Supernatural (10 page)

But Mesmer is the father of modern psychology in a far more important sense.

One of his wealthier disciples in Paris was a marquis named Armand Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, surnamed Puységur, and he and his two younger brothers had paid Mesmer the vast sum of 400 louis for training in his techniques.
He then proceeded to apply them with enthusiasm to the servants and tenants on his estate at Buzancy, near Soissons, his first step being to ‘magnetise’ a lime tree in the park.
One of the servants was a 20-year-old shepherd named Victor Race, and Puységur proceeded to tie him to the lime tree, and to make ‘magnetic’ gestures in front of his face.
After a few ‘passes’, Victor closed his eyes and fell asleep.
The marquis ordered him to wake up and untie himself.
To his surprise, Victor untied himself without opening his eyes.
Then he went wandering off across the park.
Puységur was baffled; he knew he had induced some kind of a trance, but had no idea of its nature.
More than 2 centuries later, science is still in roughly the same position.

What Puységur had done, of course, was to stumble upon hypnosis—a technique that later came to be called (incorrectly) ‘mesmerism’.
(Mesmer himself preferred to call it somnambulism—the word hypnotism was invented in 1843 by James Braid.) And as he continued to practise on Victor, Puységur made some baffling discoveries—for example, that he could give Victor
mental
orders, and the shepherd would respond just as if they were spoken aloud.
Moreover, Puységur could hold conversations with Victor in which his own part was unspoken, and Victor would reply just as if he had spoken aloud.
Victor could even be made to stop speaking in the middle of a word.
Puységur describes in his
Memoirs in Aid of a History of Animal Magnetism
(1809) how he even got Victor to repeat the words of a song which he—the marquis—was singing mentally.
What was equally interesting was that Victor was normally a rather stupid young man, but that when hypnotised,
he became far more intelligent and perceptive.

That this was no fluke was proved in experiments with another subject named Madeleine.
In front of an audience, Puységur would place her in a trance, give her various mental orders—which she would carry out—then invite members of the audience to transmit to her their own mental orders—for example, asking her to pick up a certain object.
Again and again, without hesitation, Madeleine went straight to the object and picked it up.
To demonstrate that Madeleine was not simply wide-awake and peeping (in spite of having her eyes closed), he would blindfold her with a thick piece of cloth; it made no difference to her immediate response to mental suggestions.
One sceptic—a baron—suspected that Puységur had some code by which he communicated with Madeleine, and asked for the experiment to be conducted in the home of a mutual friend, M.
Mitonard.
Puységur agreed, and in Mitonard’s home, lost no time in hypnotising Madeleine and placing her ‘in rapport’ with Mitonard.
Mitonard when gave her various mental orders, and watched her carry them out.
Suddenly, Mitonard stood as if lost in thought.
After a moment, Madeleine reached into his pocket, and brought out three small screws she found there; Mitonard admitted that he had put them there for that purpose, and that now he was totally convinced.
So was another sceptic called Fournel, who had stated that nine-tenths of these strange ‘magnetic’ phenomena were due to fraud; but when Fournel himself was able to ‘mentally’ order a hypnotised subject—with blindfolded eyes—to go to a table, select a hat from a number of other objects, and put it on his head, he had to admit that fraud had to be ruled out.

Now quite clearly these experiments were among the most important ever conducted in the history of scientific research.
It obviously makes no difference if Fournel was correct in saying that nine-tenths of the people who performed such tricks in public were frauds; it is the other tenth that matters.
What Puységur had demonstrated beyond all doubt was that telepathy exists (although the word would not be invented for another century).
He, of course, thought it was ‘magnetism’—that his own magnetic current was influencing the hypnotised subject just as a magnet influences a compass needle.
Perhaps he was not entirely wrong.
Whatever the explanation, Puységur had virtually demonstrated ‘magic’ in public.
He had also totally undermined the kind of materialism that was becoming so fashionable at the time, and which asserted that man is a machine, and that the mind is a mere product of the body, just as heat and light are products of burning coal.
Puységur had proved that mind is in some way independent of the body and
higher
than the body.

