Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  Now, I do not consider it fair or proper to impugn the statements of others in this matter, who are known to be men of talent and observation, and of undoubted credit in other matters, merely because I have not personally witnessed the phenomena, or been able to produce them myself, either by my own mode or theirs. With my present means of knowledge I am willing to admit that certain phenomena to which I refer have been induced by others, but still I think most of them may be explained in a different and more natural way than that of the mesmerizers. When I shall have personally had evidence of the special influence and its effects to which they lay claim, I shall not be backward in bearing testimony to the fact.

  The Zoist was not alone in reporting the marvels performed by the Didier brothers and others; the whole country was fascinated by them and by others who could carry out similar feats. The New Monthly Belle Assemblée of February 1849, for example, reported a case in which a lady had lost a brooch, which she last remembered having in August, it being now November. She suspected it had been stolen by one of her servants. She consulted a mesmerist, Dr Hands, whose patient Ellen Dawson was noted for her clairvoyance. Ellen described the lady's house in detail, and the bedroom where the brooch had been kept, described the servant who had stolen it, and told where it was now to be found, despite the fact that it had been pawned. The brooch was recovered.

  Clairvoyance was just one of a range of peculiar phenomena associated with mesmerism. The Victorians were amazed by the alleged phenomenon of sympathy between the operator and subject, and believed that sensations and thoughts could be transferred mysteriously between the two. The subject might be in a totally analgesic condition: you could tickle the soles of his feet and he would not respond. But tickle the soles of the operator's feet, and the subject feels it too. Then there was ‘traction’, which involved the subject mirroring the operator's movements, even when they were invisible to each other, in separate rooms. Worrying as the apparent erasure of boundaries between two individuals might have been to some, far more were simply fascinated by the phenomenon.

  There are plenty of unconfirmed reports of what today we might call ‘telepathic hypnotism’ – that is, hypnotism at a distance, by the operator simply focusing his will on the subject. Of course, the difficulty in these cases is to be sure that the subject really had no idea that she was supposed to go into a trance at such-and-such a time. Hypnotism at a distance was tested under proper conditions at the Medical School of the University and King's College, Aberdeen. H.E. Lewis, a black American electro-biologist who was on a sell-out tour of the country in 1851, was the chosen mesmerist. Students from the university were tested by Lewis for susceptibility, and then taken to a different room, where some committee members could watch over them and assess the results, while others remained with Lewis. The experiment was a total failure: not one of the students entered into a trance state.

  The whole topic of parapsychology and paranormal phenomena immediately engages one at a very personal level. Do you believe in them or not? Believers are different kinds of people from non-believers. Most of us sit on the fence and refuse to commit ourselves either way; we like to be entertained by the phenomena, but don't go all the way into full belief. But even one's position on the fence is maintained by a kind of oscillation between inclining one way and inclining the other. Each of us will deal with this tension in his or her own way. Speaking for myself, it makes me somewhat angry that I cannot know for certain, at this distance, which, if any, of the mesmeric paranormalists of Victorian Britain were genuine.

  Aftermath

  The phrase ‘mesmeric mania’ was coined (by Edinburgh academic John Hughes Bennett) to refer to the year 1851 in particular, when on top of the Elliotson–Wakley controversy, Braid's stream of publications and the itinerant lecturers, electro-biology came over from the States and the tackier side of hypnotism took the country by storm. The electro-biologists could have dozens of people in a trance at a time, and soon other mesmerists were achieving the same results without the help of the electro-biologists’ bimetallic discs. Polite society was frequently entertained by the sight of half a dozen young women swooning simultaneously under the impassive and assertive gaze of a mesmerist. Electro-biology was a short-lived craze, however – not because people saw sense, but because it was overtaken by the epidemic of table-turning and spiritism. The mesmeric mania of 1851 was the last twitching of a dying art. Although the electro-biologists’ methods were similar to those of Braid, Braid's work had fallen on such deaf ears that no one made the connection which would have accelerated the acceptance of hypnotism by the scientific community.

