My first experiments were conceived in view of proving the falseness of the magnetic theory, which states that the provoked phenomena of sleep is the effect of the transmission of the operator on the subject, of some special influence emanating from the first while he makes some touches on the second with the thumb. He looks at him with a fixed stare, while he directs the points of the fingers toward his eyes, and executes some passes in front of him.
It seemed to me that I had clearly established this point, after having taught the subjects to make themselves fall asleep just by fixing an attentive and sustained look on any inanimate object.
To determine whether the technique worked, as Mesmer had believed, because of a magnetic energy moving from the practitioner's fingers to the patient's eyes or whether it instead worked by virtue of the eye motion itself, Braid substituted a swinging pocket watch as the object in motion. The technique still worked, causing Braid to conclude that the trance states Mesmer induced--and the healing that came from them--were produced more by "fatigue of the eye muscles" or the power of suggestion than by any sort of animal magnetism or etheric field transmitted from practitioner to patient.
Braid and other doctors worked to strip mesmerism of its esoteric content and to arrive at a scientific understanding of the physiological and psychological processes involved in producing trance states by fixed attention and bilateral stimulation through moving the eyes from side to side. At the same time, Andrew Jackson Davis, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, and Phineas Quimby took the esoteric aspects of Mesmer's work and transformed parts of those into the systems that would become Christian Science, Theosophy, and the New Thought movements.
Freud Discovers Hypnosis
The world that Sigmund Freud was born into in 1856 was embracing Braid's refinement of hypnosis with fervor. The practice had spread to hospitals around the world as a means for providing presurgical anesthesia and was being used by many physicians to treat hysteria, a broad category of physical illnesses believed to have a psychological basis. (Those physical illnesses included paralysis, blindness, insomnia, fits, and a wide variety of other conditions.)
When Freud was twenty-four years old and just out of medical school, his mentor, Josef Breuer, began treating a twenty-one-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman named Bertha Pappenheim, whom Freud referred to in writing as Anna O. The young woman had spent several years of her life nursing her ailing father; when he died she developed a number of illnesses, including periodic muteness, paralysis, hallucinations, and spasms. Though she lived in Germany, she refused to speak German; she would converse only in English. She had tried on several occasions to kill herself.
At the time, therapeutic hypnotic methods varied to some degree, although most involved the classic technique of having a patient fix her or his attention on one point. In a paper published in 1881, Freud wrote of several hypnosis techniques he and Breuer preferred. One was clearly handed down from Mesmer: Freud wrote that "we sit down opposite the patient and request him to fixate on two fingers on the physician's right hand and at the same time to observe closely the sensations which develop."
The other technique seemed a more recent invention of Breuer's and Freud's and involved, as Freud wrote, "stroking the patient's face and body with both hands continuously for from five to ten minutes," a technique quite useful for calming "hysterical" female patients. Freud noted that "this has a strikingly soothing and lulling effect." The "stroking" that Freud and Breuer practiced involved alternately stroking the left, then the right side of the body, a technique Mesmer had first developed.
Breuer treated Bertha with these and other hypnotic techniques to some success, although Freud observed that in the process the woman fell in love with Breuer, a married man old enough to be her father. Bertha claimed Breuer had impregnated her and that she would have his baby; Breuer claimed she had a "hysterical pregnancy." She was moved to a private sanitarium, where she lived for the next few years out of the public eye. To this day it is not known whether the pregnancy was terminated by abortion or miscarriage, whether she gave birth, or whether, as Breuer claimed, her pregnancy symptoms were all the result of her "hysterical" desire to have his child and had no basis in physical reality.
What is known is that, after her release from the sanitarium, Bertha Pappenheim never again discussed Breuer or Freud, but instead became Germany's first and most outspoken social worker and feminist. She rose to Susan B. Anthony--like fame in Germany, writing books and producing plays advocating women's rights, and translating into German and publishing Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 groundbreaking treatise on women's rights, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In 1904 she founded a Jewish women's movement, the Judischer Frauenbund, which was so influential in Germany that it came to the attention of the Nazis; she died after being interrogated by Hitler's thugs in 1936. She had never married or, as far as can be ascertained, ever had a relationship with a man after her claim of impregnation by Breuer.
In the first year of her treatment by Breuer, Bertha had found that it was very useful for her to spend long hours talking with the attentive Breuer about her feelings: she called this her "talk therapy" and "chimney sweeping." He would come to her home both evenings and mornings to hear her "talk therapy." Even though Freud and Breuer never claimed this talk therapy to be a "cure," her case became the cornerstone of Freud's theories and of modern talk-based psychotherapies.
But in the 1880s and early 1890s, talk therapy wasn't Freud's favorite or even most common form of treatment for his patients. At the time, Freud's treatment methodology of choice was a bilateral eye-motion technique known as hypnosis.
In his 1893 Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses and his 1895 Studies on Hysteria (the "founding document" on Freudian psychoanalysis, which was coauthored with Josef Breuer), Freud based nearly all of his conclusions on results he obtained using Mesmer's and Braid's eye-motion and other hypnotic techniques. In Studies on Hysteria, for example, Freud wrote: "Quite frequently it is some event in childhood that sets up a more or less severe symptom which persists during the years that follow. Not until they have been questioned under hypnosis [my italics] do these memories emerge with the undiminished vividness of a recent event."
In 1893 Freud published On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication, coauthored with Josef Breuer. In it he addressed the subject of hypnosis frequently and explicitly. "As a rule, it is necessary to hypnotize the patient and to arouse memories under hypnosis," he wrote in the opening paragraph of the paper. "When this [hypnosis] is done, it becomes possible to demonstrate the connection in the clearest and most convincing fashion." As always, his technique involved using his hand or a watch to move the patient's eyes from side to side, and occasionally stroking the patient on alternate sides of her body.
In the paper, Freud and Breuer refer to their learning hypnotic techniques in 1881, and refer to their work before 1881 as "the 'pre-suggestion' era." Repeatedly, Freud and Breuer referred to the power of hypnosis for both diagnostic and therapeutic work. They suggested that the root causes of hysteria are found in old memories or emotional traumas, and that "Not until [the patients] have been questioned under hypnosis do these memories emerge."
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