The first real hypnotist, Franz Anton Mesmer (from whom we of course get the modern word Frank), arrived in Paris in 1778. Mesmer believed there was a quasi-magnetic fluid that flowed through our bodies and indeed the whole universe, and that interrupting the flow of this energy caused the various ailments from which we suffer. We would do well to keep this man in mind when we listen to certain of our friends talking seriously about ‘chi energy’ or psychic healing. Firstly with magnets, and then with his hands, he would cure his patients by making magical passes over their bodies to realign this mystical force.
Mesmer’s methods were fantastically theatrical. He is reported to have seated his patients around a tub of water and iron-filings, their knees pressed together to allow the magnetic ‘fluid’ to flow between them. Long rods would protrude from the bath, and these would be used to heal afflicted areas of the body. Music would play, while attractive assistants provided a highly tactile service that generally induced the ladies to suffer convulsions. Mesmer would only then appear in a purple robe carrying a huge magnetic staff; he would calm them by moving the end of the rod against their faces, stomachs and breasts. (That is what the modern NHS should be petitioned to fund, not nonsenses like homoeopathy. Prince Charles, take note.) These outrageous displays seemed to encourage what in modern terms would be seen as a psychosomatic release of suppressed sexual tension, and certainly Mesmer seemed to encourage noisy or violent responses to his strange passes. Eventually, two Royal Commissions discredited Mesmer’s methods and attributed any strange phenomena to his patients’ imaginations rather than an invisible cosmic fluid. Though they might just have been disappointed that they didn’t get their breasts touched.
However, interest in Mesmer and his followers spread, and it was John Elliotson (1791–1868) who led the animal magnetism movement here in Britain, combining it with his interest in phrenology (the now discredited study of the bumps on the skull to determine character). Naturally, the medical profession was extremely set against it, although one John Esdaile, a surgeon stationed in East India in the 1840s, shortly before chemical anaesthetic was made widely available, reported that he had carried out some three hundred operations using the ‘mesmeric sleep’. In 1819, a Portuguese priest, the Abbé José Custudio di Faria, was the first practitioner to separate the effects of mesmerism from the notion of magnetic influence. Di Faria asked his patients to close their eyes and enter a sleep state without the use of magnetism or Mesmer’s histrionics, and noted that his influence was due to suggestion rather than magical control.
The term ‘hypnotism’, please bear with me, was first coined by James Braid, a Manchester surgeon, in 1841. He saw the trance state as one of nervous sleep and named it after ‘Hypnos’, the Greek god of pretending to have sex with a mop on stage. Braid had his patients fix their gaze on a bright light and was able to achieve results without any quasi-epileptic symptoms or even the paranormal side-effects that had begun to be claimed by the magnetists. Indeed, at this time the new wave of knowledge regarding such things as electricity and the human nervous system rendered old-fashioned magnetism laughable to serious scientists, and the respectable community lost interest in it.
Most influentially after Braid came the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. He regarded hypnosis and ‘hysteria’ (epilepsy) as aspects of the same underlying neuropathological condition. His subjects were all female epileptics, and it has been suggested that this alignment of early hypnotic practice with the release of what we now see as epileptic symptoms, even from Mesmer’s time, seems to be responsible for the persistence of many modern-day classic hypnotic phenomena. The classic ‘tests’ for suggestibility used in clinical research into hypnosis, which involve trance states and different forms of catalepsy, may be a perverse throwback to the days of epileptic ‘demonstrations’. It’s a chilling thought.
Charcot’s rival was Hippolyte Bernheim (1837–1919) at the University of Nancy, who moved hypnosis away from set procedures with hysterics and promoted verbal suggestion and work with other
ailments. Probably known unfairly at school as ‘Hippo the Nancy Boy’, his became the preferred approach, and Nancy became a popular therapeutic centre. However, by the turn of the twentieth century interest in hypnotism was dwindling in Europe, and that was followed by a decline in America and Britain. Hypnotherapists found patients harder to hypnotize, and other therapeutic methods became prevalent. A while later, Freud’s works on psychoanalysis became popular and hypnosis was all but forgotten as a serious therapeutic tool. It was only with the later discovery of huge X-ray glasses that allowed the subject to see the audience in the nuddy that serious clinicians became interested again in the field.
Many claim that the American Milton H. Erickson (1901–80) is the father of modern hypnotherapy, and from the 1920s he worked to encourage a ‘permissive’ approach to therapy: the commanding ‘you will’ language of the hypnotist shifted to a new ‘you can’. Perhaps as patients grew more educated than they were in hypnotism’s heyday, the stern, flamboyant image of the hypnotist, still shaped by the figure of Mesmer, grew less appropriate. And perhaps the self-obsession of the modern American, let alone the modern Californian, where the industry was to eventually take off, necessitated a more patient- (or ‘client’-) centred approach. Erickson suffered from polio throughout his life, but used auto-hypnosis, or self-hypnosis, to control the severe pain he had to endure. He was unorthodox, famous for his indirect methods and clever ways of handling resistance, and he felt there were no bad subjects, only inflexible hypnotists.
