Mind Control in the 19th Century

So, beginning with the pioneering experiments of Flourens, around 1825, the first discoveries related to this question came only when he and other anatomists and physiologists developed new experimental methods to intervene directly into the brain, and to see the results of these interventions on the behavior of animals. These methods were:

1. Selective surgical ablation of parts of the brain of animals;
2. Faradic and galvanic (i.e., steady or pulsed electrical) stimulation of the brain of animals and humans;
3. Clinical studies, i.e., patients with neurological or mental deficits had their brain studied after their death, in an attempt to correlate them with detectable alterations in the brain tissue.

Brain Maps The Study of Brain Function in the Nineteenth Century

Flourens started by using localized lesions of the brain in rabbits and pigeons. He was able to demonstrate convincingly for the first time that the main divisions of the brain were responsible for largely different functions. By removing the cerebral hemispheres, for instance, all perceptions, motricity, and judgment were abolished. The removal of the cerebellum affected the animal's equilibrium and motor coordination, while the destruction of the brain stem (medulla oblongata) caused death. These experiments led to the conclusion that the cerebral hemispheres are responsible for higher cognitive functions, that the cerebellum regulates and integrates movements, and that the medulla controls vital functions, such as circulation, respiration and general bodily stability.

On the other hand, he was unable (probably because his experimental subjects have relatively primitive cortices) to find specific regions for memory and cognition, which led him to believe that they are represented in a diffuse form around the brain. So, different functions could indeed be ascribed to particular regions of the brain, but that a finer localization was lacking.

For the next 30 years, this was the predominant view, until a series of clinical discoveries in France and Germany, related to the pathology of language, provided a clue that higher mental functions had, indeed, a specific localization in the cortex. In addition, new experiments with more precise electrical stimulation of the cortex surface in primates and dogs, in England and Germany, provided a stronger case for strict localizationism of function.

Pierre Paul Broca	Carl Wernicke

The clinical approach was pioneered by the French physician Pierre Paul Broca. In a classical work, carried out around 1860, he studied the brain of several aphasic patients (that is, they could not talk; one of them, who became the most famous, in fact was able to utter just one word: tan). After his death, Broca discovered that Tan's brain had a relatively small zone destroyed by neurosyphillis, which was delimited to one side of the anterior brain hemispheres (cortex). This part of the brain later became known as Broca's area, and it is responsible for the control of speech (motor expression of the language). His studies were confirmed by several neurologists, including John Hughlings Jackson, the doyen of British neurologists, who was able to confirm the laterality of function in aphasic patients, and to provide a major conceptual integration of functional localization in the brain, by means of his "hierarchical" theory. This was based on the observation that higher functions such as thought and memory, were less affected by lesions than lower ones, such as the control of respiration and circulation.

More or less at the same time, a German neurologist, Carl Wernicke, discovered a similar area in the temporal lobe, which, when lesioned, led to sensory deficit in language, i.e., the patient was unable to recognize words, although he or she could hear sounds quite well. Wernicke thought that his area (which was named after him) was connected by fiber systems to Broca's area, thus forming a complex system responsible for understanding and talking.

Brain Maps The Study of Brain Function
in the Nineteenth Century

"Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was born in 1832 in Neckarau, in a small town in southern Germany. Wundt entered the university at Tubingen when he was 19, transferred to Heidelberg after half a year, and graduated as a medical doctor from the university in 1856. He stayed on at Heidelberg for the next seventeen years, working first as a professor's assistant, and later as a professor himself, in the field of psychology. Psychology, at that time, meant simply the study (ology) of the soul (psyche), or mind."

Psychology has a noble heritage.  I'm fond of telling the story about St. Thomas Aquinas -- the man I think could be called the first "psychologist."  Click here for an article on him.  In 600 short years we went from the Devout St. Thomas to the Devil in Dr. Wundt!

The Destruction Of American Education
Leading To Death of Learning

1863-1903. John D. Rockefeller's Charity Index Cards: "A Subject Guide to John D. Rockefeller's Charities." Separate links lead to hundreds of donations to "Institutions, Churches and Missionary Organizations [both Baptist and Non-Baptist], Social Welfare and Moral Reform... Education - Schools and Universities, Culture, Arts, Conservation, Environment, Emergency Relief, Promotion of Knowledge, Civic Life, Public Policy & Politics, Medical and Health Care...

