A History of Hypnosis: from Ancient Times to Modern Psychology
This overview considers the history of hypnosis from ancient times to its eventual investigation by modern psychologists, physicians, and researchers.
Healing in Ancient Times
Some of the methods used in hypnosis today were also used for healing in ancient times. For example, the Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical papyrus dating to ca. 1550 B.C.E., contains among its therapeutic measures not only drugs, but also spells and incantations, which can be distinguished as manual (doing something with the hands) or verbal (saying something with the mouth).1 Another Egyptian papyrus (Pap. A. Nr. 65) from around the 3rd century C.E. describes a method to induce a vision using elements that can induce hypnosis: eye fixation and an auditory and physical shock.2
Inscriptions in Velia, Italy refer to a tradition of healers dating back to at least 500 B.C.E., called “Pholarchos”, who were in charge of healing caves where the sick would lie down and have a healing dream or vision.3 Around 350 B.C.E. the cult of Asclepius, the Greek God of medicine, became popular. Over 300 temples dedicated to Asclepius have been found where visitors entered a state of sleep known as enkoimesis and experiences healing dreams under the care of priest-physicians.4
Magnetism, Fluidism, and Mesmerism
For many centuries, especially during the Middle Ages, kings and princes were believed to have the power of healing through the “Royal Touch.” Their miraculous healings were attributed to divine powers. Before hypnosis was well understood, the terms “magnetism” and “mesmerism” were used to describe these healing phenomena.
The Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) was the first to use magnets for healing, instead of the divine touch or a holy relic. This method of healing was still around into the 18th century, when Maximillian Hell, a Jesuit priest and the Royal Astronomer in Vienna, became famous for healing by using magnetized steel plates on the body. One of Hell’s students was Franz Mesmer, the Austrian physician from whom we derive the word “mesmerize.” Mesmer discovered that he could induce trance without magnets, and concluded that the healing force must come from himself or from an invisible fluid that occupied space.
One of Mesmer’s students, the Marquis de Puysegur, became a successful magnetist and the first to produce a deep form of hypnosis similar to somnambulism (sleep-walking). Followers of Puysegur and the Paracelsus-Mesmer fluidism theory called themselves “Experimentalists.” The work of Mesmer and the Experimentalists was a step in the right direction to recognize that the cures they observed came not from a magnet or object, but from some other force.
The Power of Suggestion – Faria, Liebeault, Bernheim, and the Nancy School
In 1813, an Indo-Portuguese priest known as Abbe Faria conducted research on hypnosis in India, and returned to Paris to study hypnosis with Puysegur. Faria proposed that it was not magnetism or the power of the hypnotist that was responsible for trance and healing, but a power generated from within the mind of the subject.
Faria’s approach was the basis for the clinical and theoretical work of the French school of hypnosis-centered psychotherapy known as the Nancy School, or the School of Suggestion. The Nancy school held that hypnosis was a normal phenomenon induced by suggestion, not the result of magnetism. The Nancy school was founded by Ambroise-Auguste Liebeault, a French country doctor who is considered to be the father of modern hypnotherapy. Liebeault believed that the phenomena of hypnosis were psychological and disregarded theories of magnetism. He studied the similarities between sleep and trance, and saw hypnosis as a state that could be produced by suggestion.
Liebeault’s book Sleep and its Analogous States was published in 1866. His writings and the stories of his cures attracted the prominent physician Hippolyte Bernheim to visit his clinic. Bernheim (1840-1919) was a renowned neurologist who was at first skeptical of Liebeault, but after observing Lieubault he was so amazed by that he abandoned internal medicine to become a hypnotherapist. Bernheim brought Liebeault’s ideas about suggestion to the attention of the medical world with his book Suggestive Therapeutics, from which hypnosis emerged as a science. Liebeault and Bernheim are the innovators of modern psychotherapy. Their views prevailed, and to this day hypnosis is still seen as a suggestion phenomenon.
Pioneers of Psychology
Some of the pioneers of psychology studied hypnosis in both the Nancy and Paris Schools. Pierre Janet (1859-1947), who developed theories of unconscious processes, dissociation, and traumatic memory, studied hypnosis with both Bernheim in Nancy and the rival school of Charcot in Paris. Sigmund Freud also studied hypnosis with Charcot and later observed Bernheim, and Liebeault. Freud began practicing hypnosis in 1887, and hypnosis was crucial to his invention of psychoanalysis.
