Hypnotists
These psychologists worked against
demonizing mental illnesses and towards searching for alternate causes of
mental illness.
1725-----1750-----1775-----1800-----1825-----1850-----1875-----1900-----1925-----1950-----1975-----2000
--------Mesmer------------ ----------Charcot----------
----------Puysigur----------- ---------------Janet-------------
Used magnetic treatment to “cure” patients, spoke out against exorcism as a way to cure mental disease.
After many successes, Mesmer began to believe that anything he touched became magnetic, and then that he didn’t need an object at all, but rather he himself was such a strong magnetic force that he could use his hands to heal, called himself a “healer”
In the late 1700s, Mesmer claimed to have restored someone’s sight but that it was only alone with him that they were able to see, resulting in him being forced out of Vienna and move to Paris where he became very popular and began healing his followers in groups rather than individually.
The switch to group healing also found a switch in methodology; Mesmer would use magnetism in order to produce a “crisis” in his patients. Once one patient began having a crisis, the others would soon follow.
While the church accused him of being in consort with the devil, the French medical profession accused Mesmer of being a charlatan.
A king’s commission was organized to examine Mesmer’s claims, after conducting several experiments (water wasn’t really mesmerized, no one was mesmerizing behind the door) they claimed that positive results were due to the imagination.
Marquis
de Puysigur: 1751-1825
Replaced Mesmer’s healing crisis with a sleeplike trance
Patients are suggestible in the trance and then have amnesia about it
Patients are also susceptible to posthypnotic suggestion.
A number of people investigated the use of hypnotism as an alternative to anesthesia during a surgery, but before it was accepted, anesthetic gases were discovered and made hypnotism obsolete as an anesthetic.
James Braid was an important figure in terms of making hypnotism respectable. He claimed that it was the suggestibility of the patient rather than any special powers of the hypnotizer that was the basis of its success.
The
Jean-Martin
Charcot: 1825-1893
A very successful neurologist in charge of La Salpetriere
Hypnotizability indicates hysteria because they have similar symptomology
Eventually concluded that hysteria has a psychological origin, not an organic one, induced by ideas, or imagination after a traumatic event.
Believed that hysteria could be the result of repressed traumatic memories, and that a therapist should uncover these memories and make their patient aware of them.
Janet called his method psychological analysis, and claimed that it preceded Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Had many of the same ideas as Freud but was never as well known.