"Rockefeller & Global Mind Control

Rockefeller's goal was not so much "charity" as it was to establish control over the many facets of society he influenced - first, to "redeem" the Rockefeller family name and second, to mold the future directions and goals of these parts of society to follow his own personal agenda, and third, to create a long-term market for the products of Standard Oil.

1870 - Electrical stimulation of the brain in anesthetized dog evoked localized body and limb movements. Fritsch and Hitzig, 1870

The brain is excitable. Electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex can produce movements.

José Delgado's Physical Control of the Mnd

"In 1874, Wundt left Heidelberg to take a position as professor of philosophy at Zurich. He stayed there for only a year, and then accepted a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, in Germany. He was to remain at Leipzig for the rest of his academic career, eventually being appointed rector of the university. Wundt died in 1920."

"Those are some of the vital statistics. What they omit is that Wundt was the founder of experimental psychology and the force behind its dissemination throughout the western world."

"To Wundt a thing made sense and was worth pursuing if it could be measured, quantified, and scientifically demonstrated. Seeing no way to do this with the human soul, he proposed that psychology concerns itself solely with experience."

"Wundt asserted that man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism. He set out to prove that man is the summation of his experiences, of the stimuli which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.

The Leipzig Connection  Sabotage of the US
Educational System -- Chapter 1

This belief that man is devoid of spirit and self-determination has come to the be the core foundation of all government mind control research of today, as clearly expressed by researchers such as Jose Delgado.

Before Wundt, the subject of psychology was largely philosophical in nature and dealt with the spirit, soul and mind. Wundt 's activity "redefined psychology as a physiological rather than a philosophical subject." Basically, everything previously considered to be a fundamental part of man - spirit, mind, soul, feelings, will, intention, hopes, and ideas - came to be ignored and explained as only being a response to external stimuli and physiology. Per Lionni, "What was will? For Wundt, will was the direct result of the combination of perceived stimuli, not an independent, individual intention as psychology and philosophy had, with some notable exceptions, held up to that time".   (Source -- Chapter 1)

The Destruction Of American Education
Leading To Death of Learning

"Wundt established the new psychology as a study of the brain and the central nervous system. From Wundt's work, it was only a short step to the later redefining of the meaning of education. Originally, education meant the drawing out of a person's innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc. - the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve. To the experimental psychologist, however, education became the process of exposing the student to "meaningful" experiences so as to ensure desired reactions:

• " ...learning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction... The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurons, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences.

"If one assumes (as did Wundt) that there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, and a nervous system, then one must try to educate by inducing sensations in that nervous system. Through these experiences, the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the "correct" response."

"Wundt's thesis laid the philosophical basis for the principles of conditioning later developed by Pavlov (who studied physiology in Leipzig, in 1884, five years after Wundt had inaugurated his laboratory there) and American behavioral psychologists such as Watson and Skinner; for lobotomies and electro-convulsive therapy; for schools more oriented toward the socialization of the child than toward the development of intellect; and for the emergence of a society more and more blatantly devoted to the gratification of sensory desires at the expense of responsibility and achievement."  (source)

Most study of the nature of the human soul, "psychology" has been done with animals.  Dr. Skinner is one of the most famous for teaching chickens, pigeons and rats to "behave" based on conditioning them.

Before I go on to say more about Pavlov, did you get that paragraph above?  Education based on conditioning, based on modern psychology, simply requires that you offer various rewards or punishments  -- to achieve learning. So, we have now had several generations of our population whose only goal is to earn enough money to buy food, sex and drugs.

This is the "me too" era of our times.  Gratification comes first because the absence of any moral rules, and the belief that man is an animal -- these give one little reason to adopt any spiritual values.  "Life for the day!"

The Russian Pavlov was a student under Dr. Wundt, and later became famous for his experiments with dogs.  Most people have heard of Pavlov ringing a bell to "condition" the dog to salivate. What most people don't know is that Pavlov also used torture and electric shock to condition the dog.  In other words he used punishment and reward to condition the dogs.  In Russia they mostly used his punishment approach to rule the people.  In the US business has tried the reward approach to motivate workers, but neither one works when it is a conditioning, with no understanding of the mind.

You notice this use of the word "condition."  In fact the Wundt approach to education was, simply to condition the child to react properly to certain stimuli!  The picture on the left is one of Dr. Pavlov performing surgery on the brain of a dog!  The others in the photo are psychiatrists, hoping to learn from the Master Pavlov!

