oppression by dictatorial authorities in all walks of life (and indeed the academies were seen by Brissot and his friend the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, whose scientific views had also been rejected by the establishment, as tools of the tyrannical government), and second because it provided them with ‘scientific’ grounds for their political theorizing: harmony with the universal magnetic fluid would restore health not only to the human body, but to the body politic of France. Bergasse overtly politicized mesmerism by writing to the popular Parlement, calling for this body to sponsor a proper investigation of animal magnetism, in the face of the hostility and intransigence of the commissions’ reports. It was in this climate, with Mesmer's students calling for publication of the material and the revelation of any secrets that Mesmer was withholding (not that he had any, but he pretended he had), that one of the breakaway members took it upon himself to publish an account of the teaching. This was Dr Caullet de Veaumorel, and his book was Aphorisms of M. Mesmer … in 344 Paragraphs. In the preface de Veaumorel disingenuously expressed his hope that Mesmer, committed as he was to the dissemination of his system, would not be offended by the publication.

  The most important dispute will become clear only after the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the kind of mesmerism being practised in the provinces was very different from Mesmer's own practices. His child had grown up and taken on a life of its own. The Lyons society, for instance, was headed by the redoubtable occultist Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. On his visit there, Mesmer found himself quite out of sympathy with Willermoz, who was a Rosicrucian, a Freemason, a Martinist and the head of a ritual magical lodge. Not all the provincial societies were entirely given over to occultism, but most of them were involved with the kind of psychological, non-materialistic magnetism espoused by the Marquis de Puységur. Mesmer could only have been aggrieved when the countries that spoke his own native German proved receptive to Puységurian mesmerism, rather than his own brand. Mesmerism was introduced into Germany by Johann Kaspar Lavater (whom Mesmer met in 1787). As early as 1787 and 1789 Professor Eberhard Gmelin published two large books on magnetism without once mentioning Mesmer's name.

  Following the collapse of the Paris society, Mesmer gave up on Paris and took to travelling, starting with a tour of the new provincial Societies of Harmony. It is not known how many of them he visited, but in Europe there were societies in Lyons, Strasbourg, Metz, Bayonne, Montpellier, Dijon, Nantes, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lausanne, Nancy, Ostend and Turin. Abroad, there was one on the colony of Santo Domingo. After the death blow of the commissions’ reports, it was indeed in the provinces rather than in the capital that mesmerism thrived.

  This is an obscure period of his life. Per Olov Enquist's book, The Mesmerist's Last Winter, is a fictional account of Mesmer's life after he has left Paris, and during his wanderings in Germany. This period is indeed ripe for fictional treatment, since almost nothing is known of it. In Enquist's thoughtful account Mesmer (or Meisner, as he is calling himself) is a wild, unscrupulous, egotistic charlatan, who will resort even to murder in order to achieve his ends, and has a weakness for his female patients. These qualities of his clash with the forces of law and order, comfort and solidity, reason and science. For all his unpleasant traits, he is a gifted healer, capable of dealing in the days before depth psychology with hysterical and psychosomatic illnesses.

  Leaving fiction aside, it is clear that he tried to wrap up his financial affairs in Paris, and invested most of his fortune in French government bonds, but no one knows precisely where he visited; rumours of an extended stay in England are probably false. He was abroad or at least away from Paris at the start of the Revolution. Perhaps because so many of his patients and followers had been aristocrats – although it was not just followers like d’Éprémesnil and Bergasse, but some of his adversaries who went to the guillotine too, including Bailly and Lavoisier – he found it sensible to stay away from Paris, except for a brief visit in 1792, between sojourns in Vienna in 1791 and 1793. He also spent some time in Germany staying with his publisher Michael Macklot in Karlsruhe in Baden. But in 1793 when he tried to return to Vienna, he was expelled on a partially contrived political charge. In conversation he tactlessly tried to distinguish between the extremism of the Jacobins and the justified struggle for freedom of the Girondins. But in order to be politically correct in Vienna at the time he should have condemned all the French revolutionaries, whatever their stripe. After all, the King and Queen of France had only just been beheaded, so the royal families of Europe were feeling somewhat uneasy. He was branded a radical, and spent two months in prison. After his release o
n 18 December 1793 he seems to have gone to Switzerland, where he lived for some years in Frauenfeld, the capital city of the canton of Thurgau.