  Braid died in 1860, Elliotson in 1868, but interest in mesmerism in the UK had already died before that. By the 1880s, however, respectable medical scientists in France could take up, in effect, Braidian and Elliotsonian positions, and yet retain their reputations untarnished. This is part of the story of the next chapter, but it fed back into Britain. In 1891 the British Medical Association appointed a commission to investigate hypnotism. The subsequent report was cautiously favourable, but distanced itself from the controversy earlier in the century:

  The Committee have satisfied themselves of the genuineness of the hypnotic state. No phenomena which have come under their observation, however, lend support to the theory of ‘animal magnetism’ … The Committee are of the opinion that as a therapeutic agent hypnotism is frequently effective in relieving pain, procuring sleep, and alleviating many functional ailments … The Committee are of the opinion that when used for therapeutic purposes its employment should be confined to qualified medical men, and that under no circumstances should female patients be hypnotised, except in the presence of a relative or a person of their own sex … In conclusion, the Committee desire to express their strong disapprobation of public exhibitions of hypnotic phenomena, and hope that some legal restriction will be placed on them.

  This report was merely ‘received’ by the BMA, rather than being endorsed, but it marked the beginning of the acceptance of hypnotism in Britain. In part this change of heart was due to the advances made by Braid over Elliotson and his peers; the wild speculations of the animal magnetists no longer sidetracked official attention from the reality of their results. In part it was due to the British medical community by now being more secure in itself, so that it could shed the blinkers which had blinded it to the value of mesmerism earlier in the century.

  7

  Murder, Rape and Debate in the Late Nineteenth Century

  In 1891 a sensational trial gripped Paris. The defendants were a twenty-six-year-old woman, Gabrielle Bompard, and her lover and occasional pimp, a middle-aged lowlife called Michel Eyraud. The year before, finding themselves in need of cash, Gabrielle had lured a bailiff called Alexandre-Toussaint Gouffé to her room with the promise of sex. Under five feet in height, with her hair cut short, it was not difficult for the gamin slut to entice him over to her bed, where she sensually unwound from her waist the silk rope which acted as her belt, and provocatively placed it around the unfortunate Gouffé’s neck as he kissed her throat. This was the signal for Eyraud to come out from behind the curtain where he had been waiting. He took hold of the other end of the rope and hung Gouffé, who died without a struggle, and remarkably quickly, considering the amateur set-up. To their dismay the lovers found only a few francs on Gouffé’s person. They dumped his body in a trunk and disposed of it in a wood near Lyons before fleeing to America.

  Months later, seeing her picture in a French newspaper, Gabrielle returned to France from California and gave herself up. The police now knew where Eyraud was, but he evaded capture for another six months, before finally being tracked down in Cuba and extradited. The gruesomeness of the murder, the paltriness of the killers’ profit, and the year-long search for the culprits kept the Affair of Gouffé’s Trunk in the headlines, and while the trunk was on display in the Paris morgue about 20,000 people are said to have come to see it.

  Gabrielle's defence tactics were to claim th
at her participation in the crime had been the result of a post-hypnotic suggestion planted by her lover, and that therefore she could not be held responsible for the crime. A team of psychologists examined her and concluded that she was simply a depraved character, mildly ‘hysterical’, but perfectly aware of what she was doing. In her defence, however, a professor of law, Jules Liégeois, was brought in to testify, at tedious length, that under hypnosis an impressionable subject is nothing more than an automaton. Her lawyers also stressed the age and gender difference, and pointed to her respectable background as the daughter of a middle-class tradesman (although in fact she seems to have long lost any shred of middle-class respectability). In other words, they played on the popular view of hypnotism as a means of depriving impressionable (i.e. female and young) people of their well-broughtup moral wills, while the best that Eyraud's defence could do, in a kind of parody of the arguments produced by Gabrielle's lawyers, was to claim that he had been led astray by her youth and beauty. Gabrielle was given twenty years, while Eyraud was put to death. The difference in the sentences does not, however, reflect any weight given to Liégeois's testimony, which fell on deaf ears; he was not even allowed to make a psychological assessment of the woman. More relevant to the judges, who had already been convinced by the panel of Parisian doctors, was the fact that Gabrielle had returned to give herself up to the police. It may also be worth noting that Liégeois's arguments, taken to their logical extension, undermine the whole notion of legal responsibility, which can't have gone down well with the judges.