Here's Wundt's pupil, Pavlov:

One of Pavlov's most important findings was exactly what happens to conditioned behavior patterns when the brain of a dog is "transmarginally" stimulate by stresses and conflict beyond its capacity for habitual response. He could bring about what he called a "rupture in higher nervous activity" by employing four main types of imposed stress. The first was, simply an increased intensity of the signal to which the dog was conditioned; thus he would gradually increase the voltage of the electric current applied to its leg as a food signal. When the electric shock became a little too strong for its system, the dog began to break down. (source)

You may already see where this is leading?  More modern psychologists insert electrodes into the brains of living animals, and then send electricity into the brain -- looking for ways to "teach" the cat???

The photo above is a living cat with electrodes inserted through the skull, into the brain.  When this is done delicately, it appears that the cat is not affected -- until the electricity is turned on!

Can children be far behind?  Is it being done, already, perhaps outside the US?  Can we "teach" this way without the electrode?

A neurosurgeon named Feodor Krause went even to the extreme length of stimulating the cortical convolutions of anesthetized patients who were being submitted to brain surgery for the removal of tumors. His mapping of the motor areas of the cortex were remarkably accurate, and provided a background for more modern investigations in patients with local anesthesia, such as the experiments carried out by Wilder Penfield in the 40s and 50s.

Brain Maps The Study of Brain Function in the Nineteenth Century

NOTE: A very interesting resource for those interested in more is Brain and Mind magazine online. It takes a pro-psychology stance, but provides some unique insight into the research being done and the questions being asked.

Another form is noise shock treatment which involved firing a cannon behind somebody without them knowing that it was going to happen. Again, the idea was to use a form of violent cure because of a theory of violent possession. 

Interestingly enough, even electric shock treatment has a history in antiquity. It did not... We did not need the development of electricity to have electric shock. The ancient Egyptians used to take a torpedo fish and slap it on the forehead of people who were possessed, and the fish would discharge an electric current, and that's the earliest record of electroshock treatment. 

This is a device that nobody can ever guess the importance of. It's an ovary compressor, and I'll leave it to your imagination to, to consider how painful it must be to have experienced it. 

Seclusion & Sensory Deprivation

Seclusion in its worst form is the Wooden Crib or Restraining Bed. This is a form of containment in which you can see that person is totally strapped into a crib with no way to move. This, however, was not the worst form of restraint. It took a leading psychiatrist to develop that. 

The Rush Chair or Restraining Chair was also used to limit motion and reduce sensory stimulation by covering the head and blocking vision.

Another device used to induce a state of shock was the rotating chair. A person could last only a few seconds in this chair without becoming nauseous and eventually losing consciousness.  Below are three different versions of the rotating chair that were used in the early days of psychiatric treatment.

And then there was the tranquilizing chair, all of these devices were used in the late #1800's, the last two of them were developed by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration Of Independence, and his face appears on the seal of the American Psychiatric Association as its founder. It's not my desire to criticize psychiatry here, but rather to make the point, in terms of mind control, that we began studying the human mind and mental illness with a theory of possession and a theory of cure based on violence, and from that we'll see the various refinements. 

Perhaps the first of the refinements, and the one that's notoriously wrong, was the leading psychological theory of the 1800's, and that is phrenology -- that you can measure the exterior of the brian or rather of the skull in order to understand the interior of the mind, and this is an illustration of a phrenologist's chart, the theory being that there is a direct correlation between a person's characteristics as an individual, and their skulls and the lumps and other aspects to be found on the skull. 

The theory, of course, is completely wrong, but it occupied a good deal of the 1800's and was the leading theory of psychology at that time. It led to further variants in terms of face- reading. The importance of the theory is not that it was wrong, but rather that it led people to begin to try to measure internal states. And so, from an erroneous theory people began to look inside the brain to see how you can find external correlations with the brain, and we come across what I think is the great paradox in all of healing, and that is that the more you learn how to cure people the more you learn how to harm them, and for every step forward in relieving mental illness you can take a step backwards in causing it. 

And so, for people whose interest is in control of the mind, their data comes from how to help the mind, and so there is no step forward that does not involve equally, in the hands of malevolent people, a step backwards. 

Hypnosis

The idea of mind control turned more serious however and in our concerns more contemporary when we come to hypnosis. This is Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. Of course, hypnosis is not sleep and so the name itself is deceptive as to the mechanism of hypnosis.  

