The history of hypnosis, going back to antiquity, has been reviewed by many writers.5,9,29,34 Hypnosis has been practiced under numerous labels in different places since time immemorial. Tribal medicine men, witch doctors, and religious leaders have employed it in various forms to heal the sick. The cures usually were ascribed to miracles performed by the gods. The Ebers papyrus, over 3,000 years old, describes how Egyptian soothsayers used hypnotic procedures similar to those practiced today. Centuries ago, the Greek oracles, the Persian magi, the Hindu fakirs, and the Indian yogi used hypnosis without realizing it. The earliest medical records describe miraculous healing by priests or demigods who induced a sleeplike state by ceremonial rites in the Aesculapian temples.
There are many allusions in the Talmud and in the Bible1,5 to the laying on of hands and to other quasi-hypnotic technics. Later, several religions introduced healing through touch and prayer. For many centuries, and especially during the Middle Ages, kings and princes were said to have the power of healing through the “Royal Touch.” From the time of Clovis (466?-511), French monarchs were held to possess this remarkable power. After falling into ridicule with the fall of Louis XVI, its use was actually revived at the coronation of Charles X in 1824, with Dupuytren and Alibert in attendance. In England, Edward the Confessor was said to have cured scrofula by the “Royal Touch” in 1066. Though defended by the Stuarts, the practice was lampooned by William III, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when he replied to his wellwishers, “May God give you better health and common sense.”
The seventeenth century spawned healers such as Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1666), the “great Irish stroaker,” who attracted a huge following. At the same time, Francisco Bagnone was operating in Italy in a similar manner and with equal success. He had only to touch the sick with his hands, or with a relic, to accomplish astonishing cures. Hardly less famous than these two was Johann Gassner (1727-1779), a Catholic priest, who believed that most diseases were caused by evil spirits and could be exorcised by conjuration and prayer.
Paracelsus (1493-1541) was among the first to point out the healing effect of the astral bodies and the magnet. His views on animal magnetism were shared by Glocenius, Burgrove, Helnotius, Fludd, Kircher, van Helmont, Balthazar Gracían, Porta, and Maxwell. All propagated the same doctrine: the magnet could cure most diseases. Writing in 1679, William Maxwell, a Scottish physician, assumed that a universal and vital spirit affected all humans. However, he recognized the influence of the imagination and of suggestion. F. A. Pattie's28 extensive research reveals how Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), an Austrian physician with little scientific insight, plagiarized the writings of the brilliant English physician Richard Mead (1673-1754), who was inspired by the research of his patient, Sir Isaac Newton. His attempt to explain living systems by natural laws led Mesmer to develop the “universal fluid” idea.
About 1771, Maximilian Hell, a Viennese Jesuit, became famous for magnetic cures obtained by applying steel plates to the naked body. Mesmer also borrowed these ideas from Father Hell's work and Maxwell's doctrine, but applied them by means of contact and passes. The “new” method, which he called animal magnetism, attracted a large following during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Later, to treat the huge crowds that sought treatment by his methods, he developed a baquet, or large tub, filled with iron filings. Patients grasped the iron rods attached to this contraption to receive the “magnetic” flow. Thirty or more persons also were connected with each other by cords and were magnetized as Mesmer touched each person with a glass rod; many developed seizures or crises similar to those observed among some religious sects. At first he contended that the magnetism emanated from the astral bodies, and later that it was transferred from himself to the patient by his magnetic wand. His theories and practices showed little or no originality. He attracted followers and as a result his “genius” was recognized. Arnold M. Ludwig23 provides a fascinating account of the early roots of mesmerism, including allusions to the potent effect of the imagination as it affects the healer and supplicant. F. J. MacHovec24 describes how hypnosis flourished several thousand years before Mesmer.
