Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (20 page)

Not unnaturally, the French had rather a lot on their minds in the last dozen or so years of the eighteenth century, and the centre of mesmeric activity moved to Germany. Mob rule and riots in Paris in 1789 (including the momentous destruction of the Bastille prison on 14 July) soon spread to the provinces. France was effectively split for a while into small provincial governments, with no central focus except a common resentment of the aristocracy, whose excesses and feudalism were often outrageous. All the old political, civic and ecclesiastical structures were discarded, and 1791 was optimistically renamed ‘Year One', the start of a new order for humankind. But the bloodshed (not just the execution of nobles and the royal family, but the elimination of political rivals), the frequent changes of government, and constant warfare against an alliance of most of the other European countries, brought the Revolution into disrepute, and people welcomed the relative stability offered by Napoléon's consulate, which started in 1799.

The Revolution almost put paid to animal magnetism. The societies of Universal Harmony were dissolved and many of their members were among the emigrés. Others earned ridicule by attaching themselves to Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743–95), a conman who travelled around Europe peddling a supposed alchemical elixir of immortal youth and gaining recruits for freemasonry. The flood of books up to 1788 died down to the merest trickle for about twenty years, and animal magnetism survived, if it survived at all, as a result of work quietly carried on in secret. When interest began again, Mesmer himself was forgotten, presumed dead, and it was to de Puységur that the new generation of researchers looked for inspiration and theoretical framework. He was practising quietly in Soissons, as before, having kept his head on his shoulders. He had been a military commander in the revolutionary army, but the mindless slaughter sickened him and he resigned his commission. This act earned him a couple of years in prison, but after that he was able to retire to his estate and pick up his private life, including his mesmeric practice, where he had left it. He was even working again with Victor Race, and discovered that, when mesmerized again, he could remember everything from his trances twenty years earlier.

The revival of magnetism in France owes a great deal to the publication of his
Du magnétisme animal
in 1807, and to further works in subsequent years. His doubts about the existence of magnetic fluid, or any material basis for mesmerism, had by now taken deep root. He emphasized will to the exclusion of everything else, and began to show even more of an interest in the paranormal abilities of somnambules.

Another survivor was Joseph Deleuze (1753–1835), an enthusiastic pre-war magnetizer who became one of the chief spokesmen and writers in the early nineteenth century, especially after 1820, when de Puységur began to take a back seat (he died in 1825). Deleuze had been introduced to animal magnetism in 1785 when he attended a demonstration given by a young woman and, although he was not the subject, he found himself going into a trance. He was a prolific and pellucid author, who closely followed the theories of de Puységur, but was far clearer and more organized than his mentor, and was more scientific in that, for example, he rejected anecdotal evidence, laid down criteria for assessing the validity of claims made
on behalf of magnetism, and followed them himself by conducting careful experiments. He also prefigured a number of later developments in hypnotism, by suggesting, for instance, that those who could achieve the deep state of somnambulism could well undergo surgery while in this state. He warned magnetizers against getting too excited by the appearance of paranormal phenomena. Throughout, his work is scholarly and sceptical. His two most important books are his famous
Histoire critique du magnétisme animal
(1813), an invaluable sourcebook for the early history of mesmerism, and a practical manual written in 1825. One of his most important contributions was to try to improve the moral reputation of mesmerism. He knew from his own experience with the young woman who had introduced him to the subject that it was possible for sexual energy to build up between operator and subject, and so, to preserve decorum, he recommended that husbands and wives should work together, and that a young female subject should be mesmerized by another woman.

