Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  Mesmer's use of hand passes places him squarely in this tradition, with the important difference that he invoked science and impersonal mechanical forces, rather than God. To say that Mesmer was a faith healer is not to say that he can be consigned to a historical dustbin, nor does it classify him as a charlatan, nor does it license us to try to explain away his cures. Faith healing works, it's as simple as that. Certified cures at Lourdes include cases of blindness and partial paralysis brought on by childhood meningitis, organic blindness, terminal cancer and hemiplegia. Medjugorje in Bosnia is bidding fair to rival Lourdes as a place of healing. Statistical evidence is accumulating that people with religious faith are healthier than the rest of us. We cannot dismiss all of Greatrakes's cures, nor those of Mesmer.

  4

  Magnetic Sleep and Victor's Sister

  Late in 1783 Armand-Marc-Jacques Chastanet, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825) and one of the largest landowners in France, found himself on his estate at Buzancy, near Soissons. An officer of the French army, in charge of an artillery regiment, he was temporarily on leave. Just the previous year, in Paris, he had been persuaded by his two younger brothers to fork out the 100 louis d'or subscription to join the newly formed Society of Universal Harmony of Franz Anton Mesmer, the wizard from Vienna. In an idle moment the marquis decided to try to put into practice the little he felt he had learnt from attending the course at the Paris society.

  One of his first patients was a twenty-three-year-old shepherd from his estate called Victor Race. He was extraordinarily lucky to stumble so easily on a deeply hypnotizable subject. To de Puységur's surprise, the magnetic passes he used on the young man had quite the opposite effect from what he had been told to expect, and had witnessed in Paris. Mesmer wanted his patients to go into a violent crisis, but in a few minutes Victor's head lolled and he appeared to be fast asleep. But no, he wasn't asleep. De Puységur found that he could talk to Victor, ask him questions and get replies; Victor could get up and walk, if ordered to do so by his master, while remaining in this sleep-like state; and most astonishingly of all, he appeared to have quite a different personality in this quasi-sleep state. Normally subservient and quiet, he appeared more intelligent, more of an equal, and this new person spoke about the normal Victor as a third person. While apparently asleep, his mental faculties were actually more alert than usual, and he could be woken up simply on command.

  This was a different kind of crisis altogether. At first, de Puységur called it the ‘perfect crisis’. The closest analogy for what he was seeing was sleepwalking, or somnambulism – a state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, in which the subject functions in the external world to a certain extent, as a sleepwalker can negotiate a journey. So he came to call the state Victor and others entered ‘mesmeric somnambulism’, or ‘magnetic sleep’, to differentiate it from spontaneous somnambulism. Before many years had passed, further similarities between the two states had been found: the kinds of people who go into spontaneous somnamabulism make good hypnotic subjects, and both conditions involve what is called ‘state-dependent memory’, which is the ability, when you are again in the same state, to remember things which are otherwise forgotten.

  News of the marquis's success spread fast, and hordes of peasants from his and neighbouring estates came to him for healing. Following an idea of Mesmer's, de Puységur magnetized an elm tree in the centre of the village and tied ropes to its branches to cope with the increased demand. (The elm tree, by the way, survived until 1940, when it was blown down in a storm. The local folk collected pieces of the tree, remembering that it was supposed to have curative properties.) He found that Victor was not unique: others also fell into magnetic sleep. It is worth pausing right from the start to ask why this should have happened. Why did the marquis's subjects not go into convulsions? There are a number of possibilities. De Puységur was not dealing with fashionable ladies who were liable to the vapours, but with peasants. Moreover, the labourers on his estate had no background in mesmerism: they had not heard rumours of it from Paris, and so there was no expectation that convulsions were the order of the day. It is also worth reflecting that being put to sleep is a kind of expression of subservience, and the marquis was after all dealing with people who were his subordinates, almost his serfs. Finally, the surroundings were rural, more peaceful than the bustle of the capital. Imagine the scene around the famous elm tree: in the distance is the magnificent castle of the de Puységurs, set in rolling hills covered in forests; in the foreground are homely thatched cottages; at the foot of the tree a spring bubbles up; elms have long been thought to have magical properties. It's got to be nicer to be hypnotized there, seated on the stone benches with which de Puységur surrounded the tree, than in the occult hothouse atmosphere of Mesmer's salon in Paris.

