Customer Reviews

Hypnotism: A History

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I've been reading at Mesmerism and Hypnosis for years and this is the best single volume yet. This one gives a very clear lineal history of the transition from Mesmerism to Hypnotism, listing WHO added/deleted/discovered WHAT to the process.

I think it would be most interesting to go back to the early practices and re-examine them for further use..the various practices did different things and had different uses!

At any rate, you needn't hesitate to buy this one if the historical subject is on interest to you. Very highly recommended. Nicely done.

The book deals with the history of what is now called hypnotism from its beginnings as animal magnetism under Mesmer, to the present. One feature of that history is the appearance of what, for its first century, were called the "higher phenomena" of [animal] magnetism/mesmerism ~ telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, contact with spirits; phenomena that are now mistakenly called paranormal (I say "mistakenly", because these phenomena are normal enough, just not as common as other phenomena that are called normal). These "higher phenomena" didn't occur regularly, & there were researchers & practitioners who never encountered them. But they occurred often enough, & spectacularly enough, that a history of the subject has to mention them & to deal with them.

There are essentially three ways in which to approach the "higher phenomena". One can, on the basis of the evidence, simply accept them. Acceptance can be critical or uncritical, but given the immense amount of evidence for their occurrence, acceptance doesn't automatically imply the abeyance of one's critical faculties. One can be skeptical about them, & this is usually the case when one is honest enough not to reject the evidence out of hand, but finds oneself unable to square their occurrence with other views to which one is committed. One can debunk them. That is to say, having a strong prior commitment to a doctrine that one could no longer maintain if the occurrence of these "higher phenomena" were allowed, one refuses to accept the evidence as anything but an indication of how uncritical, deluded, self-deluded, deceptive, or naïve people can be. Since the best evidence is plentiful & quite strong, the debunker is unable to handle these matters honestly. He must impute the claims of having observed such phenomena to honest defects of character or circumstance. If that won't serve in a given case, then fraud in its several varieties is brought in to account for the phenomena. If that won't work, then the matter simply misrepresented. & if that won't work, then the matter is simply disregarded & passed over in silence. Forrest is a debunker, & he uses all four methods in his book to maintain that there are no "higher phenomena" in the history of magnetism/mesmerism/hypnotism. & as with practically all the work of debunkers, the result is intellectual dishonesty.

To begin with, in dealing with any subject that involves significant consideration of the psychical, an author should have the decency to state in a preface his attitude towards such matters, & what he takes to be the justification of his attitude. The author's statements might affect a prospective buyer's choice: he might conclude that the author's views preclude an adequate or accurate treatment of the subject. Forrest says nothing about his attitudes concerning the psychical in his preface, & I regard that as a defect of the book.

We first learn of Forrest's attitude in the following passage: "On one occasion Puységur was mentally rehearsing a song to himself, when Victor, in a crisis, began to sing the words aloud. Puységur considered this more than a remarkable coincidence, & before long had convinced himself that Victor could read his thoughts, because Victor would reply to his unspoken questions; furthermore, he found that he apparently had the power, by thinking, to stop Victor's thoughts whenever he wished, or to change them completely. Without postulating a telepathic possibility one can only presume that Puységur was unintentionally giving cues to Victor, either by faint whispering or by small movements of which he was himself unaware." [p 72] Apart from such a degree of tendentiousness in the language of the foregoing account as to misrepresent the matter, why is the possibility of telepathy dismissed out of hand? Forrest wants, for that occasion, to resort to co-incidence as an explanation. For other matters, he wants to presume actions that he has no right to presume. Not having been present, & having no evidence to warrant the claim, Forrest is in no position to claim that unintentional cues were given at any time. Since Forrest doesn't want to accuse Puységur of fraud & he doesn't want either to accept the possibility of telepathy or to overwork the claim of co-incidence, he has to go beyond his evidence to make claims that he can't justify. Forrest in fact knows nothing about unintentional cues, & has no evidence to back up his claims. His prior commitments, not anything in the subject itself, require him to go beyond the evidence in the way that he does. Telepathy in the foregoing is quite possible, & the reports suggest it. Co-incidence is a claim easy to assert on no grounds, & impossible to deny. Best would be to state what is reported to have happened without editorializing (of which the citation above is a mild sample in Forrest's discussion of Puységur), & let the reader draw his own conclusions. [To wit: On one occasion, Puységur was mentally rehearsing a song to himself, when Victor, in a crisis, began to sing the words aloud. Before long, Puységur found that Victor could read his thoughts, because Victor would reply to his unspoken questions; furthermore, he found that he could stop Victor's thoughts whenever he wished or to change them completely. ~ These are the reports.]

