No. 11 Mesmer, Quimby & Hypnotism
Performance & The Subconscious Mind- Part 11 Mesmer, Quimby & Hypnotism
Posted on February 16, 2011 by Richard Matteson
Hi,
Understanding the Subconscious Mind
Anton Mesmer
You are getting sleepy- your mind is floating as if on a cloud. Sleepier and sleepier……….
Before you drift off in hypnotic trance, you may want to read this blog. It’s a real eye-opener!
As we saw in my last blog, Judge Troward looked to hypnosis as a validation or proof of the subconscious. So today we will look at hypnosis as a means to understand the subconscious. We’ll focus on two historic figures Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (February 16, 1802 – January 16, 1866). Today is Quimby’s birthday!
The study of hypnosis (derived from the term neuro-hypnotism or “nervous sleep” and coined by the Scottish surgeon James Braid around 1842), originally called “Animal Magnetism,” began with Mesmer’s thesis Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu of 1766, which he wrote for a doctorate in medicine at the University of Vienna. In this treatise Mesmer developed the notion of “animal gravitation,” a force which he considered to be both the cause of universal gravitation and the foundation for all bodily properties, and which he believed to affect organisms in the most intimate way. Mesmer believed that animal gravitation connected living things to the stars and was the basis for healthy functioning, since it harmonized the body in a fashion comparable to the tuning of a musical instrument. [Crabtree]
Mesmer’s interest in invisible forces found concrete expression in his early medical practice, where he experimented with using iron magnets to treat illness. Spurred on by success, Mesmer enthusiastically turned his attention to revising his theory of “animal gravitation.” Retaining his central idea of a universal force that is the foundation for health and disease, he renamed that force “animal magnetism,” in his 1779 “Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism,” finding it to possess many of the characteristics associated with mineral magnetism. [Crabtree]
What’s interesting to me is that new trends in understanding how the universe works (quantum physics) and how matter and energy are transmitted resemble Mesmer’s energy theories formulated before the US became a country!
Magi of Persia and Yogi of India have practiced a form of self-hypnotism for the last 2,400 years, for religious purposes, throwing themselves into their ecstatic trances by each maintaining a steady fixed gaze at the tip of his own nose. [Braid]
Many of the “law of attraction” concepts are thousands of years old and many books were written about these concepts in the early 1900s- over 100 years ago.
Here’s some information about Mesmer’s theories in his words from an article by Cathrine Albanese:
Mesmer taught of an invisible fluid that acted as medium for all living things. “Between ether and elementary matter,” Mesmer had written, “there exist series of matter succeeding each other in fluidity.” Mesmer went on to explain that there was one “among these fluid substances…which corresponds essentially and is in continuity with that which animates the nerves of the animal body.” It followed, for Mesmer, that “everything which exists can be experienced, and that animated bodies, finding themselves in contact with all of Nature, have the faculty of being sensitive not only to beings, but also to events which succeed one another.” It was through this “extension of instinct,” Mesmer explained, “that a sleeping man can have an intuition of disease and can distinguish, from among all substances, those which contribute to his preservation and cure.”
Mesmer’s universal fluid, as specified in the animal body, produced one important source of a habit of mind that eroded the distance between matter and spirit. His vision suggested the empowerment of humans for perfection. [Mesmer, Swedenborg and Quantum Physics by Catherine L. Albanese]
Although Mesmer’s enegry field or universal fluid is not the focus of this blog it is in some ways similar to Toward’s universal subconscious mind of which the subconscious operates.
It is the connection with the universal subconscious mind that information is transmitted to the subconscious mind. A number of healers including Mesmer and later Quimby and Edgar Cacye used this energy channel.
