The development of concepts, beliefs and practices related to hypnosis and hypnotherapy stretches back hundreds of years. Although often viewed as one continuous history, the term hypnosis was coined in the 1880s in France, some twenty years after the death of James Braid, who had adopted the term hypnotism (in 1841) — which specifically applied to the state of the subject, rather than techniques applied by the operator — to contrast his own, unique, subject-centred, approach with those of the operator-centred mesmerists/animal magnetists who preceded him.
Historical definitions De Cuvillers coined the terms "hypnotism" and "hypnosis" as an abbreviation for "neuro-hypnotism", or nervous sleep. Braid popularised the terms and gave the earliest definition of hypnosis. He contrasted the hypnotic state with normal sleep, and defined it as "a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye, on one object, not of an exciting nature." Braid elaborated upon this brief definition in a later work, Hypnotic Therapeutics:
The real origin and essence of the hypnotic condition, is the induction of a habit of abstraction or mental concentration, in which, as in reverie or spontaneous abstraction, the powers of the mind are so much engrossed with a single idea or train of thought, as, for the nonce, to render the individual unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, all other ideas, impressions, or trains of thought. The hypnotic sleep, therefore, is the very antithesis or opposite mental and physical condition to that which precedes and accompanies common sleep Therefore, Braid defined hypnotism as a state of mental concentration that often leads to a form of progressive relaxation. Later, in his The Physiology of Fascination (1855), Braid conceded that his original terminology was misleading and argued that the term "hypnotism" or "nervous sleep" should be reserved for the minority (10%) of subjects who exhibit amnesia, substituting the term "monoideism", meaning concentration upon a single idea, as a description for the more alert state experienced by the others.
Pre-19th century
Predecessors to Mesmer Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980–1037), a Persian psychologist and physician, was the earliest to make a distinction between sleep and hypnosis. In The Book of Healing, which he published in 1027, he referred to hypnosis in Arabic as al-Wahm al-Amil, stating that one could create conditions in another person so that he/she accepts the reality of hypnosis.
In Western cultures, hypnotism evolved out of a sometimes skeptical reaction to the much earlier work of magnetists and Mesmerists. Paracelsus (1493–1541), a Swiss, was the first physician to use magnets in his work. Many people claimed to have been healed after he had passed magnets (lodestones) over their bodies. An Irishman by the name of Valentine Greatrakes (1628–1682) was known as "the Great Irish Stroker" for his ability to heal people by laying his hands on them and passing magnets over their bodies. Johann Joseph Gassner (1727–1779), a Catholic priest of the time, believed that disease was caused by evil spirits and could be exorcised by incantations and prayer. Around 1771, a Viennese Jesuit named Maximilian Hell (1720–1792) was using magnets to heal by applying steel plates to the naked body. One of Father Hell's students was a young medical doctor from Vienna named Franz Anton Mesmer.
Franz Anton Mesmer
Western scientists first became involved in hypnosis around 1770, when Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), a physician from Austria, started investigating an effect he called "animal magnetism" or "mesmerism" (the latter name still remaining popular today). The use of the (conventional) English term animal magnetism to translate Mesmer's magnétisme animal can be misleading and needs to be seen in this context:
Mesmer chose his term to clearly distinguish his variant of magnetic force from those referred to at the time as mineral magnetism, cosmic magnetism and planetary magnetism. Mesmer felt that this particular force/power only resided in the bodies of animals, including humans. Mesmer developed his own theory and was himself inspired by the writings of the English physician Richard Mead, the father of our understanding of transmissible diseases. Mesmer found that, after opening a patient's vein and letting the patient bleed for a while, passing magnets over the wound appeared to be an active force making the bleeding stop. Mesmer additionally discovered that using a stick instead also "worked". After moving to Paris and becoming popular with the French aristocracy for his magnetic cures, the medical community challenged him. The French king put together a Board of Inquiry that included chemist Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin, and a medical doctor who was an expert in pain control named Joseph Ignace Guillotin. Mesmer refused to cooperate with the investigation and this fell to his disciple Dr d'Eslon. Franklin constructed an experiment in which a blindfolded patient was shown to respond as much to a non-prepared tree as to one that had been "magnetised" by d'Eslon. This is considered perhaps the first placebo-controlled trial of a therapy ever conducted. The commission later declared that Mesmerism worked by the action of the imagination.
Although Mesmerism remained popular and "magnetic therapies" are still advertised as a form of "alternative medicine" even today, Mesmer himself retired to Switzerland in obscurity, where he died in 1815. A student of Mesmer, Marquis de Puységur, first described and coined the term for "somnambulism". Followers of Puységur called themselves "Experimentalists" and believed in the Paracelsus-Mesmer fluidism theory.
Abbé Faria
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