The History of Hypnosis: From Mesmer to Modern Therapy

In 1784, in a test devised by Benjamin Franklin, a blindfolded patient responded as strongly to an ordinary tree as to one that had supposedly been “magnetized,” and a French royal commission concluded that the effects of mesmerism came from the imagination. That experiment, described in the Wikipedia article on the history of hypnosis as perhaps the first placebo-controlled trial of a therapy, sets the theme for the next 240 years: dramatic effects, contested explanations and a slow move toward testing.

Where did it start?

With Franz Mesmer and “animal magnetism.” Mesmer, an Austrian physician born in 1734, began investigating around 1770 what he believed was a magnetic force residing in living bodies. In Paris he became popular with the aristocracy for his magnetic cures, until the medical community challenged him and the king appointed a board of inquiry that included the chemist Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin and the physician Joseph Ignace Guillotin. Mesmer refused to cooperate, so the tests were run with his disciple d’Eslon, and the tree experiment followed.

Mesmer retired to Switzerland in obscurity and died in 1815. His student, the Marquis de Puységur, first described and named “somnambulism.”

Who moved it from magnetism to the mind?

Two figures, a generation apart.

Abbé Faria, a priest from India, gave exhibitions in Paris in 1814 and 1815 without Mesmer’s apparatus. Unlike Mesmer, he claimed the effect was generated from within the mind, through the patient’s expectation and cooperation.

James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, adopted the word “hypnotism” in 1841. The terms had been coined earlier by Étienne Félix d’Henin de Cuvillers as an abbreviation of “neuro-hypnotism,” or nervous sleep, but Braid popularized them and gave the earliest definition: a condition induced by fixed, abstracted attention on one object. He fiercely opposed the mesmerists’ claim that their effects came from an invisible force called animal magnetism, and in 1843 wrote what is credited as the first book on hypnotism, Neurypnology. Later, realizing hypnotism was not a kind of sleep, he tried to rename it “monoideism,” concentration on a single idea. The new name never caught on.

What happened in France in the 1880s?

Hypnosis became serious medicine, and two schools competed to explain it.

In Paris, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot endorsed hypnotism for treating hysteria. His pupil Pierre Janet developed the theory of dissociation, the idea that parts of the mind, including skills and memories, could be split off and made inaccessible.

In Nancy, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim built on Faria’s view. They stressed the cooperation between operator and subject and the importance of suggestibility. The Nancy School became the dominant force in hypnotherapeutic theory and practice in the last two decades of the century, and some experts consider Bernheim the most important figure in the history of hypnotism.

Leaders of both schools, including Charcot, Bernheim and Liébeault, attended the First International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism in Paris in 1889. So did Sigmund Freud.

Why did hypnosis fall out of favor?

Partly because of Freud. He studied with Charcot, watched experiments at Nancy and, back in Vienna, developed a therapy using hypnosis with Josef Breuer. When he later discounted its use in psychiatry, the history article notes, stage hypnotists kept hypnosis alive more than physicians did in the first half of the twentieth century.

Official approval came slowly. The British Medical Association unanimously endorsed therapeutic hypnosis in 1892, yet medical schools largely ignored the subject. In 1955 the BMA approved hypnosis for psychoneuroses and for pain management in childbirth and surgery. In 1958 the American Medical Association approved a report on its medical uses, while noting that some aspects remained unknown and controversial.

When did the science begin?

The modern study of hypnosis is usually dated to Clark Hull at Yale in the 1920s. His 1933 book Hypnosis and Suggestibility used statistical and experimental methods to rein in extravagant claims. Hull confirmed some classic effects, including reduced pain and apparent inhibition of memory, but showed they could be explained by suggestion and motivation rather than a special state, and he insisted that hypnosis has no special relationship to sleep.

In the decades that followed, the psychiatrist Milton Erickson, founding president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, shaped clinical practice with his individualized, indirect approach, while researchers built standardized scales to measure responsiveness.

A measure the history gives you

Franklin’s question still works. When a practitioner explains how a method works, ask what would happen if the special ingredient were removed: the magnet, the energy, the device. If the effect would be the same, the explanation is wrong even if the experience is real, and the useful part is likely to be the attention, expectation and suggestion that Faria, Braid and Bernheim identified in the nineteenth century.

This article is general information, not medical or psychological advice; talk with a licensed clinician about your own situation.