A commission exposed Mesmer in 1784, stating that the cures were due to the imagination, not to magnetism. Charles d'Eslon,10 a pupil of Mesmer, had already remarked, “If the medicine of imagination is best, why should we not practice the medicine of imagination.” This aphorism has been neglected for almost 200 years. However, Mesmer unwittingly laid the cornerstone for present-day group psychotherapy, and such strange bedfellows as spiritualistic healing, imagery conditioning, and psychoanalysis. His later disciples were Petètin, the discoverer of catalepsy; the Marquis de Puységur, who first described artificial somnambulism, and Barbarin, who magnetized without paraphernalia and whose followers called themselves Barbarinists. In Sweden and Germany, the latter group were called Spiritualists; the mesmeric cures were acts of God. Those who followed Puységur were called Experimentalists, and they considered themselves the disciples of the Paracelsus-Mesmer fluidism theory. Mesmerism soon spread all over the world. Excellent treatises on Mesmer have been written by Ann Jenson and Mary L. Watkins,21 and by Arnold M. Ludwig.23
The next phase was ushered in by Abbé Faria, who came to Paris from India and gave public exhibitions, in 1814 and 1815, without manipulations or a baquet. He induced over 5,000 persons, and expressed the opinion, still valid today, that the cures were not due to magnetism but to the expectancy and cooperation of the patient. Following Faria, Bertrand and Noizet paved the way for James Braid's doctrine of suggestion. Mesmerism flourished for a time in Germany, but by 1840 it was on the wane.
The first recorded uses of hypnoanesthesia were in 1821, by Récamier, who performed operations on patients under mesmeric coma. Hippolyte Cloquet performed a breast operation before the French Academy of Medicine in 1829, using mesmerism. At about the same time, in the United States, Wheeler did a nasal polypectomy employing mesmerism, its first reported use in this country.
Through the influence of Dupotet in 1837, John Elliotson, one of the ablest physicians in England, and the first professor of medicine at the newly founded college hospital attached to the University of London, became an enthusiastic advocate of the little-known science of mesmerism. Elliotson, afraid of neither innovations nor criticism, was severely censured by editorials in The Lancet for alleged charlatanism. Though he had introduced the stethoscope to England, he was called a quack and an impostor. Subsequently, the university banned the use of mesmerism. The Church also opposed its use. Elliotson, a dedicated and fearless scientist, promptly resigned. For many years he published the Zoist, a journal in which numerous painless operations and other mesmeric phenomena were reported.
However, mesmerism grew and attracted many other disciples. Among them was James Esdaile, a Scottish surgeon practicing in India, who reported hundreds of painless operations between 1840 and 1850. In 1849, Crawford Long, who pioneered the use of ether in America, stated that many reputable physicians were recommending mesmerism for pain relief during surgery.
James Braid, a Scottish physician who merits the title “Father of Modern Hypnotism,” became interested in mesmerism in 1841 when he attended a demonstration in Manchester by La Fontaine, the Swiss magnetizer. Braid scoffed at the ideas of the mesmerists. He contended that the degree of expectation increased the subject's susceptibility to suggestion. He eschewed the occult and the mysterious and instead emphasized clinical observation and experiment. Unfortunately, he coined the terms “hypnotism” and “hypnosis” from the Greek word hypnos, meaning sleep. Later, he recognized that hypnosis was not sleep, but the term had gained common currency. He also made the basic discovery, ignored for over a century, that hypnosis could be induced without a formalistic induction.
In a brief résumé, it is impossible to mention the many contributions and contributors of this period. However, some stand out, such as Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault of Nancy, whose book Le sommeil provoqué was published in 1889. He has been called the real founder of suggestive therapeutics. Though a poverty-stricken country doctor, Liébeault, to avoid being branded a charlatan, said to his poor patients, “If you wish to be treated by drugs, you will have to pay my fee; if, however, you allow me to treat you by hypnotism, I will do it free of charge!” His integrity, selflessness, devotion to the needy, and success with hypnosis attracted the attention of Hippolyte-Marie Bernheim (1840-1919), a renowned neurologist from Nancy, who, at first skeptical, later became an ardent proponent of hypnosis. Together they developed Braid's theories, and without the theatrical legerdemain of Jean-Martin Charcot, treated over 12,000 patients! Bernheim and Liébeault, the legitimate innovators of modern psychotherapy, considered hypnosis a function of normal behavior and introduced the concept of suggestion and suggestibility. They also believed that symptom-removal was effective and harmless. They triumphed over the views of Charcot, who stoutly maintained that hypnosis was a form of hysteria and that it was dangerous!
