Every year at my kids’ school (where my husband also teaches), a hypnotist comes in to entertain the audience. Everyone looks forward to this night because it’s so amazing to watch someone get hypnotized.
The seniors get first dibs on volunteering, and before our amazed eyes the hypnotist calls a group of them onto the stage and puts them into a hypnotic trance. Then, through the powers of suggestion, he gets them to do all kinds of hilarious stuff in their post-hypnotic state, like barking or shouting stuff when he gives them a verbal cue. And every year, more than a few members of the audience also get hypnotized, or at least fall into a trance-like state in their seats, just watching him.
Hypnosis is a different level of awareness, not sleep, not wakefulness, but some sort of extra-ordinary state of consciousness. And what’s amazing is that after two centuries of using hypnosis, scientists really aren’t sure how it works, or what the underlying mechanism is.
The earliest practitioner of altering his patients’ states of consciousness was a Viennese physician named Franz Anton Mesmer (1734 – 1815). He formulated a somewhat dodgy theory that we have a magnetic fluid that courses through our bodies, and that the level of it determines our health. He believed this fluid could be controlled by treating patients with magnets. Mesmer also believed he had learned to control a patient’s “animal magnetism” with his own will. The practice became known as “mesmerism” (and yes, that’s where the word mesmerizing comes from) and for about twenty years, Mesmer was quite a celebrity, even attracting the attention of the French King Louis XVI. But then the king appointed a royal commission to investigate Mesmer’s findings. It included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, and after months of assessing Mesmer’s techniques, the panel concluded that there’s no actual channel of magnetic fluids in the body. Mesmer’s theory was discredited and his reputation was ruined, and he died in obscurity.
But his followers picked up the ball and continued to “mesmerize” patients. The first recorded use of hypnosis (although not yet called that) was as a form of anesthesia in surgery, in 1829, but although hypnosis slowly gained acceptance among physicians as a legitimate treatment for pain and illness, they didn’t talk about it much, for fear of ruining their reputations. Then in the 1840s, a surgeon named James Braid (pictured below), who had a stellar professional reputation, became convinced of its effectiveness and named it hypnosis, after the Greek god of sleep, Hypnos.
Today’s it’s become a legitimate procedure to treat all kinds of things like chronic pain, phobias, smoking, overeating, and fear of dental procedures.