In order to put things on a more formal footing, de Puységur and Deleuze became, respectively, the president and vice-president of the Magnetic Society, founded in 1813 with the help of a certain Joseph du Commun, whom we will meet again in the next chapter. Apart from arranging lectures and general publicity and public relations for the cause of mesmerism, in their brief history (up to 1820) they ran one of three contemporary French journals devoted to the subject. The journal was
Bibliothèque de magnétisme animal
(1817–19). The other two were
Annales du magnétisme animal
, which ran from 1814 to 1816, and
Archives du magnétisme animal
(1820–23), edited by Baron E.F. d'Hénin de Cuvillers (1755–1841). On the whole the standard of writing is not very good in these journals (they were mainly amateurs, not medical men), varying between inadequate reporting of case histories and well-meaning but waffly publicity articles. All this did nothing to win over the medical professionals, who remained either hostile or uninterested, and tended to attribute magnetic cures to other causes. However, certain future developments in hypnotism are prefigured in the pages of these journals: ‘self-magnetization' (i.e. self-hypnosis); the use of suggestion to produce blisters; the first steps in painless surgery.

But there was also a new generation of mesmerists. One of the
most important was a colourful character – too flamboyant for the likes of sober Deleuze – called the Abbé José Custodio di Faria (1753–1816), a Portuguese priest who came to France in 1813 from India, where he claimed to have been initiated as a Brahmin. He used to dress up as an Indian magician and put on displays of magnetic cures, making him the forerunner of all the mesmeric entertainers of later years. The importance of this rather vulgar showman lies in his technique: he had his subjects or patients sit in a comfortable chair and gaze fixedly at his raised hand while he simply commanded them, in a loud voice, to sleep. This practice was backed up by theory. He totally rejected Mesmer's magnetic fluid and had little time for clairvoyance and telepathy. He said that the reason mesmerism worked therapeutically was the impressionability of the subject to the operator's will (an impressionability which, more bizarrely, he seems to attribute to anaemia); the subject has expectations of what will happen, and is in a state of heightened suggestibility. In a sense, then, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Faria was the first to make suggestion occupy the centre of the theoretical stage. If Faria's name is familiar, by the way, that is because Alexandre Dumas borrowed it (and certain traits of the original) for the old imprisoned abbéin
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

Faria's downfall was spectacular and probably unfair. An actor pretended to be mesmerized by him and to perform some of the clairvoyant feats typical of the time. In the middle of the performance, he opened his eyes and denounced Faria to the audience as a fraud. It was unfairly assumed that if one subject could fake it, all the others were frauds too. The ruse did the actor's career no harm, because he gained the lead part in a popular farce called
Magnetismomania
, written by Jules Vernet, in which he played a mesmerizer who looked suspiciously like Faria. The abbé, though, was forced into retirement and died a few weeks later.

In every branch of science and walk of life there are people about whom you feel that if they had only lived longer they would have gone on to even greater things. In the early history of animal magnetism Alexandre Bertrand is one of these. When he died in 1831, in his thirties, he had already left a body of important work. He combined the scholarly caution of Deleuze and the insight of Faria. It was Bertrand, as much as anyone, who was responsible for the
return of mesmerism from the provinces to Paris: the course of lectures on the subject he gave there in 1819 and 1820 were hugely successful, and forced the medical authorities to pay attention to the subject. Then in 1820 a magnetizer, Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy, who will later play an important part in the story of hypnosis, was invited to come and heal one of the patients in the Hôtel Dieu, one of the main Paris hospitals. The patient was a good subject and self-prescribed her cure. In 1821 the first well-publicized mesmeric operation was carried out in Paris by Dr C.A. Récamier.

Bertrand's first book was
Traité du somnambulisme
(1823), written more or less from an orthodox fluidist point of view, but by the time he wrote his second book, three years later, he had undergone a conversion, as a result of thinking more deeply about the work of Faria and his associate F. J. Noizet. In
Du magnétisme animal en France
, he argued that suggestion alone is responsible for the phenomena of magnetism, and that no fluid is needed to explain them. This explains, for instance, why subjects who merely believe they are sitting under a magnetized tree will feel the same effects and behave in the same way as those who are sitting under a genuinely magnetized tree. He made the rapport between operator and subject the central phenomenon of hypnotism, because it is rapport that makes the operator's suggestions effective, and he understood that rapport also explains why post-hypnotic suggestions work. The patient or subject, he argued, becomes open to the least suggestion of the operator, by word, gesture or intonation. Given a few more years of life he would have followed up these tentative speculations on the power of the subconscious mind to cause health and disease.

