A User's Guide to the Millennium by J. G. Ballard

Author:J. G. Ballard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Magnetic Sleep

From Mesmer to Freud

Adam Crabtree

The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime. One-time pioneers are suddenly demoted and deemed to be little more than package tourists. Sigmund Freud, far from being the heroic first explorer of the unconscious mind, now seems to be one of the last to step off the gangway, as Adam Crabtree makes clear in this account of the precursors of psychoanalysis.

The unlikely figure who first raised the curtain on the era of modern psychology was Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician born in 1734, whom I have always associated with ouija boards, stage hypnotists and other assorted quackeries. In fact, he was a sceptical physical scientist deeply opposed to all paranormal phenomena. While practising as a doctor he became interested in the power that magnets seemed to exert over the workings of the human body. A Jesuit priest, with the daunting name of Father Hell, had developed a cure for stomach cramps involving the use of iron magnets. Mesmer’s careful experiments convinced him that currents of force, which he dubbed ‘animal gravity’, moved beneficially between doctor and patient. The most important magnet, he believed, was the human body, and he enjoyed a remarkable run of success, treating everything from haemorrhoids and paralysis to epilepsy and melancholia.

Despite his immense fame, Mesmer was distrusted by the orthodox medicine of his day, but he was able to pass on his torch to the most remarkable of his French pupils, the Marquis de Puységur, a former artillery officer intrigued by the phenomenon of electricity. After being trained by Mesmer at his Society of Harmony in Paris, Puységur turned his skills upon the daughter of his estate manager, who was suffering from toothache, and began a series of experiments that Adam Crabtree claims were to alter the course of psychiatry for ever. While laying on his hands, Puységur discovered that his patients sank into what he termed ‘magnetic sleep’. This was a state of sleep-walking consciousness during which the patients became extremely suggestible, developed an intense rapport with the therapist, but on awakening remembered nothing. It clearly foreshadowed both Freud’s therapeutic couch and the spotlit stage of the music-hall hypnotist.

Mesmer always believed his powers of healing were physically based, but Puységur was confident that the therapeutic benefits of the magnetic trance were wholly psychological. Indeed, many physicians were already worried about the painful secrets revealed by the entranced patients and the dangers of ‘unhealthy’ sexual attachment. Puységur, one observer noted, placed his hands on the head of a woman patient, gently tickled her nostrils and ‘pressed on her breasts in a manner that her nipples would have felt a slight rubbing’. In ‘lively and sensitive women’ convulsions occurred, with sudden movements of the arms and legs, the discharge of ‘the sweetest emotions’, followed by a state of languor and weakness. Surprisingly, the observer noted, the women felt no guilt and were ready to repeat the experience.

Well,

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