A history of hypnotism

For generations, the history of mesmerism and animal magnetism has been trivialized in inaccurate, anecdotal, sensationalistic accounts. However, with these two massive, intricately detailed, and admirably comprehensive studies, this has changed. Practitioners generally require a present-day context for studying a medical-historical figure or movement; the inspirations for these two volumes are the contemporary revival of interest in hypnotherapeutics and the rapid growth of the diagnostic category multiple personality. Alan Gauld is senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Nottingham and has written widely on hypnosis and parapsychology; Adam Crabtree is an English-Canadian clinical psychologist in private practice, who in 1988 published the most complete bibliography available of writings on animal magnetism and early hypnotism. With overlapping interests and backgrounds, Gauld and Crabtree have coordinated enormous quantities of primary source material to produce what are likely to remain the best informed and most authoritative accounts of their subject for a long time to come. The two volumes, which complement one another beautifully, brim with interesting historical and clinical material. Both books start with the life and work of the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth century and then trace their stories up to the early twentieth century. A sequence of ideas and events first set out in 1970 by the Swiss psychiatric historian Henri Ellenberger is here reconstructed in great narrative and textual detail: the formulation of Mesmer's ideas of animal magnetism in Vienna during the 1770s and 1780s; Mesmer's fashionable, therapeutic salons in Paris during the late Enlightenment; the censorship of his ideas and practices by an eminent royal commission in 1784; the Marquis de Puysegur's psychologization of Mesmer's ideas; the spread of mesmerism to other French cities and countries; its post-Napoleonic reappearance in France in popularized, bastardized forms; the mid-century revival of interest in Britain with Charcot's academic legitimation of hypnotic phenomena in the early 1 880s; the controversy between the schools of the Salp&riere and Nancy; and the role of hypnotic research in the origins of twentieth-century dynamic psychiatries. Gauld concludes with a historical sketch of twentieth-century developments and his own compact theory of hypnosis, while Crabtree reflects on the current preoccupation with multiple personality and dissociative disorders. Not the least striking aspect of this historical subject is the vast quantity of writing-virtually thousands of books, pamphlets, lectures, case reports, and autobiographies across 125 years-that it generated. A serious interest in mesmerism and hypnosis …