The French students who followed Mesmer-produced results which are par-ticularly important in understanding the transpersonal states which can be accessed by energy manipulation techniques. Mesmer's disciple Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur, was in many ways the opposite to Mesmer. He accepted no fees for his work and he dealt not with the aristocracy but with the peasantry who worked on his familial estate.
Several of his cases were written up in some detail and provide a striking contrast with the publicity-conscious frenzy attending Mesmer's soirees. The Marquis de Puysegur initially worked with individual laborers in a calm, low-keyed and respectful manner, and his patients responded without the Mesmeric array of dramatic outbursts. Instead, they entered in a perfect crisis, a state of relaxed attention also called magnetic sleep or artificial somnambulism. The mental lucidity which accompanied this trance allowed for conversations to occur between magnetizer and subject. Strikingly, de Puysegur found that illiterate peasants could make accurate medical diag-noses and progdiag-noses on their own cases. As this practice spread to Germany, it even became common custom to consult so-called somnambulists for health problems and spiritual guidance.10
The example of the farmer Victor Race is worth quoting in some detail.
Known as the pre-eminent somnambule of his day, he apparently produced medical information far beyond his peasant's ken. Exhibiting what Ellen-berger and others described as a dual personality, he was able to make his own medical diagnosis, state the prognosis, and recommend treatments.
He even scolded de Puysegur once in a magnetized state, criticizing several recent public demonstrations that brought on a worsening of Race's con-dition - Mesmerism, he said, was only to be used therapeutically, and not for demonstration or experimentation.
It is interesting that a single technique could produce such widely diver-gent results, depending on the intent of the therapist and the mindset of the patient. Mesmer's patients were so caught up in their neurotic frivolity that
only superficial layers of their psyche were evoked. But it is tempting to conclude that Victor Race and other somnambulists were able to access their higher self or soul through this nondirective technique, perhaps out of trans-ference admiration or imitation of their beloved and exalted patron and magnetizer. It is difficult to ascertain from the historical reports the degree of prompting or unintentional communication between magnetizer and patient, but it seems unlikely that such nonspecific factors could account for such detailed output. Since this type of specialized medical information could certainly not have been learned consciously (or unconsciously) by peasants with no access to higher learning, it seems reasonable to speculate that transpersonal sources of medical information were accessed. Chapter 13, on the process of channelling, will look more closely at this process of accessing information from non-physical sources in the realm of the spirit.
These results also presage and parallel the story of Edgar Cayce, Ken-tucky's famous Sleeping Prophet of the late 1800's. Cayce was a poorly educated photographer who discovered by accident his ability to enter into a sleep-like trance from which he could give highly detailed medical reports about his own condition. As he came to wider attention, he began to ment on patients whom he had never met before, prescribing a highly com-plex but consistent series of poultices, herbal remedies, nutritional supple-ments, and physical and spiritual practices. His vast collection of over 10,000 such readings is now stored at the Edgar Cayce Foundation at the Association for Research and Enlightenbment in Virginia. Interested readers are referred to the works of Sugrue and Steams for more information on this fascinating chapter of the transpersonal trance in American medicine.
At any rate, Mesmerism soon became a well-established practice that flourished throughout Europe in the early 1800's despite official disap-proval. There was a London Mesmeric Infirmary, and a major journal of Mesmerism, The Zoist. This journal was edited by the president of the British Medical Association, who was forced to resign his presidency because of his staunch support of animal magnetism.13 With the rising interest in chem-ical anesthesia and in biologic medicine, there soon came a complete rejec-tion of these promising variants of Mesmerism, as the new dogma of sci-entific materialism or reductionism rose to the forefront. This complete disregard of animal magnetism by Western science lasted nearly 200 years until recent work in the emerging field of biomagnetism started to replicate many of these classic findings.
Another British physician, James Braid,18 completed the transition from Mesmerism to modern clinical hypnosis by stripping away all reference to the alleged magnetic fluidium. In his studies of the fixed attentional focus which characterized the trance state, Braid formulated a neurological theory of trance in 1843, in an essay called "The Physiology of Fascination." He also coined the term "neuro-hypnology," or nervous sleep (hence our modern term hypnosis) to denote the state of receptivity to suggestion which devel-oped when a patient's attention could be fixed and finely focused.