His demonstrations should have caused the greatest sensation since the invention of the wheel.
Why did they not?
Because of the unfortunate accident of being associated with the highly suspect name of Mesmer.
Mesmer was a fraud.
‘Magnetism’ was really due to suggestion.
Therefore hypnotism was also a fraud, and all the demonstrations in the world failed to prove otherwise.
The hostility was so tremendous that ‘mesmerism’ was made illegal in France (and much the same in Austria), and a doctor who even expressed his support for the ideas of Mesmer—let alone practised them—could lose his license.
The medical profession was in a state of near-hysteria, determined to stamp it out, if necessary, with fire and sword.
Mesmerism remained—scientifically speaking—a pariah throughout most of the 19th century, and any doctor who became interested in it did well to keep silent.

The storm had still not blown itself out by 1809, when Puységur published his first book on hypnotism.
Anything to do with Mesmer was still regarded with the deepest hostility.
But many doctors took to heart Jussieu’s comment that the phenomena deserved further investigation, and conducted their own experiments.
D’Eslon—Mesmer’s original French advocate—recorded a case of a man who could play cards with his eyes closed.
A Dutch experimenter described a case of a hypnotised boy who could read with his fingertips and a girl who could read his mind and describe people and places he knew (but she didn’t).
A German experimenter described an epileptic boy who could distinguish colours with the soles of his feet, even when he had stockings on.
In Baden, a hypnotised girl correctly read a message in a sealed envelope—even though the hypnotist himself did not know what it was.
In Sweden, a professor described a girl who was able to read a book when it was placed open on her stomach, while her eyes were blindfolded.
This particular phenomenon was observed again and again with ‘sensitives’.
In England, a young schoolteacher named Alfred Russel Wallace—who was later to share with Darwin the honour of ‘discovering’ evolution—found that one of his pupils, under hypnosis, could share his own sense of taste and smell; when Wallace tasted salt, he grimaced; when Wallace tasted sugar, he made delighted sucking motions.
When Wallace stuck a pin in himself, the boy jumped and rubbed the appropriate part of his body.

What all this clearly demonstrated was that human beings have ‘unknown powers’ which are not generally recognised.
But since they are so easy to demonstrate in the laboratory, they obviously ought to be recognised.
Then why were they ignored?
Let us not be too harsh on those doctors and scientists who denounced Mesmer.
It was not pure stupidity and wickedness.
Science was simply not ready for these discoveries.
It was plodding along at its own slow pace, discovering electricity, atoms, meteorites.
(In 1768, the great chemist Lavoisier—who reported unfavourably on Mesmer—was asked by the French Academy of Sciences to go and investigate a great ‘stone’ that had fallen from the sky at a place called Luce.
His report stated that all the witnesses had to be mistaken, for ‘stones’ did not and could not fall out of the sky; it was not until the following century that the existence of meteorites was acknowledged by science.) If science had rushed on much faster, it might have been led into all kinds of untrue assumptions—as Mesmer was.

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Mesmer and Puységur would have shaken their heads in amazement if told that,
two centuries
after their discoveries, science still refuses to acknowledge them.
That is carrying conservatism to the point of sheer mulishness.

Of course, we now accept hypnosis as a reality.
That came about in the last decades of the 19th century, mostly through the researches of the great French doctor Jean-Martin Charcot, who ran the Salpêtrière Hospital (mostly for very poor patients) in Paris.
Charcot was puzzled by the phenomenon of hysteria—how a woman could believe she was pregnant, and her stomach swell up, or a man believe his arm was paralysed, and be unable to move it.
He soon discovered that he could induce exactly the same effects by hypnosis, and he gave amazing demonstrations in which people would drop on all fours and bark like dogs, or flap their arms when told they were birds, or even eat a lump of charcoal with relish when told it was chocolate.
Because Charcot was practising on poor down-and-outs, his rich medical colleagues did not feel threatened as Mesmer’s colleagues had.
And they were completely won over when Charcot announced his conclusion that hypnosis was just
another form of hysteria.
That made it perfectly all right.
Of course, Charcot was mistaken.
We can see perfectly well that, in fact, hysteria is a form of hypnosis; the hysterically pregnant woman has, in effect, hypnotised herself—convinced her unconscious mind that she is pregnant, so it causes her stomach to swell.
However, Charcot’s error had one excellent effect, in that it made hypnotism more-or-less respectable again.
And a young doctor called Freud, who had come from Vienna to study under Charcot, was deeply impressed by the phenomena of hypnosis, and reasoned that it must be caused by
some part of the mind which is far more powerful than our everyday consciousness.
So Mesmer’s discovery had led, in a roundabout way, to the foundation of modern psychology.