The subconscious mind can be accessed through hypnosis and sleep or sleep-like trance states. In many documented cases a person under hypnosis can access information not available from their own subconscious mind. Curiously Mesmer did not discover hypnosis, it was Frenchman Armand Puységur, who published in 1784 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal in Paris:
A work of great significance for the history of modern psychology. Puységur was an artillery officer in the army, a colonel of the regiment of Strasbourg. A member of an old and distinguished family, he had inherited a large property in Buzancy near Soissons and spent most of his time there looking after his land and occasionally carrying out experiments with electricity. Having heard about animal magnetism and its marvelous curative powers, he went to Paris to learn from Mesmer.
Returning to his estate at Buzancy, he began to use animal magnetism to alleviate the ills of local residents. Among the first he treated was a peasant named Victor Race who was suffering from a fever and congestion of the lungs. When applying the magnetic passes to the man, Puységur noticed that Victor had fallen asleep. This sleep was not, however, a normal one, for he could still communicate with Puységur. While in this state Victor showed himself to be extremely suggestible and even seemed, in Puységur’s estimation, to be able to read his magnetizer’s thoughts. When returning to his normal state of consciousness, Victor remembered nothing of what had happened. Puységur also noted that there seemed to be a specially close relationship between himself and Victor, a relationship that he would later (Suite de Mémoires, entry number 148) call an “intimate rapport.” He also was struck by the dramatic change in personality that Victor underwent between the state of magnetic sleep and his normal state: in the latter he was of rather ordinary or even slow wit, while in the former he became extremely bright, perceptive, and articulate.
Puységur termed this newly discovered condition “magnetic sleep” and “magnetic somnambulism,” since he immediately noticed the similarity between this state and that of natural “somnambulism” or “sleep-walking.” Puységur went on to further investigate this state through experimentation with other patients. He noted that they all showed the same characteristics as the ones that Victor had demonstrated. His work with Victor and subsequent investigations are described in the Mémoires. Puységur’s discovery of artificial somnambulism started a whole new trend in the practice of animal magnetism, shifting the emphasis from the physical to the psychological. The alteration in consciousness between the state of magnetic sleep and the normal waking state, with its attendant amnesia, revealed, within human beings, a double or divided consciousness with two memory chains. This revelation opened up a new line of investigation that would eventually lead to the psychological concepts of the “subconscious,” the “subliminal self,” and the “unconscious” in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The second edition (1809) and the third and most complete edition (1820) are supplemented by the Suite de Mémoires (entry number 148) which further develops the discoveries of the Mémoires. [Crabtree]
After that, magnetizers by the hundreds repeated Puységur’s experiment, and they confirmed what he had found (Crabtree 1988). It soon became clear that human beings have two different states of consciousness, one their daily state of awareness and the other a state of consciousness that is ordinarily hidden, but can be brought to light by inducing magnetic sleep.
Magnetizers called this dual state “double consciousness.” It is interesting to note that the more they experimented with double consciousness in magnetic sleep, the more they discovered naturally occurring double consciousness. And in the 1790′s the first true cases of dual personality or multiple personality were reported.
It was Charles Poyen ( – 1844), a disciple of Puységur and self-proclaimed professor of Animal Magnetism, who brought these concepts to the US from France in 1836.
What is known of his career in America comes almost entirely from his Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, published in 1837. Upon his arrival in America, Poyen began to tour New England, lecturing and giving demonstrations of animal magnetism.
Bringing volunteers from the audience to the stage, Poyen frequently succeeded in inducing trance and eliciting the usually associated phenomena. While the circus-like atmosphere of these mesmeric entertainments was hardly calculated to add to the scientific credibility of mesmerism, Poyen’s lecture-demonstrations, as Fuller (1982) has suggested, did effectively stimulate “the public’s imagination with novel ‘facts’ about human nature”.
As stage mesmerism spread, it became part of a much broader American cultural movement away from established religion and toward an esthetic religiosity that stressed the achievement of inner harmony through self development, exploration of the heretofore hidden powers of the human mind, and transcendental contact with higher spiritual planes and powers (God, the ether, magnetic fluid, cosmic vibrations).
When Poyen came to Belfast, Maine, on a lecture circuit about mesmerism around 1836, Phineas Quimby attended. Two years later after listening to a Poyen lecture he began plying the mesmerist with questions about the nature of animal magnetism and its powers.