  Not unnaturally, he wanted to recover the money he had left behind in Paris. In 1798, when the new government, the Directorate, made it safe, he returned to France, hoping to be recompensed for his losses, since the value of the government bonds in which he had invested had been wiped out by the Revolution. He lived quietly for three or four years in Versailles and Paris, keeping out of touch with the animal magnetists, writing his 1799 book, Memoir of F.A. Mesmer, Doctor of Medicine, Concerning His Discoveries. In 1799 he wrote to the Swiss Minister of Arts and Sciences suggesting the establishment of a permanent clinic in Switzerland, of which he had been made an honorary citizen in 1798. It was the same old story. The minister wrote back: ‘Your treatise on animal magnetism confirms beyond all doubt the universally accepted opinion of your brilliant and fertile imagination. But equally sincerely I cannot hide from you my reluctance to admit a physical theory not yet demonstrated by experiment.’ While assuring Mesmer that this was not ‘blind prejudice’, he adamantly refused to entertain the idea of a clinic on Swiss soil.

  In the end the French government granted him an annual pension of 3,000 francs. This was enough for him to live on comfortably, but not real compensation for the 400,000 livres he had lost; he also complained that his wife had got through most of his fortune in Vienna, which is not really fair, since the money had been hers in the first place. He returned to Lake Constance, living variously at Frauenfeld and Meersburg. He lived in retirement, looked after by his housekeeper and a couple of other servants, hardly aware of progress being made in the field he had started. He did receive visitors, though, and one of them, Dr Johann Heinrich Egg, has left us a telling account of his visit. He speaks with warmth of Mesmer's sociability and knowledge, and of his kindliness in treating local patients for free, but acknowledges that he had certain pet topics to which he always returned: his own importance, the narrow-mindedness of the medical authorities, the stupidity of current medical practices. At one point Egg asked him why he recommended river water for bathing rather than spring water, and apparently without humour Mesmer told him that this was because river water is more magnetic than spring water, which in turn is due to the fact that the sun shines on it, and he, Mesmer, had magnetized the sun. The man's egotism was also revealed by a portrait that hung in his living room, which showed Mesmer as the genius of humanity celebrating the victory of animal magnetism over other forms of medicine.

  Well might the Swiss minister have spoken of Mesmer's ‘fertile imagination’. For in the 1799 book for the first time Mesmer nailed his colours to the mast of the paranormal implications of animal magnetism. Earlier in his career Mesmer had deliberately avoided this whole area, in his desire to establish the teaching on a scientific basis. Perhaps he resented the success of Puységurian magnetism and wanted to show that he knew it all along. In this book he accepts as brute facts the ability of mesmerized subjects to diagnose illnesses and predict their courses, and to see clairvoyantly. His explanation is that in a mesmerized subject (as in anyone who is normally asleep) the outer senses are asleep, but the inner senses are awake and capable of receiving messages directly from the cosmos, which is pervaded by magnetic fluid. A magnetized subject can tap into a timeless metaphysical zone, and this is how precognition works. But even now his explanation for all this is scientific and materialist in tone, not occult: it is the ebb and flow of magnetic fluid in the body that allows the five senses to operate in a waking subject, and the inner senses to be aroused as the others become dormant in a sleeping subject.

  In 1812 Karl Wolfart discovered, to his surprise, that Mesmer was still alive, and wrote to invite him to lecture to the Prussian Academy. War and an old man's natural reluctance to travel intervened, but in the end Mesmer consented to be interviewed by Wolfart at home. Wolfart was impressed by the old man's energy; he was still healing local folk. He stayed there a month, took back to Germany Mesmer's latest manuscript, and published it as Friedrich (sic) Anton Mesmer's Mesmerism, or the System of Reciprocal Influences; the theory and practice of animal magnetism as a generally applied treatment which will preserve mankind. As well as a thorough discussion of the theory and practice of magnetism, in this book Mesmer also imagines a utopian society run on magnetic principles, and criticized current conceptions of law, education and so on. This section of the book had actually been written early in the 1790s and submitted to the French revolutionaries as a model on which they could reform society – but they promptly buried it in a bottom drawer. The basis of the theory is the basis of animal magnetism: all bodies influence other bodies through the universal magnetic fluid, and awareness of this fact would get people to change their social and educational systems to take account of it.

  Early in 1815 Mesmer moved to a village even nearer Iznang, the place of his birth. He died there from the effects of a stroke on 5 March.

  A Faith Healer

  So who was this man whose unintentional legacy would prove to be hypnosis? He was a man of contrasts: a snob who extended charity to the poor but demanded a huge fee as entry into the Society of Harmony, an avaricious man who claimed disinterest in financial gain, a man who wanted the world to know of his discoveries, but wanted to be seen to hold the real secrets himself.