Dupotet conducted apparently successful experiments on mesmerizing his somnambule from a distance, but Bertrand thought they were badly set up, and argued that her entrancement was due to suggestion. At this time, there was generally uncritical acceptance of the marvellous phenomena of hypnosis. Bertrand was the exception – not that he didn't accept some phenomena about which we would be sceptical today, but he did at least carry out his own careful analyses of many cases of trance. As a result of his experiments, he came up with a list of what he saw as the twelve main phenomena of mesmerism:

1. Division of memory between trance and normal life
   
2. Time-distortion
   
3. Anaesthesia
   
4. Exaltation of imagination
   
5. Exaltation of intellectual faculties (e.g. hypermnesia)
   
6. Instinct for remedies
   
7. Prevision (seeing into the future)
   
8. Moral inertia (i.e. passivity in relation to the operator's will)
   
9. Communication of the symptoms of maladies
   
10. Thought-transference
    
11. Clairvoyance
    
12. Control by the subject over his own involuntary organic processes.
    

The sixth item on the list is literally just instinct – the kind of instinct that animals show when they find the right herb to chew when they are ill. It is noticeable, then, that he omits intro-vision (self-diagnosis) and medical prediction; he didn't believe that these were genuine phenomena, and argued that in most cases the subject showed little knowledge of anatomy, ascribed most ailments to ‘abscesses' or obstructions, and proved incapable of predicting the course of serious diseases, only trivial ones. This showed, he claimed, that no actual prediction was involved, but rather that by autosuggestion the subject would manifest the appropriate trivial symptoms at the right time.

We have already seen that there were two main schools of thought about mesmerism at this time (with countless individual variations, to be sure): fluidism and animism. Although clearly closer to animism than fluidism, Faria and Bertrand effectively initiated a third school of thought: that suggestion is responsible not only for the induction of trance, but also for the phenomena of mesmerism. In due course of time, after a period when magnetism was again in the doldrums in France, their work would come to the attention of Bernheim and the Nancy school, and by this route would exert an enormous influence on modern thinking about hypnosis.

But the careful, quiet work of Bertrand was overlooked for a while due to the excitement of what was going on elsewhere, for instance with Récamier's famous operation on a magnetized patient. Then there were the show-stealing methods of Dupotet, who used to magnetize his patients in hospital by screaming at them to go to sleep. This kind of activity led to magnetizers being banned once more from the Paris hospitals. The pendulum was swinging either for or against the medical use of magnetism in an erratic fashion. In 1825, in order to try to put things on a sane and steady keel, a certain Dr P. Foissac persuaded the medical section of the Academy to appoint a fresh committee, especially to investigate the diagnostic abilities of somnambulists. Foissac offered to provide somnambules if they would appoint a commission to investigate the subject. There was some nervous debate as to whether they should proceed. The usual arguments were trotted out: Mesmer and de Puységur were quacks; the whole thing was faked; it was beneath the dignity of the Academy to investigate it; it had already been condemned in 1784. But a commission of eleven was appointed on 28 February 1826. The timing was right: where Mesmer had found few allies among really significant scientists, by the 1820s Laplace and Georges Cuvier were giving the science named after him cautious affidavits. Cuvier said, for instance, that two living bodies in close contact undoubtedly did communicate with each other through their nerves – that although it was sometimes hard to distinguish real physical causes from imagined ones, in this case something real was going on. Another eminent scientist gave even more explicit support to mesmerism. The 1820s saw the publication of the multi-volume
Dictionnaire de Médecine
, a work of exemplary respectability. The article on magnetism was written by Dr L. Rostan. To everyone's surprise, he showed himself to be a believer in the reality of magnetic sleep, and even described his own successful experiment in clairvoyance.