Hypnosis began the modern era with Mesmer, whose theories were also wrong.  they were not only wrong, they were also plagiarised, on inter planetary or planetary magnetism affecting mental states and so forth. 

What Mesmer really happened upon without realizing it was the beginning of the idea of the laws of suggestion, and what he did is set up what is called a baquet, and you can see here it's an oak tub from which iron bars extrude, and the French nobility would come and touch the iron bars which were in the tub, the tub was filled with water with iron filings, and people would then have convulsive states which were pleasant enough for them to repeat quite frequently. Some slides of the baquette... 

This was high society, not only treatment but also entertainment. You can see at the left a woman has fainted. That was quite common. Here's a colour slide of the same kind of event.

Mesmer was, his work was studied by a Presidential Commission or rather a King's Commission. King Louis XVI appointed a special commission to study Mesmerism. At the time it was receiving rave notices from the public and condemnation from medical societies. Here's a cartoon of the time of animal magnetism, you can see the animal doing the hypnosis, and another cartoon debunking animal magnetism. The report that was issued on the work of Mesmer's student des Lond, was highly critical. The commission found that there was nothing to the interplanetary theories and the magnetic theories, but they were then forced to explain why Mesmer got so many cures, and they attributed the cures to the power of imagination, and rather than study the power of imagination as a way to cure individuals, the commission left the issue alone, and it took a hundred years for people to pick up that essential point, that manipulation of the imagination could be used to manipulate the mind. 

The commission also issued a secondary report that was stamped "eyes only" for the King's eyes only, and in that report the commissioners said that there was an aspect of magnetism that was so dangerous that the practice would be stopped at once. It was a menace to morals, that the attraction that developed between the magnetizer and the subject being magnetized was so great that seductions were inevitable, and therefore we have the first inkling of the relationship between hypnosis and hypnotic seduction in this secret report for the King's eyes only. 

Mesmer died in disgrace and in exile after the report appeared, and hypnosis, which was still called animal magnetism at the time, fell into disgrace but not into complete abandonment. It wasn't until about fifty or sixty years later that James Braid, a Scottish physician, coined the term hypnosis and hypnotism, and it wasn't until about fifty years after that that hypnosis begins to be studied in a serious way, and the problems of mind control, using hypnosis as the vehicle again resurface. 

The Victorians were interested in hypnosis 'cause it was fun to be hypnotized. They lacked the joys that we have, such as Geraldo, and so they had to entertain themselves by using hypnosis for their parlour games. And you can see a man here drinking milk out of a saucer on the floor, he had just been hypnotized. And so, stage hypnosis at the turn of the century, from the 1890's to the 1910's and '20's, was one of the most well-known and well-attended and lucrative forms of entertainment. 

Here's a couple of artifacts from that time. Here's a brochure from a stage hypnotism show. Walter Bodey, an English hypnotist, was perhaps one of the most famous of the stage performers. He had a hypnosis and electrical show. You can see on there that, a statement, "The real Trilby," going back to Svengali. We'll return to that in a moment. This is James Bodey. He lives on in history for a reason people don't remember any more, and that is, he was the inspiration for an extremely young comic who got his start by mimicking Bodey, and here's the young comic, here's the two of them together, Bodey on the right and Charley Chaplain on the left. And so, Charley Chaplain's career began by studying Bodey's mechanisms and his mannerisms on stage, and then making comedy of them. 

During the Victorian era people's exposure to hypnosis was not only as a form of entertainment, but it seemed like a form of mind control as well. You could get people to do anything that you asked of them. You could have them be suspended between two chairs, you could even stand on them when they were suspended between two chairs, and you could do a lot worse as well. If you're sensitive, please don't watch the next two slides. This is an iron bar held by eyelets, put into the eye lids of a subject, and this a stage hypnotist in Georgia, and as if that isn't bad enough to suspend an iron bar from the eye lids, he took it one step further and then pulled a young woman on roller skates. So, it's not always fun to be hypnotized, and some people have taken the idea of stage hypnosis, it seems to me, far beyond where it should be entitled to go. 

One of those people is Barry Konnikoff, who traffics under the name of Potentials Unlimited. In one of his later... He has self-hypnosis tapes which were available all over the place. I've heard he's gone bankrupt now and I certainly hope that's true. In his later round of tapes he argued that women who have been sexually abused or raped deserve it because of what they did in prior lives. Now, the First Amendment perhaps protects that. On the other hand, it is... There aren't words that would describe a person who would make money out of that kind of a theory, so I won't waste our time on him. 