  The Phenomena of Magnetic Sleep

  Just as children grow and become independent human beings, so Mesmer's brainchild was taking on a life of its own, breaking free of its original limitations and setting out on a course that would lead directly to the development of modern psychiatry and psychology. Before Mesmer, someone who was mentally ill was either possessed (the intrusion paradigm) or had something physically wrong with them (the organic paradigm). Since the sixteenth century, the organic paradigm had gradually been gaining ground over the intrusion paradigm, and in fact many mental illnesses were thought to be hereditary. Mesmer unwittingly created a third paradigm. I say that he did so unwittingly, because he himself was a devoted follower of the organic paradigm. But with de Puységur's discovery of magnetic sleep, Mesmer's physiological explanation of what was essentially psychological could no longer survive. Victor Race appeared to have an alternate personality within him, which emerged when he was in magnetic sleep. This led, before too many years had passed, to a third paradigm of mental illness, the alternate-consciousness paradigm, and by the time of Freud psychologists had realized that not only mentally ill people, but all of us, have alternate streams of consciousness going on simultaneously within us. The map-makers of the mind saw that we have an unconscious, and therapists found new ways to work with their patients to uncover the contents of this other layer of the mind.

  One aspect of Race's manifestation of an alternate personality proved vital in this context. When magnetized, he expressed feelings of hostility towards his sister, whom he ostensibly loved. The importance to history of Victor's sister, who was by all accounts a spiteful shrew, was that when de Puységur learnt of Victor's domestic troubles, he suggested to the magnetized man ways of alleviating the situation. This was the first practice of psychotherapy: in his magnetized state Victor revealed emotions he would not normally have revealed, and de Puységur felt able to offer him advice because Race often expressed feelings of trust for his master. Similarly, psychotherapists today recognize the importance of that feeling of trust and find ways to get their patients to unlock hidden emotions and reveal painful secrets.

  At a stroke the therapeutic potential of mesmerism was extended from the bodily to the psychological realm. De Puységur developed his psychotherapeutic theories further in reflecting on a later case, that of Alexandre Hébert, whom he met in 1812. Alexandre was a young teenager given to frequent violent rages, episodes in which anything smashable in the vicinity would certainly be smashed, people would get bitten and Alexandre would try to harm himself. The kind and diligent marquis looked after the boy more or less on a daily basis for some months to effect a cure. He came to believe that mental illness was a kind of deranged somnambulism. If the somnambulist is in rapport with a man of good will, the results will be good; but if the magnetizer's will is bad, or if there is some other form of disturbance in the rapport, such as breaking the subject's contact with the real world, the result will be insanity. By ‘rapport’ here de Puységur means not just the special case of rapport with a magnetizer, but one's relationships in general; and few psychotherapists today would disagree that close relationships such as those with one's parents may, when unbalanced, be responsi
ble for many kinds of mental disturbance.

  De Puységur reflected at length on the degree of rapport that quickly built up between himself and his subjects. He found he could get Victor, and later his favourite somnambulist, a young woman called Madeleine, to do something just by willing it. Just as it is will that makes me raise my hand when I want to, so the magnetized subject is like a limb or extension of the operator. Victor's alternate personality seemed to be summoned forth, almost created, by the marquis himself. Madeleine would fetch an object on an unspoken, willed command; and all de Puységur had to do was order a patient to recover and he would recover. The question of control came up immediately: what would Victor or other somnambulists not do if the magnetizer ordered it? De Puységur came to the conclusion, however, that he could not make anyone do something they would not normally do.

