History of hypnotism in Europe and the significance of place.

Abstract

Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism , Alison Winter's Mesmerized , Daniel Pick's Svengali's web , Andreas Mayer's Sites of the unconscious and, most recently, William Hughes' That devil's trick , have elucidated the scientific as well as the popular cultures in which mesmeric and hypnotic practices thrived in the nineteenth century.1 By the end of the nineteenth century – that is, the time on which the articles of this special issue focus – hypnotism was a common topic of medical, legal and public debate in several European countries. The therapeutic potential of hypnotic suggestion was balanced against the dangers of a mental state that made the individual a seemingly powerless subject of the hypnotizer's will and commands. Risks to individual and collective mental health, of sexual abuse of hypnotized persons, and of criminal suggestions were widely invoked whenever hypnotism was discussed. The ‘magnetic’ treatments by lay healers and the popular performances by stage hypnotists such as Donato (Alfred Edouard D'Hont) and Carl Hansen, who toured Europe, caused political concerns about public health and public order, leading to calls for the banning of hypnotic practices or for restricting their use to qualified medical men. Indeed, hypnotism appears to have been a practice around which a number of acute popular anxieties coalesced during the nineteenth century, including fears related to psychological contagion, crowds, race, class and gender.2 In the scientific discourse, the pendulum of opinion had begun to swing from Jean-Martin Charcot's school at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, which interpreted hypnosis as an induced pathological state of the nervous system, to Hippolyte Bernheim's school at the University of Nancy, which saw it as a psychological state resulting from suggestion. In some instances, however, the idea of pathology was hard …