History of Hypnosis - From Ancient Times to Modern Hypnosis

The history of Hypnosis starts from the early ages of civilization.

In ancient times, people used it for healing purposes, especially in religious ceremonies. For example, shamans entered in a process of strong visualization and suggestion during which he willed to heal the sick person. The first type of hypnosis started with animal hypnosis. In 1600-s, farmers calmed chickens hypnotically using different methods. In 1800-s people hypnotized birds, rabbits, frogs and others. B. Danilewsky experimented with animal hypnosis and studied its physiological workings in animals.

Austrian doctor, Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815), who is acknowledged as the “Father of Hypnosis” started a theory of “animal magnetism“. He believed that there was a quasi-magnetic in the every air we breathe and a “cosmic fluid” could be stored in inanimate objects, such as magnets and transferred to patients for curing their illness. He cured a 29-year-old woman, who suffered from a convulsive malady. During one of the woman’s attacks Mesmer applied three magnets to the patient’s stomach and legs while she concentrated on the positive effects of the “cosmic fluid”. Her symptoms subsided when Mesmer gave her this treatment. Mesmer believed that “cosmic fluid” more was directed through his patient’s body, her energy flow was restored and she regained her health in this way. Mesmer had great success treating thousands of people with “animal magnetism” and the process referred to as mesmerism.

One of Mesmer’s pupils Marquis de Puysegur (1751-1825) used “animal magnetism” on a young peasant. During the process he noticed that the patient could still communicate with him and respond to his suggestions. Puysegur thought that the will of the person and the operator’s actions were important factors in the success or failure of the magnetism and he believed that a “cosmic fluid” was not magnetic, but electric.

An English physician, John Elliotson (11791-1868) reported 1,834 surgical operations performed painlessly. A Scottish surgeon James Braid (795-1860) gave mesmerism a scientific explanation. He found that some experimental subjects could go into a trance if they simply fixated their eyes on a bright object. He believed that mesmerism is a “nervous sleep” and coined the word hypnosis, derived from the Greek word hypnos which means sleep.

French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893) used hypnosis to treat hysterics and categorized it as an abnormal neurological activity. Auguste Ambroise Leibeault (1823-1904) and Hippolyte Bernheim (1837-1919) were the first who regarded hypnosis as a normal phenomenon.

Freud interested in hypnosis and read Bernheim’s book on hypnosis “De la Suggestion” to find a physiological explanation of suggestion in the nervous system. As he observed patients enter a hypnotic state, he began to recognize the existence of the unconscious. However, Freud rejected hypnosis as the tool to unlock repressed memories, instead favoring his techniques of free association and dream interpretation. With the rise of psychoanalysis in the fist half of the 20-th century hypnosis declined in popularity.

The modern study of hypnosis is usually considered to have begun in the 1930s with Clark Leonard Hull (1884-1952) at Yale University. His work Hypnosis and Suggestibility (1933) was a rigorous study of the phenomenon, using statistical and experimental analysis. Hull’s studies demonstrated that hypnosis had no connection with sleep (“hypnosis is not sleep, … it has no special relationship to sleep, and the whole concept of sleep when applied to hypnosis obscures the situation“).

Hypnotherapy has been widely used in World War I, World War II and the Korean War. Hypnosis techniques were merged with psychiatry and were especially useful in the treatment Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.In 1950s medicine started to use hypnosis for therapy. In 1955 British Medical Association recognized hypnosis therapy and in 1958 the American Medical Association approved a report on the medical use of hypnosis 2 years after AMA approval, the American Psychological Association endorsed hypnosis as a branch of psychology.

Today, hypnosis is highly effective and popular medical tool and it is widely used for habit control – stop smoking, weight control, stress reduction and other health problems

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