The Encyclopaedia of Liars and Deceivers by Roelf Bolt

Author:Roelf Bolt [Bolt, Roelf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781780233123
Google: t95sAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1780232713
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2014-06-14T18:30:00+00:00

MESMER’S ANIMAL MAGNETISM

Theologist and doctor Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) studied medicine in Vienna. He was a man of the Enlightenment, and strangely enough, it was this that made him go astray. Inspired by Sir Isaac Newton’s ideas on gravity, Mesmer assumed that human health too was influenced by the planets. His dissertation, published in 1766, was entitled De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body).

In the early 1770s Mesmer met Maximilian Hell, a Jesuit who told him about how he had used magnets to heal diseases. Mesmer combined his own theory with Hell’s practical insights. In 1773 he treated a chronic hysteric, Fräulein Österlin, by giving her a fluid containing iron. When he then moved magnets over her body, she experienced flows of energy running through her. Österlin was cured. Soon after, Mesmer discovered that he did not even need magnets. Just moving a finger over the body was enough to influence what he called ‘animal magnetism’. This was a subtle fluid which fills the cosmos and circulates between planets and people. When the magnetism can run freely through the body, a person is healthy, while obstructions cause illnesses.

To Mesmer there was nothing supernatural about his theory; he considered animal magnetism as real as gravity. One important difference however, as we now know, is that gravity exists while animal magnetism does not.

In 1777 Mesmer treated Maria Theresia Paradis, a seventeen-year-old pianist who had been blind since she was three. The result that Mesmer claimed to have achieved illustrates that he was becoming less and less enlightened and more and more of a quack. Maria Theresia was able to see again, but only when Mesmer – and no one else but Mesmer – was present. The laughing stock of Viennese physicians, he was forced to leave the city and settled in Paris, where magnetic treatments soon became fashionable. He managed to increase his income considerably by no longer treating his patients individually but in groups, a method that proved even more medically successful.

The secret of Mesmer’s therapy had nothing to do with animal magnetism. His pseudo-therapy relied on suggestion and autosuggestion. A patient like Fräulein Österlin would be told beforehand what would happen during the treatment: ‘The animal magnetism cannot run freely through your body and your hysteria is the result. By manipulating the flow of the animal magnetism we are going to remove this blockage. When the blockage has been removed, your hysteria will be healed.’ Mesmer knew how to present this in a sufficiently persuasive way to influence how the patient experienced her own body. Although Mesmer would have hated the idea, as he thought he was dealing with a purely physical force, he is considered one of the founders of psychology. The reason the group treatment in Paris worked better than individual treatment was because of contagion. Individual patients might have felt inhibited in surrendering themselves fully to Mesmer. But when they saw that someone else was responding to the treatment, they felt more free to respond themselves.

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