KIKH Museum

Charcot

	Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) was probably the most famous neurologist of his time – from about 1870 to 1893. Famous neurologists such as Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Richter, Meige, etc. belonged to his ‘school’. He taught, researched, and conducted treatments at the Salpetrière in Paris, a large hospital from the 1700’s. To demonstrate the difference between “traumatic” paralysis (today understood as a functional disturbance) and paralysis, which is caused by lesions of the nervous system, he employed hypnosis1). With hypnosis, he was able to show that traumatic paralysis could be made to disappear under hypnosis, or that a paralysis induced by hypnosis would exhibit the same symptoms as the patient’s “traumatic” paralysis (this idea of Charcot is confirmed by modern neurophysiologic methods – see reports from Research and Clinic 2)).		The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) began his investigations of hypnosis around 1880.
	This portrait from A. Brouillet shows Charcot (behind him is his favourite student, Joseph Babinski) demonstrating a case of “grand hysteria” for a select audience of doctors and writers. The patient is Blanche Wittman, a famous patient of Charcot’s (“the hysterical queen”), whom Charcot often used to demonstrate the three stages of hypnotism (Baudouin, 1925 3)).		These observations and their assumptions endure to today, but are nevertheless false: Charcot investigated hypnosis with only a few hysterical patients, and never performed the hypnosis himself, but left it to his colleagues. As we know today, Charcot’s hysterical patients took on a number of hypnotic behaviours, which they had “picked up” in the earlier sessions with the doctors and later arranged between themselves. In this way, Charcot committed the great error of viewing hysterical symptoms as characteristics of hypnosis. He therefore falsely described the hypnotic state as a state of mental illness. Nevertheless, the reputation of Charcot gave the phenomenon of hypnosis respectability in medical circles as a worthy subject of scientific study.


	Sources: 1) Charot, J.M. (1890). Oeuvres Complètes. Lecon sure les maladies du Système nerveux, Bd.III. Paris : Progrès Medical, 299-359. 2) Hypnotische Phänomene und konversionsneurotische Störungen: Die gleiche hirnphysiologische Basis? Online-Dokument auf www.hypnose-kikh.de. 3) Baudouin, A. (1925). Quelques Souvenirs de La Salpetrière. Paris-Medical, 15, I, 23. Mai, No. 21, X-XIII.

Janet

	Pierre Janet, who worked under Charcot as a doctor at the Salpetrière in Paris, actually revealed the false assumptions of Charcot, and showed that the three stages of hypnosis described by Charcot were only behaviours learned by patients from hypnotists working for Charcot. He nevertheless continued research into hypnosis and discovered, among other things, that certain patients experienced a different personality under trance than during waking 1) (dissociated identity disorder). Janet hat a strong influence on the development of psychotherapy around 1900 – particularly the idea of the separation between “unconscious” and “conscious”, which he explicated in his work l’Automatismé Psychologique. Freud and Breuer refer in their studies of hysteria (1895) to Janet’s case studies about patients who were healed by bringing unconscious “fixed ideas” back into the conscious where they could be worked out. Alfred Adler’s individual psychology was influenced by Janet’s concept of “sentiment d’incomplétude”. C.G. Jung, who attended a lecture by Janet in the winter semester of 1902/1903, saw a correspondence between his idea of “complex” and Janet’s “unconscious fixed idea”.		Pierre Janet (1859-1947) postulated before Freud the existence of unconscious psychic activities, which he investigated using hypnosis. The International Society of Hypnosis gives an award for outstanding leaders in the field of clinical hypnosis, named after Pierre Janet.

	Sources: Janet, P. (1886). Les actes inconscients et le dédoublement de la personnalité pendant le somnambulisme provoqué. Revue Philosophique, 22, II, 577-592.

Bernheim

	The biggest opponent of Charcot was Bernheim, the head of the School in Nancy. Unlike Charcot, who saw hypnotic phenomenon as based in bodily sickness, Bernheim attributed these phenomena to purely physic factors. Bernheim, professor of internal medicine at the University of Nancy, met the country doctor Liébeault in 1882. Liébeault worked with hypnosis at his practice in Port-Saint-Vincent near Nancy. His method consisted of focusing the patients’ gaze and then suggesting to them that they became more and more sleepy. Once he had the impression that they were hypnotized, he simply suggested to them that they were freed of their symptoms. In this way he found considerable success. He was dismissed as an outsider by his professional colleagues; particularly because he sought no accolades for his achievements, he was even more suspect. His book in 1866 1) was almost completely ignored. However, this changed drastically when Bernheim publicly advocated for Liébeault and used his methods at the university clinic in Nancy.		Hyppolite Bernheim (1840-1919) founded the School of Nancy, which – unlike the Salpetrière School – attributed the workings of hypnosis to the power of suggestion.
	uguste Ambroise Liébeault (1823-1904), a rural doctor. His extensive work with therapeutic hypnosis was first regarded seriously after his ‘discovery’ by Bernheim, professor at the University of Nancy.		Bernheim, whose textbook on hypnosis (1886 2)) was a big success, was a bitter contestant of Charcot’s ideas, and for whom the conflict with the Salpetrière School was eventually decided. His theory of hypnosis reached such well-known psychiatrists as Forel, Schrenck-Notzing, Krafft-Ebing, and Bechterew, to name just a few. Bernheim’s concept, that hypnosis is a state of heightened suggestibility which can be evoked by suggestion, became the basis of so-called “classical hypnosis”.


	Sources: 1) Liébeault, A. (1866). Du sommeil et des états analogues, considérés surtout au point de vue de l'action du moral sur le physique. Paris : Masson. 2) Bernheim, H. (1886). De la suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique. Paris : Doin.

Freud

	Before Freud developed his ideas about psychoanalysis, he had contact with the two rival schools of hypnosis, the School of Nancy (Bernheim, Liébeault) and the Salpetrière School (Charcot). Freud spent four months in 1885-1886 at the Salpetrière, where he visited lectures from Charcot and became familiar with his theoretical ideas on hypnosis. In July of 1889, Freud called on Liébeault and Bernheim in Nancy, after he finished translating Bernheim’s textbook on hypnosis. While he was initially impressed with Charcot’s ideas, he was eventually drawn more to the School of Nancy. In a presentation before the Viennese Medical Society on April 27, 1892, Freud referred openly to the hypnosis theories of Bernheim. Freud used hypnosis therapeutically and seems to have had considerable experience with hypnosis, as indicated by the following passage:		Sigmund Freud (1859-1947) employed hypnosis before he developed his theory of psychoanalysis.
	"I have for many years practiced hypnotic treatment, initially with verbal suggestions and later combined with the guidance of the patient. I can therefore speak about the success of hypnotic or suggestive therapy from good experience” (Freud 1916/17, p. 431f) 2). He had great success with his treatments using hypnotherapeutic methods: for a patient who was unable to breastfeed her child on account of various hysterical symptoms, he was able to remove all symptoms in only two sessions. The same occurred after the birth of a second child 1). Freud’s later turn away from (then purely classical-suggestive) hypnosis had multiple reasons, one of which was probably the failures of hypnosis in treating certain patients of limited susceptibility (not all patients have the same ability to become hypnotised) (see Kinzel, 1993, p. 64ff 3)).
	Sources: 1) Freud, S. (1893). Ein Fall von hypnotischer Heilung nebst Bemerkungen über die Entstehung hysterischer Symptome durch den Gegenwillen. Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus, 1, 102-107, 123-129. 2) Freud, S. (1916/17). Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. 3) Kinzel, C. (1993). Psychoanalyse und Hypnose. München: Quintessenz.







				Hall 7: Hypnosis in France around 1870