Hypnotic Anesthesia
During the period of intense psychological investigation of hypnosis , a number of physicians developed the use of hypnosis for anesthesia. In 1821, Récamier performed a major operation using hypnosis for anesthesia. In 1834, the British surgeon John Elliotson, who introduced the stethoscope to England, reported numerous painless surgical operations using hypnosis. James Esdaile, the Scottish surgeon, performed over 2,000 minor and 345 major operations using hypnosis in the 1840s and 1850s.
Modern Hypnotism
The Scottish ophthalmologist James Braid is the father of modern hypnotism. It was Braid who first coined the term neuro-hypnotism (nervous sleep), which later became “hypnotism” and “hypnosis” (1841). Braid had visited a demonstration of a French magnetist, La Fontaine in 1841. He scoffed at the ideas of the Mesmerists, and was the first to suggest that hypnosis was psychological. Braid is perhaps the first practitioner of psychosomatic medicine. In 1847 he tried to explain hypnosis by “monoideism” (focus on one idea), but the term “hypnosis” had advanced in the work of the Nancy School, and is still the term used today.
Hypnosis in America
Just as hypnosis was investigated intensely by psychologists, hypnosis was used in medicine as anesthesia, with thousands of surgical operations performed using hypnosis.
Hypnosis was commonplace in the mid-1800s when chemical anesthetics were discovered. Street-corner “tent-shows” were popular entertainments where hypnosis was demonstrated, along with new inhalation drugs and other wonders of chemistry. It was at one of these shows that Horace Wells first got the idea of use nitrous oxide for dental extractions. As chemical anesthetics became popular, the widespread use of hypnosis for anesthesia declined.
In the 1800s in America there was also a deep interest in metaphysical, psychic, and spirit phenomena, and this spawned different types of spiritual healing and mental healing movements. Because hypnosis was already widely known, it was natural for some spiritual healers to induce trance as part of their method. Their movements usually presented their cures as coming from a spiritual source, but the cures probably resulted more often from the combination of trance with the suggestions of the healer and the belief of the subject.
Fortunately, despite the appropriation of hypnosis for tent-shows and spiritual healing, the scientific and academic investigation of hypnosis continued. In the first half of the 20th century Joseph Jastrow taught hypnosis at the University of Wisconsin. His student, Clark Hull, became an experimental psychologist at Yale University who advanced hypnosis research significantly. In 1933 Hull published Hypnosis and Suggestibility, the first major review of hypnosis applying the standards of modern experimental psychology. Ernest Hilgard and Andre Weitzenhoffer conducted significant research at Stanford. Hypnosis gained even more scientific attention when it was used in World Wars I and II and the Korean Conflict for rapid treatment of injuries and trauma. Since that time, has been approved by the major medical and psychological organizations in America, Great Britain, and Canada, and has remained a subject of rigorous scientific study.
The twentieth century also had several influential hypnosis practitioners. Dave Elman, a hypnosis performer who popularized a rapid induction method of hypnosis, taught his techniques to many doctors and physicians. The American psychiatrist and psychologist Milton Erickson was one of the greatest influences on the hypnosis field. His theories that the unconscious mind is always listening led to indirect techniques of hypnosis, including subliminal suggestion and neurolinguistic programming (NLP).
From an historical standpoint it is interesting to note that, although hypnosis was at times attached to various passing fads and movements, the clinical practice and scientific study of hypnosis have survived. That alone is a great testament to the enduring power of hypnosis to help people. Thankfully, the medical and academic fields have continued to use and validate hypnosis as a therapeutic procedure, and hypnosis research seems as active as ever. With new ways of understanding the mind, the brain, consciousness, and memory, I am excited to see what new understandings of hypnosis the twenty-first century may bring.
Sources
1. Bryan, Cyril P. The Papyrus Ebers. Geoffrey Bles, 1930. p. xix.3. Kingsley, Peter. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Golden Sufi Center, 2004. p. 78-80.
2. Griffith, Francis Ll, and Herbert Thompson. The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden. Clarendon Press, 1921. p. 113: “It’s method. You take a new lamp...and you lay it on a new brick, and you take a boy and seat him upon another new brick, his face being turned to the lamp, and you close his eyes and recite these things that are (written) above down into the boy’s head seven times. You make him open his eyes. You say to him, ‘Do you see the light?’ When he says to you ‘I see the light in the flame of the lamp,’ you cry at that moment saying ‘Heoue’ nine times. You ask him concerning everything that you wish… You cry down into his head, you strike his head with your second finger, (that) of the …, of your right hand.”
3. Kingsley, Peter. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Golden Sufi Center, 2004. p. 78-80.
4. The physician Hippocrates studied and taught at the Asclepion on the island of Kos, and was the son of Heraclides, a priest of Asclepius.