I want to get back to the central theme of mind control, which starts with Jean Martin Charcot, who was the foremost neurologist of the time. While the stage hypnotists were persuading people that minds could be controlled by hypnosis, the professionals were learning hypnosis as well, and they were learning it largely from a small group of people, the most influential of whom was Charcot. 

Charcot, as the greatest neurologist in Europe at the time, was frequently visited by kings and princes and certainly all of the most elite of the medical profession from around the world, and in his clinic at La Sault Petrier in Paris, he would demonstrate hypnotic phenomena. He would, in his demonstrations, induce neurotic symptoms in people. People who came in with an inability to move one limb, in hypnosis would be able to move that limb, but he would transfer the neurotic symptom to the other limb, and so he could create and destroy and eliminate and transpose neurotic conditions, and this was a remarkable demonstration which impressed a number of people in the audience, but his theories were at odds with his major contemporaries, le Beau who was on the left and HipoHypolee Bernheim who was, on the right. 

There was in France at the time, this second school of thought about hypnosis. Charcot believed that people who could be hypnotized were hysterics and that hypnosis was a form of hysterical dissociation. Bernheim, based on the work of le Beau and his own work thereafter, believed that hypnosis was a form of suggestion, and that the manipulation of suggestion did not need a former neurotic condition. Here's Bernheim. Bernheim and Charcot often appeared against each other in a series of criminal cases that appeared throughout France, on the issue of the anti- social production of crime with hypnosis. 

A person who studied from both of these people and was influenced by both of them was Sigmond Freud. This is a picture of him on his wedding day, and a better-known portrait of him in his old age, and then the infamous couch. In his London office over the couch Freud had a picture of Charcot's demonstration, doing the demonstration that I showed you a few slides back. Let me get to that. This was the, a picture that hung over the couch in Freud's office in England. 

Freud was very much influenced by the hypnosis theories, and worked with hypnosis for a year, but then abandoned it, and it wasn't clear why he did abandon hypnosis. Some theorists have argued, and I think correctly, that he was a lousy hypnotist, and that seemed to be true, and he couldn't, as a result, get deep enough trances to have effect on his patients. 

Other theorists have argued, and Freud's own writings tend to support a secondary hypothesis, and that is that Freud was scared of the seductive power of hypnosis, that the ability to move people into altered states of consciousness gave a feeling to the hypnotist of some such omnipotence that it was in itself seductive. And Freud wrote that in one of his patients, as soon as the hypnotic encounter had ended she jumped up and threw her arms around him and hugged and kissed him, and he did not attribute that to his handsome demeanour. He said it must be some other force at work and it so frightened him, he said, that he never used hypnosis again. And I think that he's harking back to the Mesmer Commission's noticing that there is a manipulative power in hypnosis that the subject may not be able to resist, but also the hypnotizer may not be able to resist as well. 

Retroactive Hallucinations -
False Memory Syndrome

Bernheim, by the way, and Albert Muhl, a German hypnotist in the 1880's and the 1890's, had already given the world the false memory syndrome. They called it retroactive hallucinations at the time, and they wrote quite openly in their works that they were concerned that through the power of suggestion you could create an impenetrable witness for a court of law. That by hypnotizing somebody, you could induce them to tell a false story, that story would be impervious to cross- examination, because the individual would sincerely believe in the truth of what he or she was saying, and therefore you would never be able to effectively cross- examine that person, because they would continually insist on the truth of what they were reporting. 

And so, by the early 1890's the phenomenon of false memory had already been noted and been written about extensively, and its application for courts of law had already been written about. There is absolutely nothing new in the false memory issue. It is simply a failure to read the literature from a hundred years ago. What's more important is, where are we gonna go from now with false memory, and I think the answer is where we have already come from a hundred years ago.

Hypnotic Seduction

The notion of hypnotic seduction had been noticed in the secret report to the King in France, it had been noticed by Freud in his work, and it had been noticed by many others -- a series of slides on hypnotic seduction. The idea of hypnotic seduction got, I think, its greatest impetus in a 1894 book called TRILBY. And this is illustration from it with the infamous Svengali as the hypnotist, and to this day the portrait of Svengali as a hypnotist is almost as powerful as Sherlock Holmes as a detective. It's almost the stereotype of the field. 