  During the course of his testimony, the enthusiastic Liégeois did not confine himself just to the facts of the case at hand, but launched into a spirited but complex theoretical attack on the views of his rivals, which provoked more of the same from his opponents. One wonders how the judges viewed this psychological wrangling. They could see that the Paris doctors were laying exclusive claim to medical professionalism and were accusing Liégeois of supporting charlatans such as stage mesmerists, but some of the intricacies may have left them cold. As we find time and again in the history of hypnosis, there were social undertones as well. Close to the surface at several points during the trial was the accusation that Liégeois's arguments strengthened the kind of anarchic lower-class movements which threatened the stability of the Third Republic.

  This seemly wrangling was part of an ongoing debate. What had spilled over into the courtroom was an argument between two rival schools of psychology. Liégeois was an associate of Hippolyte-Marie Bernheim (1837–1919), the doyen of the Nancy school, who was unable to attend the trial himself because of ill health, while the opposing expert witnesses were friends and associates of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) of the Paris Salpêtrière school. While the death sentence was inevitable for Eyraud, in Gabrielle's case the issue became not just her guilt or innocence, but the topic of hypnosis and coercion, which struck at the heart of the theories of the rival schools.

  Liébeault and the Nancy School

  Players of Scrabble like the word ‘od’, but few are aware of its origins. In the 1840s and early 1850s many educated Europeans were caught up in a wave of enthusiasm for the theories of an Austrian chemist, Baron Karl von Reichenbach (1788–1869). Having previously discovered paraffin and creosote, von Reichenbach announced in 1845 the discovery of a new force, od, which pervaded the universe, and which magnetized and sensitive subjects could see emanating from magnets and crystals. James Braid wrote a stunning reply in his pamphlet The Power of the Mind Over the Body (1846), in which he displayed the results of his counter-experiments and argued that von Reichenbach's subjects were suggestible people who produced the results the baron himself wanted to see. (Oddly enough, something similar to Reichenbach phenomena were still being investigated in La Charité Hospital in Paris, with the help of hypnotized subjects, at the end of the century, by J.B. Luys and Colonel de Rochas, until debunked by the English writer Ernest Hart, among others.)

  Hypnotism was indeed in the doldrums, and remained there for some time. The excesses of Elliotson in Britain had condemned even Braid's views to obscurity, tarred with the brush of occultism and eccentricity. No medical man worth his salt would bother to investigate the matter, lest his career suffer. The only people who kept it alive were the stage mesmerists, but they attracted popular audiences, not academic kudos. But there was a certain amount of interest on the Continent in Braidism. Dr Durand le Gros (who wrote under the English pseudonym Phillips) wrote a book on the subject in 1860, which was well received in limited circles, and he also lectured in Belgium and France. At much the same time Eugène Azam was looking after a young girl known to posterity simply as Félida X., a hysteric who turned out to have multiple personalities. He used Braidian hypnosis on her and reported the case in the prestigious Archives de médecine for 1860. Azam told his friend, the eminent doctor Paul Broca, about his work, and Broca tested it for himself by carrying out a hypnotic operation. The results were impressive, but out of date: by now chemical agents were in almost universal use for surgery.

  This flurry of medical interest was compounded in 1860 when Braid, who was by then close to death, sent a paper to be read at the French Academy of Sciences. The consequences of this modest move by Braid were enormous. In effect it initiated the whole modern movement of hypnosis, but it would take quite a few years for the impact to become public. In the audience was a doctor called Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904). Intrigued, he went home to the village near Nancy where he had his practice, and quietly experimented on his patients, in a special clinic set up in the peaceful surroundings of his garden. He came to realize that it was all suggestion. No induction process was required beyond suggestion – no hand passes, nor even Braidian fixation – and he found that suggestion effected cures too, in a great many cases, whether the disorder was organic or otherwise. His method was simply to look into the patient's eyes and assure him that his symptoms were cured. He thought that hypnotic sleep was the same as natural sleep, except that it was induced by suggestion, which focuses the attention on the idea of sleep. His views were strongly influenced by Braid: the concentration of the mind on a single idea, the idea of sleep, induces relaxation, the isolation of the senses from the external world, the arrest of thought and a distinct trance state. But he did not dismiss magnetism as a theoretical possibility.