But Freud’s interpretation of hypnosis—that it merely demonstrates the enormous hidden powers of the unconscious—only confirmed the view that was originally held by Mesmer’s colleagues: that it was all a matter of ‘suggestion’.
If you tell a hypnotised man that you are about to touch his arm with a red-hot poker, and in fact you touch it with an icicle, he screams with pain, and will develop a blister.
This is merely a demonstration of the immense powers of the unconscious mind.
But it is not a case of ‘mind over matter’, for the unconscious is really a kind of gigantic machine—far bigger and more powerful than the puny mechanisms of the conscious mind.
Freud won over the scientists so easily because his view was so determinedly realistic.

But what if someone had asked Freud—or Charcot, for that matter—how a hypnotised girl could read a book placed open on her stomach, or obey orders given to her mentally?
How could
this
be explained in terms of ‘unconscious suggestion?’
The answer of course, is that it cannot be.
Which means that, as far as modern science is concerned, some of the most important findings of Mesmer, Puységur, D’Eslon, Alfred Russel Wallace and the rest, are still ignored.
Hypnosis is ‘suggestion’, and that is that.

It follows, of course, that no one can be induced to do something under hypnosis that he—or she—would not do when normally awake.
And yet, as we shall see, this is a highly questionable assertion.
Consider, for example, ‘the Story of the Wicked Magician Thimotheus’, as described by Professor Heinz E.
Hammerschlag in his book
Hypnose und Verbrechen
(
Hypnotism and Crime
):

‘One March evening in the year 1865, there was a knock at the door of an honest workman in the village of Solliès-Farliede (Bar).
He lived in the house together with his two children, a boy of fifteen and a girl called Josephine, aged twenty-six.
Josephine opened the door and was deeply frightened, without knowing what there was about the man standing there that could awaken such a feeling of terror.
Certainly he was ugly, unkempt, and club-footed; and he gave her to understand by a sign that he was a deaf-mute.
In addition, there was something about this terribly neglected man which filled her with fear, so that she would gladly have turned him away.
But her father had compassion for the pitiful state of the beggar; and he allowed him to come into their living-room and to join them at supper which was ready on the table.
During the meal Josephine had a chance of more closely watching this man, whose long black hair and untidy beard filled her with revulsion.
A cold shudder passed down her spine when she saw his strange habits while he ate.
When he poured out some wine for himself, he did not, for example, fill his glass at one time but usually put it down three times before it was filled, and never took a sip from the glass without first making a sign of the cross over it.

‘Later in the evening, some neighbours who had heard about the peculiar stranger called at the house.
The conversation was carried on very painfully with paper and pencil.
It emerged that the deaf-mute stranger was a cork-cutter named Thimotheus Castellan who had had to give up his occupation because of an injury to his hand and who now travelled through the country as a healer, magnetizer and water-diviner.
His signs and his mysterious behaviour made a great impression on the simple peasants.
Only Josephine, out of fear, remained silent.
When the stranger was later brought to the haystack for the night, she remained on the bed in her room fully dressed and for many hours could not fall asleep.
Nevertheless, the night passed without anything unusual happening.
The following morning, her brother was the first to leave the house to go to work.
He was followed afterwards by her father and the stranger.

‘Before some minutes had passed the beggar returned by himself to the house where he found Josephine occupied with her work.
She dared not turn him away, although the same feeling of anxiety overcame her as on the previous day.
He sat in silence near the hearth and watched the girl at her work.
Their silence was repeatedly interrupted by visits from neighbours who evidently regarded the stranger as someone endowed with unusual powers.
They observed him with astonishment and even brought him articles of food as presents.
Just as one of the neighbours, without being noticed, entered the kitchen he saw the stranger making mysterious signs with his hand behind the girl’s back.
Josephine herself seemed restless and excited and was obviously very glad to see any visitor who interrupted her isolation with the beggar, the cause of so much anxiety.
But towards noon she could no longer avoid being alone with him.
For they sat together at the mid-day meal, which she provided for him so as not to let him go away hungry.