hypnosis

hypnosis as commonly conceived, is a sleep-like state, induced by monotonous stimulation and repetitive suggestions, in which the subject becomes abnormally responsive to suggestions (including therapeutic ones), and may display novel or enhanced abilities. The concept evolved from the ‘animal magnetic’ or ‘mesmeric’ movement of the period 1780–1850. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), a Viennese physician, studied the supposed healing properties of magnets, but eventually concluded that the healing effects could be equally well induced by application of the operator's hands. He developed a theory that maintenance of healthy function requires the circulation round the body, particularly the nerves, of a quasi-magnetic fluid, ‘animal magnetism’. Any disturbance to this circulation is harmful, and causes disease, but can be corrected if a healthy operator ‘magnetizes’ the patient by making ‘passes’ with the hands over his body. Having fallen out with the Vienna medical faculty, Mesmer came to Paris in 1778 and established a highly successful clinic, where he treated all kinds of ailments (not just ‘mental’ ones).

The ‘mesmeric passes’ sometimes had side-effects, for instance convulsions or sleep. One of Mesmer's pupils, the Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825) discovered that certain subjects would pass through a sleep-like state into a state of ‘somnambulism’ (later called ‘trance’ or ‘sleep-waking’). ‘Somnambulic’ subjects might converse with the operator; diagnose and prescribe for their own ailments or those of others; have visions of distant persons, places, and scenes; show enhanced powers of memory; and carry out prescribed actions, including postdated ones. Afterwards they would remember nothing of this until again put into the somnambulic state.

There were thus two therapeutic methods at the animal magnetists' disposal: the ‘mesmeric passes’, and the diagnoses and recommendations offered by magnetic somnambules. In the early nineteenth century these practices, and the associated theory of ‘animal magnetism’, spread widely across Europe, and by the 1840s they had established themselves in Britain and the US. The movement reached its peak in the late 1840s when public attention was caught by numerous reports of major surgical operations carried out painlessly on patients put into a sleep-like state by mesmeric procedures.

Magnetic practitioners were mostly well-intentioned individuals, and sometimes medically qualified (though the medical profession was generally hostile). But there also appeared numerous public demonstrators who would put on mesmeric shows for the entertainment of large audiences. These popular demonstrators played a significant part in transforming the ‘mesmeric’ movement of the first half of the nineteenth century into the more respectable ‘hypnotic’ movement of the second. For a scientist or medical man might sometimes attend a public demonstration, and realize that, however implausible the fluidic theory, the phenomena required investigation and explanation. Among persons whose interest was thus aroused were James Braid (1795–1860), a Manchester physician, who introduced the word ‘hypnotism’, and Charles Richet (1850–1935), the French physiologist and Nobel Prize winner. Both influenced the hypnotic school which developed in the late 1870s at the Salpêtrière in Paris, under the leadership of J. M. Charcot (1825–93), the neurologist. Charcot held that fully-fledged hypnosis is a pathological state with physiologically definable stages initiated by specific physical stimuli. This view was undermined in the middle 1880s by the ‘Nancy School’ of hypnotists under A. A. Liébeault (1823–1904) and H. Bernheim (1840–1919), whose work brought about a widespread, though incomplete, convergence of opinion among interested scientists and medical men. The key term was ‘suggestion’. Hypnosis is a state of partial sleep induced by repetitive sleep suggestions. Mesmeric passes in their setting constituted such suggestions, but sleep and other suggestions can more conveniently be given verbally. Part of the otherwise sleeping brain remains alert to the voice and commands of the hypnotist. Through this channel, ideas instilled by the hypnotist can take root and may develop with great rapidity and force owing to the quiescence of potentially competing brain systems. Hence ‘good’ subjects may be made to hallucinate, to obey commands automatically, to playact or regress to childhood, to remember some things and forget others, to block out pain, and to display transiently enhanced mental or even physiological powers. Neurotic disorders, which arise from self-suggestions, can be treated by countervailing suggestions, and sometimes physical disorders can be indirectly helped.

Views of these kinds, with their roots mainly in clinical observation and practice, held sway with many variations and some dissentients well into the twentieth century. But thereafter non-clinical influences became increasingly prominent. Experimental psychologists emphasized methodological problems. Many have questioned whether there is any ‘special state’ of hypnosis. No generally agreed objective markers of such a state (such as a certain EEG pattern) have been uncovered, and ‘hypnotic’ phenomena, it is claimed, can often be obtained with unhypnotized subjects when their motivational level and degree of ‘imaginative involvement’ are appropriately manipulated. Dispute continues. Methodological questions have also been raised over the supposed benefits of hypnotherapy. Few studies of the outcome of such therapy have utilized matched control groups or have correlated therapeutic success with patients' ratings on scales of hypnotic susceptibility. Thus, even when hypnotherapy is apparently successful, it often remains unclear what part has been played by the hypnotic procedures as such, though it does seem that they may particularly benefit certain psychosomatic disorders.

The methodological arguments have been linked to a multiplication of theoretical positions. The ‘neodissociationist’ view of Ernest Hilgard (b. 1904), which explains hypnotic phenomena in terms of the partly autonomous functioning of ‘cognitive control systems’ in the brain, has some dedicated followers, as does the ‘socio-cognitive’ school of Nicholas Spanos (1942–94), which holds that ‘hypnotized’ subjects use ‘cognitive strategies’ to enact the social role of ‘good hypnotic subject’. However, many theorists present not so much a unitary theory of hypnosis as a multipronged approach to the phenomena traditionally labelled ‘hypnotic’.

Meanwhile many hypnotherapists adhere to older paradigms (which patients can easily grasp), and continue to practice with little regard to recent methodological and theoretical arguments; but in this respect hypnotherapy is perhaps little different from other forms of psychotherapy.

A. Gauld

Bibliography

Forrest, D. (1999). The Evolution of Hypnotism. Black Ace Books, Forfar.
Gauld, A. (1992). A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.