  His consistent refusal to allow his theories to be tested by the kind of experiments that eventually proved to be his downfall when carried out by the 1784 committees suggests that he was a charlatan, but it is hard to sustain this thesis. A charlatan is someone who knows that he is peddling falsehood, and continues to do so anyway. But Mesmer comes across as sincere – fanatical and over-concerned with money, but sincere. In all likelihood, he should be seen as a man of moderate abilities who never saw that he was working in the field of psychology rather than physics, and who became the ancestor of modern psychotherapy only because his followers developed his ideas and practices along more productive lines. There is no doubt, though, that he could perform almost miraculous cures. This is not surprising in the days before depth psychology. His miracles depended on winning the trust of the patient; there may have been nothing substantial underneath – no solid bedrock of verifiable theory – but this only makes him a faith healer. He put his stagecraft, the occult trappings and quasi-scientific mumbo-jumbo, towards the goal of increasing his own fame and wealth, but the way to this goal was paved with cures. Does the end besmirch the means?

  As a faith healer in an age of reason, he served an important purpose. While the medical profession could cope (to some extent, at any rate) with regular disorders, they had no way of coping with neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses. These had formerly been part of the domain of priests, or of other channels of divinity, but the priests had withdrawn from the scene under the influence of the Enlightenment. So, whatever one thinks of Mesmer, his work did fill a genuine and important gap, until such time as psychological healing would become recognized as a crucial branch of medicine.

  As an example of the kind of faith healing that had only recently fallen into disuse, consider the Royal Touch. On the assumption that kings hold their position thanks to the gods, that they have a divine right to kingship, healing power and worldly power have commonly been taken to coincide. In ancient times, for example, the touch of the toe of King Pyrrhus of Epirus (319–272 BCE) was said to cure inflammation of the spleen, and similar powers were ascribed to the Roman emperors Hadrian and Vespasian. Edward the Confessor in England (1042–66), and Philip I in France (1067–1108) were the first to use the Royal Touch. The illness the Royal Touch is supposed to cure is simply called the ‘King's Evil’; the term probably covers a number of disorders which involve swelling of the neck, but chiefly scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph nodes of the neck) and goitre. Each sufferer was touched on the head by the king or queen, who wore a glove. The glove was supposed to absorb the disease, and was later burnt, so that the upper air could disperse the diseas
e. At each touching a priest said: ‘The king touches you, the Lord God restores you.’

  By association, anyone vested with a sufficiently awesome authority could heal by touching. Samuel Scot, from Hedington in Wiltshire, in the sixteenth century, was far from royal, but he was the local squire's son, and it no doubt helped that he was the seventh son of his father. If superstition didn't support your healing efforts, grandiose titles might, as was found in the late eighteenth century by the prolific healer Prince Alexander of Hohenloe-WaldenbergSchillingfürst, Archbishop and Grand Provost of Grosswardein in Hungary, and Abbot of St Michael's at Galargia.

  In its heyday, the Royal Touch was extensively used. In the five years 1660–4 Charles II touched 22,982 people. Dr Johnson was touched when young by Queen Anne, but plainly to no great effect, since portraits dating from later in his life show that his neck glands remained swollen. William III discouraged Royal Touch, and said to one applicant: ‘May God give you better health and more sense!’ Since all forms of faith healing depend on the patient's expectations, one can only hope, for the sake of the poor sufferer, that King William did not ruin the effect. An amusing example of the kind of scepticism that eventually did away with the Royal Touch is the remark of the arch-rationalist Voltaire, who noted that one of Louis XIV's mistresses died of scrofula despite having been well touched by the king! In France the practice fell into decline under Louis XV and died out during Louis XVI's reign – that is, during Mesmer's lifetime.

  So the laying-on of hands, whether by a priest or a monarch, was a means of transmitting divine healing power. This was the case even when a layman practised it, as Valentine Greatrakes, the ‘Irish Stroker’, did in seventeenth-century England. He was an educated man, a member of high society, but around the middle of the century he experienced a conversion which convinced him that he could channel divine healing power. In the years following 1662 he cured not just the King's Evil, but ague (malaria) and a wide range of other ailments. Charles II was interested enough to ask to see him at work, and so did the chemist Robert Boyle. A more humble man than Mesmer, Greatrakes admitted that he was not always successful. There are several parallels between his career and Mesmer's. His method was massage, chiefly over the patient's clothes (for modesty), but sometimes under, which led to charges of obscenity. His patients too often went into convulsions before being cured (as did those of Greatrakes's contemporary in Italy, Francisco Bagnone), and, even more bizarrely, sometimes fell into such a deep trance that they were insensible to pain. Like many faith healers, his response to some patients was striking – a ploy to encourage confidence, as in the nineteenth-century cure for warts which involved rubbing them with beef stolen from a butcher's shop! In some cases Greatrakes used his own urine as a potion or salve; in another he spat on the eyes (in imitation of Jesus?). But whatever the method, he always claimed that he was only an instrument of God.