Poyen admitted that with proper training, anyone could become adept at administering hypnotism. Intrigued, Quimby left his job as watchmaker and followed Poyen’s tour of New England for the subsequent two years (1838–1840), until he became proficient at applying mesmeric hypnotism himself.
Around this time, it was Quimby’s good fortune to encounter Lucius Burkmar, an uneducated youth who was particularly susceptible to hypnosis. Quimby and Lucius began a tour of their own, practicing mesmeric demonstrations in front of large crowds.
First published in The New England Magazine, 1888:
Mr. Quimby’s manner of operating with his subject [Burkmar], was to sit opposite to him, holding both his hands in his, and looking him intently in the eye for a short time, when the subject would go into that state known as the mesmeric sleep, which was more properly a peculiar condition of mind and body, in which the natural senses would or would not, operate at the will of Mr. Quimby. When conducting his experiments, all communications on the part of Mr. Quimby with Lucius were mentally given, the subject replying as if spoken to aloud.
Quimby and Burkmar
For several years, Mr. Quimby traveled with young Burkmar through Maine and New Brunswick, giving exhibitions, which at the time attracted much attention and secured notices through the columns of the newspapers.
It should be remembered that at the time Mr. Quimby was giving these exhibitions, over forty-five years ago, the phenomenon was looked upon in a far different light from that of the present day. At that time it was a deception, a fraud, and a humbug; Mr. Quimby was vilified and frequently threatened with mob violence, as the exhibitions smacked too strongly of witchcraft to suit the people.
As the subject gained more prominence, thoughtful men began to investigate the matter, and Mr. Quimby was often called upon to have his subject examine the sick. He would put Lucius into the mesmeric state, who would then examine the patient, describe his disease, and prescribe remedies for its cure.
After a time Mr. Quimby became convinced that whenever the subject examined a patient his diagnosis of the case would be identical with what either the patient himself or someone present believed, instead of Lucius really looking into the patient, and giving the true condition of the organs; in fact, that he was reading the opinion in the mind of some one, rather than stating a truth acquired by himself.
Becoming firmly satisfied that this was the case, and having seen how one mind could influence another, and how much there was that had always been considered as true, but was merely some one’s opinion, Mr. Quimby gave up his subject, Lucius, and began the developing of what is now known as mental healing, or curing disease through the mind.
Quimby simply cured people with the belief in his mind. His patients including Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, who cited Quimby as inspiration for theology, were cured by their belief. More from The New England Magazine, 1888:
Instead of putting the patient into a mesmeric sleep, Mr. Quimby would sit by him; and, after giving him account of what his troubles were, he would simply converse with him, and explain the causes of the troubles, and thus change the mind of the patient, and disabuse it of its errors and establish the truth in its place; which, if done, was the cure.
He sometimes, in cases of lameness and sprains, manipulated the limbs of the patient, and often rubbed the head with his hands, wetting them with water. He said it was so hard for the patient to believe that his mere talk with him produced the cure, that he did this rubbing simply that the patient would have more confidence in him; but he always insisted that he possessed no “power” nor healing properties different from any one else, and that his manipulations conferred no beneficial effect upon his patient.
He never went into any trance, and was a strong disbeliever in Spiritualism, as understood by that name. He claimed, and firmly held, that his only power consisted in his wisdom, and in his understanding the patient’s case and being able to explain away the error and establish the truth, or health, in its place. Very frequently the patient could not tell how he was cured, but it did not follow that Mr. Quimby himself was ignorant of the manner in which he performed the cure.
If you haven’t fallen into a deep sleep or trace yet- be my guest. What we have examined in this blog is the power and nature of the subconscious mind as revealed by hypnotism originally called animal magnetism.
We’ll look at how this information relates to performance in another blog. Hypnotism is one direct way to help performance anxiety. Self-hypnotism or auto-suggestion is another.
More to come,
Richard