  Double consciousness and rapport were not the only phenomena of magnetic sleep that de Puységur discovered through his work with Race. One day, when magnetized, Victor gave the marquis a document to look after; the next day, in an unmagnetized state, he spent ages searching for it, and was very worried that he couldn't find it. De Puységur had discovered hypnotic amnesia and state-dependent memory. He also found that Victor could remember things apparently forgotten, from his childhood, for instance – this is hypermnesia, another common hypnotic phenomenon. He thought the amnesia was due to the fact that when magnetized the subject operates with a set of senses different from our normal set, and he thought he had proof of this in the paranormal phenomena Race and others manifested.

  The first of these paranormal faculties was clairvoyant therapy. Race and others could apparently diagnose their own illnesses, diagnose illnesses in others too, prescribe treatments and predict the course of disorders. Whatever one may think of all this, the reports are very convincing, for all the crudity of their medical knowledge:

  A young man … submitted himself for examination. He was told that he suffered from the stomach, and that he had obstructions in the abdomen, arising from an illness which he had had some years previously. All this, he told us, was correct. But, not content with this soothsayer, he went straight away to another ‘doctor’, 20 feet distant, and was told exactly the same. I never saw anybody so dumbfounded with astonishment as this young man, who had assuredly come to ridicule rather than to be convinced.

  Then there was telepathy with the magnetizer, as a result of the rapport between them, which was such that de Puységur had only to will Victor to sleep, from some distance away and without saying a thing, and Victor would fall asleep. Actually, some of what de Puységur was inclined to attribute to telepathy is more easily explained otherwise. For instance, the marquis was once absent-mindedly singing a song to himself, and to his astonishment Race then sang it out loud. This was probably due to hyperaesthesia: de Puységur was probably slightly moving his lips, and in his sensitized state Race could pick out the words. In any case, de Puységur himself did not talk of telepathy – that is my word for the phenomenon. He attributed it, at this stage, to the transference of magnetic fluid, bearing the magnetizer's will and thoughts, from the magnetizer to the subject.

  As can be imagined, when in 1784 de Puységur published an account of his experiments with Race, both he and his master, Mesmer, acquired great fame throughout France. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other noblemen throughout France magnetized trees as de Puységur had to keep the workers on their estates healthy and happy. Before long the phenomena, both supernormal and paranormal, which de Puységur had witnessed in his subjects were being reproduced all over France. In some cases, matters went even further: instead of just clairvoyant diagnosis, reports came in of subjects who could see details of distant events, and sometimes – in what is known as ‘travelling clairvoyance’ – felt themselves detach from their bodies and visit other places.

  ‘Believe and Will’

  At first de Puységur was a loyal believer in animal magnetism and Mesmer's magnetic fluid, but not for long. He had found the course at the Society of Universal Harmony unsatisfying, and felt he left just as ignorant as he went in. In 1785, at the foundation of the branch of the society at Strasbourg (where he had been posted with his regiment), he announced that the true principle of successful magnetism was encapsulated in the motto which he henceforth adopted: ‘Believe and Will’. That was all the operator had to do to be effective. There may or there may not be such a thing as magnetic fluid, but it made no practical difference. Even if there was such a fluid, the operator's will was still required to transmit it: it would be passed through the magnetizer's hands on to the patient. Good will would produce good effects, bad will the opposite; all the operator needed was self-confidence, to enable him to draw on his store of healing will. Out of deference, he expressed agnosticism: ‘I no longer know whether there is a magnetic fluid, an electric fluid, a luminous fluid, etc. All I know for certain is that in order to magnetize successfully there is no point at all in knowing whether a single fluid exists.’ But these views of his were not fully published until the nineteenth century, and in the meantime his peers throughout France remained materialists.