Another tendentious account of a different sort: "[Baron du Potet] was not above using stage-tricks, as in his apparent demonstration of thought-transference [telepathy] between father & daughter somnambulists. The audience was assembled in a darkened room, from which two identically furnished & darkened rooms led off. Each subject was led to one of these rooms, &, at a signal from Du Potet, began to behave similarly, picking up a particular object & bringing it at exactly the same moment to the entrances to the audience's room, where the objects were illuminated by candles held up by the spectators. Both brought a cup & then a book, & then a fan, & so it went on. A simpler explanation than thought-transference would be to suppose prior instruction by Du Potet or collusion between the subjects, & the possible use of a mnemonic code to remember the order in which the objects were to be picked up." [p 124] If the subjects were indeed hypnotized, then collusion between them is quite unlikely. So this leaves the claim of fraud by du Potet. First, the psychical explanation is always the simplest explanation, as being the most direct. That is, what seems to have happened, actually did happen. If this conflicts with any preconceptions, so much the worse for the preconceptions. If there is something in science that doesn't allow it, so much the worse for science ~ which even at its best is incomplete, limited, & inadequate (incomplete, in that the sciences taken together do not provide a complete knowledge of the physical world; limited, in that the sciences taken together cover only those aspects of the physical world that can be brought under general rules [& therefore not such matters as history]; inadequate, in that, unless the totality of what exists is material, the sciences can give no accurate & balanced account of reality as a whole). Forrest's claim that fraud is a simpler explanation is wrong. On the other hand, to say that some explanation (whether psychical or not) is the simplest, is not to say that, in any given case, it's the correct explanation. It may be or it may not be. But the truth of the matter isn't determined by extraneous considerations like prior commitments, or indeed, even simplicity. Second, Forrest has absolutely no reason to suggest fraud on the part of du Potet even as a possible explanation. Ignoring any sources outside Forrest's book, nothing else that Forrest mentions about du Potet earlier in this chapter & in later chapters remotely suggests fraud, & actually implies the opposite. Indeed, later, on the same page, Forrest cites without objection the following testimonial to du Potet's character: "I really believe him to be an honest, enthusiastic man, engaged with his whole soul in pursuing what seems to him the most important of all discoveries. [...] He is honest, I am sure; how much truth he may possess I am at present quite unable to say." But when it suits Forrest's purposes (which is to say, when he can't come up with a genuine alternative explanation), he will ascribe fraud.

The preceding material comes at the end of a chapter devoted to "Vision without eyes", in which Forrest discusses a number of incidents in order to debunk all claims of telepathy & clairvoyance. The foregoing citations from Forrest's text show plainly that he can't state matters simply when he deals with the psychical, but has to impose a good deal of editorializing, & at least his account of Mlle Pigeaire additionally contains some mistakes that benefit his argument. But Forrest's efforts to debunk the evidence will be persuasive only to those unfamiliar with the evidence of psychical research, especially that concerning clairvoyance, since all his arguments can be decisively rebutted. This chapter is further weakened by significant omissions. The material presented gives the impression of mesmerism beginning in Austria with Mesmer, & then passing with him to France, before passing to Britain (& to some degree the United States), before going back to France ~ all between, roughly, 1765 & 1890. In fact, there was significant interest in mesmerism all over Europe beginning right after the Napoleonic Wars, & much important work was done in Germany, Russia, & Scandinavia. The reader would not even begin to suspect that. Moreover, in the work done elsewhere on the continent, the "higher phenomena" weren't absent, & the evidences for them were sometimes better than those to be found in France. Second, Forrest says nothing about one of the best tests of "Vision without eyes", conducted in Britain between a group of debunkers & a group of believers, in which the debunkers confessed themselves defeated after the test, & paid the money that had been bet on its outcome. But the most important omission is the absence of any discussion of the Didier brothers in France, particularly Alexis Didier, famous for his clairvoyance. This was tested on numerous occasions, very often spontaneously, & he had numerous successes. The only thing that the debunker might claim against him is that he had a network of spies to provide the information, an implausible claim that can't begin to be substantiated, & would account for very little in the main tests even if it could be proven. To take one instance, the renowed magician Jean Robert-Houdin, whose repertory covered much the same ground, tested Alexis Didier, & concluded that Didier was quite genuine. (Robert-Houdin was the magician in admiration of whom Erich Weiss adopted the stage-name of Houdini. A network of spies wouldn't cover tests of that sort.) So Forrest misrepresents the history of mesmerism by his omissions, & of course, leaves out the evidences that he can't debunk.