Anyone who develops an interest in modern hypnotic techniques soon sees that Erickson is revered with a sense of the magician in a way that Mesmer would have encouraged for himself. He certainly had the same penchant for purple clothes as his predecessor. Reading about Erickson and his miraculous successes through his principal devotees, one sees that the magical reputation survives primarily due to the telling and re-telling of remarkable anecdotes. The following is randomly taken from a website on Ericksonian therapy, and is an anecdote (as given on the site) regarding anecdotes (told by Erickson to the boy) which go back to an anecdote that would have been written by Erickson or told about him at some point. It gives a flavour both of Erickson’s style and the respect he provokes from his followers.
Often, Erickson didn’t use a formal trace [sic] induction. Instead he talk [sic] stories that has [sic] a deeper meaning. Sometimes that meaning was clear, most times it was not. At least not to the person’s conscious mind. For example, a twelve-year-old boy was brought in to see Erickson about bedwetting. Erickson dismissed his parents and began talking to the boy about other topics, avoiding a direct discussion about bedwetting altogether. Upon learning that the boy played baseball and his brother football, Erickson elaborated on the fine muscle coordination it takes to play baseball, compared to the uncoordinated muscle skills used in football. The boy listened raptly as Erickson described in fine detail all the muscle adjustments his body automatically makes in order to position him underneath the ball and catch it: the glove has to be opened at just the right moment and clamped down again at just the right moment. When transferring the ball to another hand, the same kind of fine muscle control is needed. Then, when throwing the ball to the infield, if one lets go too soon, it doesn’t go where one wants it to go. Likewise letting go too late leads to an undesired outcome and consequently to frustration. Erickson explained that letting go just at the right time gets it to go where one wants it to go, and that constitutes success in baseball. Therapy with this young man consisted of four sessions that included talks about other sports, boy scouts, and muscles.* But bedwetting was not discussed, and ‘formal hypnosis’ was not conducted. The boy’s bedwetting disappeared soon thereafter.
It is an odd tale that vaguely makes me want to go to the toilet, and equally as fascinating as another I read of a boy with the same affliction treated by Erickson. This other boy, if I remember correctly, was
approaching his tenth birthday and Erickson again made no attempt to ‘correct’ his behaviour. Instead, he told the parents to stop insisting their child wear a ‘bedwetter’ placard to school and to cease punishing their son. However, as he left, he turned to the family and said, ‘Of course he wets the bed; he’s just a baby nine-year-old. I’m sure a big grown-up ten-year-old wouldn’t do that.’ The result was that the child stopped wetting the bed on his tenth birthday, the idea being that he wanted to be seen as a grown-up. Another great story, and there are many hundreds like this to capture the imagination of one interested in the power of communication.
There is a dilemma here which typifies much post-Erickson hypnosis and its Frankenstein grandchild, neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. The ‘permissive’ approach encourages the telling of anecdotes to the client which, though they may be fictitious, indirectly suggest a therapeutic change. Certainly this would seem to be a common-sense tool where one might wish a person to see a difficult situation in a more helpful light. However, the methods by which the techniques of Ericksonian hypnotherapy and NLP are actually taught to student practitioners tend to reflect the methods employed in the therapy itself. For example, one such method for teaching which is widely used is that of exactly this sort of anecdote- telling, and much of the evidence of the efficacy of Ericksonian hypnotic techniques (and NLP) comes from these anecdotes rather than from any actual testing or documented case histories. Many verbatim transcripts are given of ‘sessions’, but these tend to be far less juicy than the tales told of, and by, the people responsible. In fact, in NLP, the subject of testing is generally mocked (with the amused disregard for fact shared by true believers of any kind). So there is an interesting conundrum: anecdotes are told about the miraculous changes created by the founders of these schools with little importance paid to how accurate the facts are in order that they might inspire the student to approach his work with an attitude of creativity, of ‘anything is possible’, and to achieve the artistic level of competence of the people he hears unfounded stories about. The shining stars of the field are tagged with another buzzword, ‘genius’, and become the sum of their anecdotes.
In these approaches, which sprang from or were popularized by the sixties mentality of ‘change your head, don’t change the world’, it does become hard to separate fact from fiction. It has also been shown that Erickson didn’t always report his clinical work accurately, and some have questioned how effective some of his thinking seems to be. For example, Erickson’s way of encouraging his daughter to ‘get over’ orthodontic treatment she underwent was to say to her, ‘That mouthful of hardware that you’ve got in your mouth is miserably uncomfortable and it’s going to be a deuce of a job to get used to it.’ Displaying some doubt about Erickson’s claims for himself, the scientist McCue wrote, ‘The authors [Erickson and Rossi, 1980] contend that the first half of the sentence acknowledges the daughter’s discomfort and the second half, beginning with “and”, “is a suggestion that she will ‘get used to it’ and not let it bother her”. To the present writer, however, the sentence implies that the recipient of the hardware will have considerable difficulty in getting used to it.’
Erickson was clearly a fascinating, charismatic and effective individual who richly impressed the people who wrote about him. Tales will always abound about such seemingly inspiring figures. They are always fun or inspiring to read. Therapeutic approaches are very hard, though by no means impossible, to subject to any real testing, and it remains for the wave of Ericksonian practitioners to prove the worth of his ideas by recreating his magic. Sadly, most therapists tend to be strangers to charisma, so I suspect that, regardless of what magic touch Milton really had, his real legacy has been merely to facilitate a shift of attention among many therapists from ‘hypnosis’ per se into ‘heightened communication’ – something apotheosized by the world of neuro-linguistic programming, which we will look at a little later.