Charcot's theories, based on working repeatedly with only a dozen hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière, an insane asylum, were completely discredited. However, because of his great scientific standing, his interest in hypnosis helped to make it respectable. Charcot, like many eminent scientists today, did not realize that some degree of hypnotizability could be induced in nearly everyone. Also, he did not recognize that hypnotic responses were a part of everyday subjective happenings and were not the kind of dramatic occurrences that he took great delight in demonstrating. Nor did he appreciate the broad therapeutic potentialities that Liébeault and Bernheim achieved in their impressive series of cases.
Although slowly accepted, hypnosis was emerging as a science by 1884, when Bernheim published his book De la suggestion dans l'état hypnotique et dans l'état de veille. He recognized, as did Braid, that suggestion was the basis for hypnosis. His unimpeachable reputation spurred the growth of the science. Hypnotherapy came into its own, and many respected scientists such as Bramwell, Tuckey, and Wingfield in England; Janet, Bérillon, and Pitres in France; Moll, Dessoir, and Vogt in Germany; Forel in Switzerland; Van Renterghem in Holland; and Morsell in Italy became interested in its clinical applications. Later, Heidenhain, Broca, Pavlov, Babinski, Krafft-Ebing, and Prince and Sidis in the United States, accepted its validity.
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer also became interested in hypnosis. Freud had studied with Charcot and Bernheim; however, he avoided hypnosis for several reasons. First, he was concerned because he could not hypnotize many patients to a sufficient depth; second, the cures were temporary, inasmuch as the post-hypnotic suggestions could not be maintained, and he could not elicit buried traumatic material because of the patient's resistances. He also felt that hypnosis stripped the patient of his defenses. Freud's abandonment of hypnosis did not discredit its validity as a valuable psychological tool, but rather indicated his inability to incorporate hypnosis into his own hypnotherapeutic approach. Whether or not hypnosis is too authoritative a technic and covers up the resistances is open to question. A modern reassessment by Milton V. Kline22 refutes many of Freud's subjective reasons for sidestepping hypnosis. These reasons will be discussed more fully in Chapter 51.
In contradistinction to Freud, Sidis, Prince, and Janet demonstrated that hypnosis could be utilized for intensive exploration of the personality. They did not believe that deeply repressed emotional forces were obscured by hypnotic suggestions. The failure of hypnotherapy was due largely to emotionally conditioned blind adherence to outmoded tenets rather than to critical evaluation. Leon Chertok7 has reviewed the critical period from Liébeault to Freud.
Further criticism generally comes from those who naively regard hypnosis as belonging to a specific school of psychotherapy. They do not realize that the meaningful involvement of the patient with the therapist results in readier acceptance of suggestions. Contrarily, the hypnosis which was rightfully criticized was the dramatic symptom-removal type used at the turn of the century, which was essentially commanding and authoritative. Today, however, hypnotherapy is vastly different from the primitive hypnosis that Freud reluctantly abandoned.
The history of hypnoanesthesia and its relationship to the inhalation anesthetic drugs is an interesting one. Both were used by the street-corner “professors” and the tent-show exhibitors of chemical and psychic phenomena. Induction of hypnosis and lectures on the wonders of chemistry were favorite amusements, which often ended with the entertainer's demonstrating the effect of nitrous oxide or “laughing gas.”
It is of historical importance that one of these showmen, Gardner Q. Colton, gave such a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, on December 11, 1844. Horace Wells, a dentist, who was in the audience, saw one of Colton's subjects, who had inhaled the gas, stumble against a chair and badly bruise his legs. When the young man sat down, Wells asked if he had hurt himself. He answered that he had not and was astonished that his legs were bloody. He stated that he felt no pain until the effect of the gas wore off. Wells immediately thought of using nitrous oxide for dental extractions, and the next day Dr. Riggs, a colleague, extracted one of Wells's own teeth after Colton had administered the gas. On regaining consciousness, Wells exclaimed, “It is the greatest discovery ever made. I did not feel so much as the prick of a pin!”