By emphasizing the innate skills of the patient, seeking a neurologic mechanism, rejecting the notion of animal magnetism, and emphasizing the verbal transactions between doctor and patient, Braid laid the foundation for Charcot, Janet, Freud, and modern clinical hypnosis. At the same time, he closed the door of Western medicine on Mesmerism and magnetism.
Today, verbal therapies using imagery and suggestion are testimony to the increasing acceptance of the "de-magnetized" version of hypnosis that is pre-eminent today. The popular press today continues to confuse Mesmerism and hypnosis by using the terms synonymously and even in the clinical literature the terms are often not carefully differentiated.
Ironically, then, the Mesmeric brach of clinical hypnosis's family tree is finally coming to fruition now, with modern energy-based treatment like Therapeutic Touch and energy healing (also called the laying on of hands).
The latter will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, while the former has become so much a part of the curriculum in most American nursing schools over the last twenty years that it is practiced in most hospitals in America today. Developed in the early 1970's by a nurse collaborating with a clairvoyant, this simple treatment is readily learned in a weekend work-shop, and involves developing sensitivity to the fluctuations in a patient's magnetic fluidium, or energy field. It has been perhaps the best researched of the energy therapies, and so provides the link between classic Mesmerism and modern science.
Biomagnetism
The science of biomagnetism today has the high tech ability to investigate electromagnetic phenomena with a precision impossible in past generations.
Devices range from simple surface electrode recordings of skin resistance to the sophisticated SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) measurement of minute fluctuations of the magnetic field. All these devices stem from the commonplace notion that biological activity is fundamentally electrical in nature (i.e., nerve conduction action potentials, muscle contrac-tion, EEG, EKG, etc.), and that moving electrical currents induce a corre-sponding magnetic field that extends out into the surrounding space. So by virtue of our electrically coordinated nervous system symphony, we also generate a pulsating magnetic field surrounding us.
The many exciting discoveries in biomagnetism sound like science fiction.
For example, human beings are now known to share with homing pigeons the abilitiy to orient directionally to the earth's magnetic field. We also have a magnetic sensory modality, apparently mediated by a nerve plexus near the ethmoid sinus in the skull that contains magnetite crystals and is disrupt-able by placing a magnet over one's forehead.1 Highly structured direct cur-rent (DC) electrical field cradients, with their corresponding magnetic fields, have been found to surround and interpenetrate the bodies of all living organisms.7 These fields appear to correlate with the popularized concepts of personal space and interpersonal distance, and also with the mystical
concept of the aura. Similarly, it may be that psychotherapeutic work on boundary issues is not just metaphorical, but may also have an electromag-netic basis that could potentially be measured directly in clinical research.
A brief experiential exercise can help the reader become familiar with the somewhat unusual notion of an energy field surrounding the body.
Instructions: Begin by rubbing your two hands briskly together for 5 or 10 seconds, and then bring them about two feet apart with the palms facing each other. Begin to move the hands towards each other with a slow, bounding, back and forth movement until they are only an inch apart. Pay attention to the different sen-sations you notice. Be sure to note the sensation of temperature or warmth transmitted from hand to hand, and distinguish this from the sensation of tingly pressure that becomes evident when the hands are 6 to 12 inches apart.
This last sensation occurs when the edge of the energy field of one hand comes in contact with the outer edge of the field of the other hands. Practice will help you to differentiate this sensation more clearly from the other physical sensations happening at the same time. The size of the gap between the two hands at the moment when the field's edges touch is a measure of the size of your auric field. It widens after exercising, meditating, or simply imagining a flow of energy coursing out of the hands; in context, this gap shrinks when you're tired or sick. Gradation and fluctuation of this magnetic feeling are at the heart of the treatment technique called theapeutic touch.
These magnetic fields also seem to actively direct the processes of cell growth and differentiation, and are not simply indirect side effects of biologic processes. Altering these fields can induce rudimentary limb regeneration in organisms which typically lack this ability.2 Discrete areas of increased electrical conductivity on the skin have recently been found which exactly match the location of classic Chinese acupuncture points,2 suggesting that the Chinese model of acupuncture with its points and meridians is not simply a cultural superstition, but is rather the outcome of centuries of careful introspection and clinical experience. Even the placement by today's pain specialists of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator (TENS) elec-trodes on acupuncture points is at least a grudging acknowledgement by Western medicine that something important is going on here.