  As a result of these novel beliefs, he dispensed with the baquet and other accessories; as mechanical means of transmitting magnetic fluid, they were no longer necessary. Through this emphasis on will he was led to an anti-materialist position quite opposed to Mesmer's. In disagreeing with Mesmer like this, de Puységur was not unusual. Of course, there were some who were more orthodox, and de Puységur himself would initiate his own orthodoxy, but in reading the mesmeric literature of the end of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries one is constantly struck by how writers felt free to invent their own fluid or some other explanation of the phenomena.

  De Puységur actually took Victor Race to Paris and showed him to Mesmer, but Mesmer was not impressed. I would like to have been a fly on the wall at that momentous meeting, the critical point at which Mesmer's star began to decline and de Puységur's to rise. One imagines that de Puységur would have been unfailingly polite, keeping his reservations to himself and trying gently to point out to Mesmer the interest of Victor's trance and the new abilities he displayed. Meanwhile, Mesmer would have stubbornly insisted on the reality of magnetic fluid and denied the efficacy of mere will. True, some of his patients had gone into a trance state, but he regarded this as an interruption or delay in the healing process, which was properly marked by crisis and convulsions. The trance state, Mesmer thought, might even be a sign of severe mental illness. De Puységur, on the other hand, came to believe that convulsions were not only unnecessary, therapeutically speaking, but may even be harmful. The whole process of healing needed more care than Mesmer had given it. And it was a stroke of genius for de Puységur to see that the trance state was a valid end in itself, not just a sidetrack on the way to a mesmeric crisis. If he hadn't done it, someone else would, but in any case modern psychotherapy begins here: Charcot and Bernheim, Janet and Freud are de Puységur's grandchildren, with Mesmer as their ancestor.

  The Spread of Puységurian Magnetism

  In the years immediately following de Puységur's 1784 and 1785 publications, a number of French writers such as Jean François Fournel explored the state of magnetic sleep, without adding substantially to de Puységur's findings or speculations, while others such as A.A. Tardy de Montravel tried to reconcile Mesmer and de Puységur. According to de Montravel, whose somnambulist claimed to be able to see the magnetic fluid leaving the magnetizer and entering her, magnetic sleep was just one form of crisis, a cataleptic form as opposed to the more violent convulsions.

  Soon more and more magnetizers found their subjects going into magnetic sleep rather than crisis. Before long, enthusiastic experimenters had come to recognize most of the major hypnotic phenomena acknowledged today: catalepsy, amnesia, anaesthesia, positive and negative hallucinations, post-hypnotic suggestion, individual differences in susceptibility. But the claims for paranormal abilities – especially clairvoyance,
somnambulistic medical diagnosis and prophecy – also persisted and grew. Ironically, for all Mesmer's stubborn materialism, he had opened the floodgates of occultism in the provincial societies.

  The reality of magnetic sleep was no longer in doubt, but its interpretation was controversial. Gradually, two main schools or lines of thinking emerged. The fluidists, following Mesmer's belief in magnetic fluid, attributed mesmeric phenomena to the fact that all nature is akin, and that everything is imbued with this fluid; this means that we are all unconsciously in contact with the universe, and they speculated that in a trance we wake up to this fact. The animists had no time for magnetic fluid and attributed the trance phenomena to the separation of a higher spiritual part from the physical body. Fluidists thought that magnetism involved the transfer of magnetic fluid from the operator to the subject, while animists thought either that will alone was sufficient to explain the induction of trance, or, as among others Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817) argued, that will plus prayer did the trick. Finally, fluidists perpetuated the old mass methods of mesmerism, since for them it was a mechanical process which baquets and magnetized trees could transmit, while animists focused more on one-to-one treatments. However, despite these differences, there was one vital similarity: both schools still emphasized the role of the magnetist himself. For the fluidists, he was the channel for healthy magnetic energy; for the animists, it was his will and his prayers that were effective. The days were still a long way off when the consensual participation of the subject could be seen to be critical.