  Liébeault was an unusual man. The twelfth child of a peasant family from Lorraine, he had made a name for himself in his home village and the surrounding district as a man of integrity and a skilled doctor, and so had won a place in the ranks of the French medical establishment, which was still almost entirely dominated by the upper classes. Short, talkative, and with a peasant's dark complexion, he displayed the opposite of Mesmer's greed. He found that he earned enough money from his practice to offer hypnotism for free. Not surprisingly, he soon had plenty of patients. After five years of research he wrote a book on his findings.

  Liébeault's book surely holds the record as the least successful publication of all time. It sold precisely five copies in its first five years. He was regarded (if he was known at all) as a quack for his hypnotism and a fool for his lack of concern about money. Nevertheless, he persevered, and continued to make use of hypnotism in his practice. There is a saying that dripping water hollows a stone not by using force but by just going on dripping, slowly and surely, and in 1882 Liébeault's long, quiet isolation came to an end when he was approached by the professor of internal medicine of the nearby University of Nancy. In actual fact, though, Hippolyte Bernheim was sceptical: surely hypnotism was the province of charlatans and fools. He sent a recalcitrant patient to Liébeault, to test him out. The patient was suffering from chronic sciatica, and Bernheim had been unable to cure him. His intention was to expose Liébeault as a fraud, but the man was cured to Bernheim's satisfaction. Bernheim was converted. He struck up a friendship with Liébeault and subsequently invited him to work at the university, where he cured him of his tendency to be attracted towards magnetism, b
y proving that unmagnetized vials of water were just as successful in bringing about cures as magnetized ones.

  Between them, these two men developed the influential Nancy approach to hypnotism, which is the foundation of modern hypnotism. The basis of this view is that hypnotism works through suggestion – that is, that the psychological force of suggestion can influence even physical disorders. They were the first to call what they did ‘psychotherapy’. Psychologically speaking, hypnotism involved, according to the Nancy school, the concentration of attention, or the ‘nervous force’, in various organs of the body and the brain. Their technique was a combination of permissiveness, in that they liked to win the patient's confidence, especially by letting him view other hypnotic sessions, and authoritarianism, in that they would commonly tell the patient to ‘sleep’ in a commanding tone of voice, and even hold his eyelids down for a while. Later, however, Bernheim was to find that suggestion was almost as effective even when the patient was awake. Interestingly, in order to contradict the view, prevalent among their contemporaries, that hypnotizability was a form of weakness to which mainly women were liable, Bernheim practised largely on male subjects. He found that hypnosis was easier to induce in those who were used to obedience, like soldiers.

  Bernheim, who was short in stature, with friendly blue eyes, a moustache, goatee and soft voice, defined hypnosis as a state of suggestibility induced by suggestion. The book he wrote in 1884 has the distinction after all this time of being a model of clarity and a mine of information. It altered the course of hypnosis research for ever. Within a few years he and Liébeault were the centre of what was effectively an international school, though there were differences of opinion among them. In France there were the lawyer Jules Liégeois and the forensic medical expert Henri-Etienne Beaunis, who were particularly interested in the impact of suggestion on criminal responsibility. Abroad there were Albert Moll and Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing in Germany; Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Austria; C. Lloyd Tuckey and J. Milne Bramwell in Britain; Boris Sidis and Morton Prince in the USA; Vladimir Bechterev in Russia; Otto Wetterstrand in Sweden; Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Morselli in Italy; August Forel in Switzerland; Joseph Delboeuf in Belgium; A.W. van Renterghem in Holland – and this is to mention only the most prominent researchers, the pioneers who brought hypnotism into the modern era.