Trilby, today, would be a No. #1. best-seller, the equivalent of a No. #1. best-seller, and even bigger. It was probably the first block-buster novel. It was published in a magazine in serial form, and after the first issue appeared the magazine had to print an additional one hundred thousand copies because of the desire for people to continue the story. It... The author, George du Maurier, was launched into such public light that he ultimately hid from all, in order to preserve his privacy. He had lecture tours through the United States and Britain. 

Do you remember PATEN PLACE, how huge a novel that was at the time? This was the equivalent and even bigger. The story of TRILBY is the story of a hypnotist who gets total control over the personality of a young woman, and the novel itself I find to be incredibly boring, but the portrait of the hypnotist is tremendously exciting and has lived on almost as an icon of the subject itself. There was a town in Florida, and I haven't checked to see whether this is still true, that changed its name to Trilby, and at the centre of town they have Svengali Square. There were TRILBY parties, TRILBY hats, TRILBY clothes. 

It was an enormously popular and influential novel, which introduced people to the idea of the potential for hypnotic seduction, and also even worse. Let me... Since I don't want to dwell on this aspect of mind control, let me sum it up and say that the traditional thinking has been that you cannot get people to do with hypnosis what they would not otherwise do. There is value in that thinking, because it then doesn't encourage people to try, but if you go and talk to the hypnotists who will tell you that and you talk to them in private, they will tell you the opposite story, that within certain parameters you can get people to do things they would otherwise not do, with hypnosis, and that while hypnosis is not a magic wand or a magic potion, it is an effective facilitator for seduction or anti-social conduct. 

History of Mind Control

1815 - Franz Anton Mesmer dies. He leaves many disciples with various opinions and induction techniques. They spread mesmerism all over the world, some as scientific hypnosis, some as spiritualism. Some mesmerists say the cures are from God. Some use seances to call up spirits of the dead. One disciple founds chiropracty. Mesmer's efforts to find a physiological explanation for hypnotic phenomena caused scholars to shift from considering hypnosis as magic or religion to seeking scientific understanding of it. Thus, Mesmer began dynamic (unconscious) psychiatry.

1815 - Abbe Faria comes to Paris from India, gives public demonstrations of hypnosis, hypnotizes as many as 5,000 at a time. He, like Mesmer's disciple Puysegur, proves Mesmer's props are not necessary for induction. He says that both the induction and the cures arise from expectancy and cooperation in the patient.

1820 - Dr. Alexandre Bertrand publishes treatise saying trance makes subject preternaturally sensitive to suggestions of the mesmerist, both spoken and unspoken.

1821 - First recorded operations under hypnotic anesthesia done by Recamier. First tooth extraction under hypnosis.

1823 - First childbirth under formal hypnosis.

1825 - The word hypnosis (from Greek, "sleep") is first used. Hypnotic anesthesia, analgesia, positive and negative hallucinations, catalepsy, regression, posthypnotic suggestion, and some physiological effects on the body caused by suggestion are all identified and experimented with.

1837 - John Elliotson, an English doctor, begins lifelong campaign for scientific study and medical use of hypnotism.

1841 - An English doctor in India, James Esdaile, uses hours of mesmeric stroking and passes in a semi-darkened room, combined with "sleep" suggestions to induce trances deep enough for major surgeries, hypnosis being the only available anesthetic. He experiments on a prisoner: he induces deep trance, automatism, then amnesia, and makes him an unknowing hypnoprogrammed subject.

1843 - James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, sees mesmerism demonstrated, and begins a lifelong study of it. He pioneers practical medical applications of hypnosis. He theorizes that it is a type of special suggestibility. He discusses disguised induction—trance (hypnosis) deliberately caused in a susceptible subject without a formal or pre-announced induction.

1846 - Chemical anesthesia begins. Surgeons lose interest in Esdaile's hypnotic anesthesia. Hypnotists begin to experiment with drug-induced trances.

1858 - Dr. Azam, of Bordeaux, attempts to create an artificial multiple personality by means of hypno-SiS. (Hammerschlag, p. 14)

1860s - Charcot's Salpetriere group competes with Liebeault and Bernheim's Nancy School. Charcot, et. al., accept hypnosis as worthy of scientific analysis, but insist that criminal hypnosis is impossible (though he and his staff exploit, display, and scorn somnambulist women). The Nancy School believes criminal hypnosis is possible because suggested amnesia is possible.

© 2007 by The Phoenix Foundation

Body text

© 2007 by The Phoenix Foundation

Body text