& then there is another series of misrepresentations by omission.
"Although Charcot was not exactly anticipated by his magnetic forebears, there is enough to lead us to conclude that his three stages & their concomitant physical modifications were derived from them. The reasons why these earlier magnetists reached their particular classificatory systems need not detain us." [p 251] As a matter of fact, D Veliansky, a professor of the Imperial Academy of St Petersburg, drew up a table of the stages/depths of trance about half a century before Charcot, important enough to mention if the work done outside of France had been reviewed. But Veliansky's table, superior to Charcot's, finds a place for the "higher phenomena", & that's sufficient reason not to discuss it.

"Braid's death made one fact apparent: he had no disciples & had developed no school. In Great Britain interest dwindled rapidly, & publications in the 1860s & 1870s were few. It was not until the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 that serious research into hypnotism was resumed. In the meantime Braid's work had been taken up in France, & it was in that country that the death throes of animal magnetism were to be witnessed, at the great Salpêtrière hospital." [p 212] & the history proceeds with two chapters, accurate within their misleading limits, devoted to Charcot, Janet, & the school of Nancy, & then goes on to a parochial discussion of the 20th century. In the course of the discussion of the school of Nancy, Forrest says, "& so on. Never, however, was the subject seen to perform acts of which he was normally incapable, & no trace of paranormal powers was ever exhibited." [p 234] "[N]o trace of paranormal powers": in context, the statement is irrelevant, & there is no reason for that topic to be mentioned. It is the last time in the history that anything having to do with the psychical is mentioned, however, & the implication is that once we come to the modern age of investigation, any suggestion of psychical powers in connection with hypnotism disappears ~ as if to say, once methods of research become adequate, & observation becomes scientific, the psychical vanishes from the subject. Some pages earlier, in a citation from a speech by Charcot, Forrest adds a similar irrelevancy (about Puységur) that happens to be mistaken. But as I pointed out at the outset, the "higher phenomena" were rare, & Veliansky's table of stages has the virtue of showing why they would be rare. Yet why, after mentioning that serious research in Britain was resumed with the Society for Psychical Research, does Forrest not discuss it? After all, if he had condensed the two chapters devoted to Charcot & the school of Nancy (the first half of the chapter on Charcot is quite irrelevant to the history, although interesting in itself), the four chapters devoted to Mesmer, & the overdone chapter on the Okey sisters, he might have had space to deal with other developments that were important. But Forrest says nothing about the SPR or about Julien Ochorowicz, or indeed certain things about Charles Richet, because to mention them would require discussion of some very strong evidences of the psychical ~ a discussion that would show that what Forrest represents as the modern development is quite mistaken. Moreover, the "higher phenomena" don't disappear in the twentieth century, or with the introduction of "science" into the investigation of hypnotism. Quite the opposite. We have the work of Pagenstecher in Mexico City in the 1920s with Maria Reyes de Zierold (Señora de Z in the literature); & of L L Vasiliev in the Soviet Union over many years up to 1963, to mention only two important instances of many. We have xenoglossy & past-life regressions. Now in the case of these two, much has come up that's dubious at best or clearly false. Nonetheless, there are cases that can't be dismissed.

I give the book two stars because it's not altogether worthless. The discussions of Mesmer & the irrelevant portion of the discussion of Charcot are useful & reliable, & the discussions of the 20th century are useful within their extremely narrow limits. But the omissions misrepresent the subject, & there would have been ample space for the omitted material if the irrelevancies had been left out & if needlessly expanded accounts had been significantly condensed. The main problem however, is that Forrest is committed to a view that requires certain evidence & events to be excluded or to be misrepresented, & people to be mischaracterized. Consequently, much of the book is simply unreliable & dishonest.