The phenomenon of hypnosis has been described in various forms from early biblical days.
Research suggests its role was significant, especially in the areas of religious experience and healing. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians and Greeks developed ‘Dream Incubation Centres’, where people came to fast and pray, hoping to have a dream which would lead them from their problems. It is highly probable that many of these dreams were hypnotically induced.
The earliest recorded evidence of hypnotic practice dates back to the early 1500’s; with a guy with one of the most hypnotic names in history; Philip Areolus Theothrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim (1493-1541) (known for brevity as ‘Phil’, actually no, he was known as ‘Paracelcus’), He was a Swiss physician who believed in the idea that the stars had some influence over human behaviour.
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He believed also that it was the magnetic nature of the stars that held their alleged influence and that all magnets could thus have some effect on the human body.
Paracelcus’ theory that all space was filled with this ‘magnetic fluid’, was taken up by Van Helmont in 1577, who developed it to include the idea of ‘Animal Magnetism’. This suggested that humans were able to emanate a magnetic field, which could have influence over the minds and bodies of others.
This principle of magnets having a potential healing power led to a great many magnetic healers practising over the next hundred years.
One of the most famous practitioners of the art of Magnetic Healing was a Jesuit priest, the unusually named Father Maximilian Hell. Both his teaching and writings promoted a popular understanding and enthusiasm for astronomy and magnetism, spreading Hell’s reputation throughout Europe.
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His magnetic medicine attracted the attention of a young man named Franz Mesmer, recently graduated from the Jesuit University in Bavaria.
Mesmer was to become possibly the most notorious of all the magnetic healers and the man with whom most modern descriptions of hypnosis began.
Franz Anton Mesmer was born in Vienna and is considered the father of hypnosis. He is remembered for the term Mesmerism which described a process of inducing trance through a series of passes he made with his hands and/or magnets over people. He worked with a person’s animal magnetism (their psychic and electromagnetic energies). The medical community eventually discredited him despite his considerable success treating a variety of ailments.
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The term hypnosis was introduced in the 1840s by a Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795-1860), who believed the subject to be in a particular state of sleep--a trance.
In the late 19th century, a French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893) thought hypnotism to be a special physiological state, and his contemporary Hyppotite-Marie Bernheim (1840-1919) believed it to be a psychological state of heightened suggestibility.
Sigmund Freud, who studied with Charcot, used hypnosis early in his career to help patients recover repressed memories. He noted that patients would relive traumatic events while under hypnosis, a process know as abreaction. Freud later replaced hypnosis with the technique of free associations.
Today, hypnosis is used as a form of therapy (hypnotherapy), a method of investigation to recover lost memories, and research tool.