A short history of hypnosis

A facinating saga of the development of human understanding concerning the art and science of hypnosis & healing

Hypnosis has a fascinating history.  Hypnosis has been practised under many guises for thousands of years. In ancient Sanskrit writings there are examples of the use of healing chances and healing temples in India.  In ancient Egypt, in the region of Sakara, and in Delphi in Greece, there are examples of sleep temples and the use of trance induction for healing.

In the 1500s, Paracelsus, a Swiss medical doctor, was the first known physician to use magnets for healing.  In those days they used pieces of lodestone, a mineral rich in iron.  Paracelsus passed the lodestone over a person's body to begin the healing process, and he had great success with many diseases. 

Over the centuries people continued to experiment with magnets until in 1725 when a Jesuit priest named Maximilian Hell was observed by a young medical doctor from Vienna named Francis Anton Mesmer.  Mesmer returned to Vienna and began using magnets in his own practice.  In his day, bloodletting was considered to be the key intervention in the healing process.  Mesmer would open a patient's vein and allow the blood to flow for a while after which he would make passes over the cut with a magnet and the bleeding would stop.  One day he could not find his magnets and he picked up a stick and passing it over the patient’s cuts, he observed that the bleeding stopped. 

Mesmer went on to suggest that it was not magnetic energy that cause the bleeding to stop but the magnetic energy that came from the patient which he called ‘animal magnetism’. Mesmer became famous as a healer and eventually moved to Paris where everyone who was anyone went to him for one of his magnetic cures.  He became very successful but eventually resistance rose from the established medical community of the time who declared him to be a fraud.

Mesmer himself asked the French king for a court of inquiry to be set up to explore animal magnetism.  The high powered board concluded that Mesmer, and so mesmerism, must be a fraud.  The discredited Mesmer returned to Vienna and the idea of energy as the healing art form was no longer considered important by mainstream western medicine and psychology until the late 1900s.

Nonetheless, mesmerism was still practised in France and in England and around 1840 a young surgeon named James Braid went to see a demonstration by a mesmerist named La Fontaine.  In those days the mesmerist would stand near the head of the patient and make downward hand passes over the body.  Braid was intrigued to note that the subject's eyes would remain in an upward stare looking at the healer and he realised the importance of the eyes being fixated in creating trance and he coined a new term that this which was neuro-hypnosis.  Braid decided that mesmerism did not involve energy transfer but rather that it worked simply because suggestion caused the patient to go into trance.  He wrote the first book on the hypnosis in 1843, called Neurypnology.

In this book he clarifies that fixation on a single point or idea is what causes hypnosis.  Although he suggested alternative names the term hypnosis has survived.

Around the same time, a medical doctor in India called James Esdaile wrote a book called mesmerism.  In this book Esdaile outlined the use of mesmerism in the process of controlling and eliminating pain.  He developed his techniques before anaesthetics were available and he completed around 500 operations using hypnosis and found that many patients healed more rapidly than expected.  On his return to England, Esdaile's claims were not accepted by the medical fraternity. Around that time, chloroform became available and so no further work on the ability of hypnosis to control pain was carried out.

In the 1860s, the Nancy School of hypnosis was set up in France.  Sigmund Freud studied at this school and initially used hypnosis in his practice but later developed the idea of 'free association - talking therapy'.  His talking therapy developed into psychoanalysis which changed the history of the European psychology and eclipsed hypnosis.

20th century psychology developed along two paths; analytical psychology emerging with Freud and others who followed like Jung and Adler, the other behavioural psychology developing from studies of reflexes in response to stimuli, perhaps the best known being the work of Ivan Pavlov and his dogs that salivated in response to a bell.

Our understanding of hypnosis developed slowly throughout the early 20th century and in 1943 Clark Hull published his work on psychological studies of hypnosis called 'Hypnosis and Suggestibility'. Hull's key observation was that anything that assumes trance causes trance.  This was of fundamental importance and suggests that NLP techniques and visualisation are fundamentally hypnosis.

Hull was also a major influence on Milton Erickson who went on to become probably the most effective hypnotherapist in the 20th century. Ericksonnian hypnotherapy,where utilisation of events and experiences are key differs markedly from the the authoritarian approaches but both have their place in clinical practice.

Other key figures in the last 50 years include Coue, LeCron, Elman, Weitzenhoffer and Estabrooks, Rossi and Zeig. 

What is hypnosis exactly?