Sleep, and anesthesia, can be rapidly induced in salamanders by apply-ing external magnets;2 reversing the polarity of the magnet reverses the physical effect. This suggests that changes in consciousness are not chemi-cally mediated, as it is in surgical anesthesia via inhaled anesthetics or in medication treatment of insomnia. Perhaps there is also an unexplored bio-magnetic mechanism linking mind to bio-magnetic field. Perhaps bio-magnetic anes-thesia for surgery may return (Mesmerists in the operating room), as might
the use of external electrical currents to facilitate healing (now used by orthopedists to heal pathologic bone fractures).
During altered states of consciousness such as meditation or healing, the external magnetic field of a subject changes. Preliminary studies with SQUID16 have begun, but funding difficulties have prevented further research with SQUID. Some studies suggest that hypnotic suggestion may also work by a biomagnetic process, wherein regional changes in electro-magnetic potential can be induced by suggestion. For example, a hypnoti-cally anesthetized limb is accompanied by measurable changes in the DC current in the brain of the subject.12
This electromagnetic mechanism may explain how certain psychiatric conversion disorders (marked by the development of pseudo-neurologic symptoms like blindness or deafness, without any nerve damage) don't follow standard anatomic patterns, leading to n u m b hands or pain in the feet, even though human nerve pathways don't follow this pathway by ending at the wrist or ankle. Rather, there may be a form of self-hypnosis at work in generating these functional conversion symptoms. Perhaps hyp-notic suggestions can alter specific regions of the body's electromagnetic field according to the particular imagery held in the patient's mind; the neurologic pathways can be bypassed by these electromagnetic fluxes. As the mystics said, energy follows thought, and physiology follows energy;
perhaps electromagnetic fields are the mediators of these puzzling forms of energy transformation.
A modern variant of Mesmerism called Therapeutic Touch is being taught as part of the standard nursing school curriculum to thousands of RN's in America today. This technique also involves noncontact passes of the hands along the length of the patient's body and has been demonstrated to speed up the process of wound healing (see Reference 19, an extremely well-controlled scientific experiment) and to enhance the growth of prema-ture infants in a neonatal intensive care unit.14 In both studies, nonspecific expectancy effects were controlled for, eliminating placebo and hypno-sug-gestive factors. Therapeutic Touch has had to endure its own Royal Com-mission, with the recent notorious attempt to discount and debunk it in the Journal of the American Medical Association. for a critique of the article, see Reference 15b. Much has been written about direct hands-on approach to healing,5-6 and these phenomena also seem to be electromagnetically medi-ated. Chapter 3 will deal with the transpersonal trance aspects of hands on healing in greater detail. Clearly, further measurement of the DC fields and SQUID events accompanying these hypno-therapeutic processes will be cru-cial to validate this energy field model.
Another intriguing aspect of electromagnetic fields is that they can inter-act with one another by a process of resonance, much like tuning forks which vibrate in tandem. This process could explain how high-voltage transmission lines might induce human disease, by an entrainment process called biom-agnetic resonance2 that is mediated by electromagnetic fields rather than by direct radiation. Of interest to psychiatrists is a 30-year-old report which
correlates psychiatric hospitalization rates with fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field.12 The phase of the moon has been disproved as the signal generator (despite popular notions about "lunatics"), suggesting a process of magneto-behavioral resonance rather than one of direct astrological influ-ence (or maybe astrology is mediated by differing magnetic fields set up by the planets).
Finally, it has been speculated that clinical intuitions and hunches are a resonance phenomenon between the tuning forks of the therapist's and the patient's interacting electromagnetic fields. Particularly empathic ther-apists may simply have learned how to allow their emotional tuning forks to resonate in an unrestricted manner, while cold or distant clinicians may have clamped down their oscillation to the point where no interaction is percieved. Chapter 4 by John Tatum will explore this possibility in further detail.
The notion of "life energy" which pervades all non-Western healing traditions15 may have its roots in subtle bioelectric phenomena of the sorts outlined above. This field metaphor is quite fascinating and intuitively seductive, so hopefully more research will emerge to ascertain the validity of these images. The tests need be no more complex than to measure the strength and extent of these fields in radiantly healthy people (notice how our common figures of speech reflect this model), and compare them with the fields of severely ill people.