Mind and Body; or, Mental States and Physical ConditionsAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Mind and Body; or, Mental States and Physical Conditions
Atkinson, William Walker
Mental suggestion
Mesmer made many wonderful cures, and attracted wide attention. In
1781 the king of France offered him a pension of thirty thousand
livres if he would make public his secret. The offer was refused, but
he gave private instruction and opened a school. He had many pupils
and followers, prominent among whom was the Marquis de Puysegur, who
made discoveries resulting in the identification of Mesmerism with
the "trance condition" now commonly associated with the term, whereas
originally Mesmerism included simply the healing process. Mesmer's
methods continued popular for many years after his death, until Braid's
work resulted in the founding of the modern school of Hypnotism, and
Mesmerism died out.
The Abbe Faria, about 1815, after investigating Mesmerism and
attracting much attention, discarded the "fluidic" theory of Mesmer,
and held, instead, that in order to induce the mesmeric state and
to produce the phenomena thereof, it was necessary merely to create
a mental state of "expectant attention" on the part of the patient.
The cause of the state and the phenomena, he held, was not in the
operator but in the mind of the patient--purely subjective, in fact.
Alexander Bertrand, a Frenchman, published a work about this time,
holding theories similar to those of Faria. In 1841 James Braid, an
English physician, becoming interested in Mesmerism, discovered that
the mesmeric state might be artificially induced by staring at bright
objects until the eyes became fatigued, etc., and, later, that any
method whereby concentration and "expectant attention" might be induced
would produce the phenomenon. He duplicated all the feats of the
mesmerists, including the healing of diseases. He called his new system
"Hypnotism" to distinguish it from Mesmerism, and under its new name it
gained favor among the medical fraternity. Moreover, in connection with
his predecessors, Faria and Bertrand, he laid the basis for the modern
theories of Suggestive Therapeutics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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