Thus, when hypnosis was commonplace, anesthesia was a curiosity. Now, after more than a 100 years, anesthesia is the vogue and hypnosis is the anomaly. Pierre Janet,20 the great French psychologist who at first opposed hypnosis and later advocated its use after his epochal investigations on relaxation, stated: “If my work is not accepted today, it will be tomorrow when there will be a new turn in fashion's wheel which will bring back hypnotism as surely as our grandmother's styles.” That his prophecy, made at the turn of the century, is now being fulfilled is evidenced by the expanding literature on the medical, dental and psychological applications of hypnosis.
The need for rapid treatment of battle neuroses during World Wars I and II and the Korean war led to a tremendous interest in hypnotherapy. The merger of hypnotic technics with psychiatry was one of the important advances to come out of these conflicts. Since the pioneering work of Pavlov and his disciples in the Soviet Union, and Clark Hull's19 classic experiments at Yale, a spate of books has been published on the subject, chiefly by psychologists15,18 and physicians. More reports are appearing in scientific publications exclusively devoted to hypnosis all over the world in nearly every discipline, indicating the increased interest in this age-old science.
From a historical viewpoint, it is interesting that many nostrums and other medical fads have passed into the limbo of discredited procedures, but hypnosis has survived, and, at present, scientific interest is stronger than ever. This salient point alone indicates the indispensable value of hypnosis. Its powers, medically applied, to cure and to relieve pain have been greatly underestimated or ignored by the medical profession because of irrational prejudice. This is not surprising, since prejudice is ignorance educated, and it is difficult for any individual, in any given era, to see through the “smoke screen” of his own culture.
Clinical and experimental investigations into the scientific applications and the limitations of hypnosis are being conducted by well-trained investigators in nearly all the medical, psychological, and ancillary disciplines. Hypnosis is being taught at an evergrowing number of universities and medical schools. In addition, many thousands of physicians, dentists, and psychologists in the United States have received training in the introductory workshops on hypnosis conducted by leaders in the field.
The British Medical Association, on April 23, 1955, reported its approval of hypnosis for treatment of the psychoneuroses, and of hypnoanesthesia for relief of pain in childbirth and surgery. The report also advised that all physicians and medical students receive fundamental training in hypnosis. The Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association, on September 13, 1958, recommended that, in view of our increasing knowledge, instruction in hypnosis be included in the curricula of medical schools and postgraduate training centers. The use of hypnosis for entertainment purposes was vigorously condemned. In a subsequent report in 1961, the A.M.A. Council on Mental Health recommended that 144 hours of training be given over a 9- to 12- month period at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. To date, this has not been done except at a few medical schools. However, clinical and experimental investigations into hypnosis are being conducted by numerous workers in many countries. They are gathering data which should shed further light on the nature and clinical applications of hypnosis. It is unfortunate that, throughout the long history of hypnosis, it has been the favorite whipping boy of those who espouse the value of psychological and placebo therapy while denying the obvious correlation with hypnosis. However, it is true that hypnosis has been hurt more by the extravagant claims of its ardent proponents than by its opponents. The American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and the International Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis have established sections in many countries throughout the world to maintain high ethical and training standards and to prevent the abuses that caused hypnosis to fall into oblivion twice during the past century and a half.
In the course of its tortuous history, and in spite of the many obstacles confronting those intrepid enough to risk hearing their thoughts called absurd, hypnosis has emerged as a valuable adjunctive psychotherapeutic tool to medicine. At last its therapeutic and psychological value is being recognized by many reputable scientists. The author believes that the links forged by Paracelsus, Mesmer, Bernheim, and Liébeault, which led to Freud, ultimately will be joined with those contributed by the behavioral scientists to make hypnosis a well-understood and fully accepted modality.
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