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Spellbound
Studies on Mesmerism and Literature
By Maria M. Tatar PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06377-5
CHAPTER 1
From Mesmer to Freud: Animal Magnetism, Hypnosis, and Suggestion
"Go to France," Monsieur de Metternich told Gall, "and if they laugh at your bumps, you will be famous."
— Balzac, Ursule Mirouët
Franz Anton Mesmer was a man of mediocre talents and dubious ideals, but he came to occupy a pivotal position in the history of medicine and psychology. Because mesmerism serves as the principal link connecting primitive rites of exorcism with modern psychoanalysis, Mesmer himself has assumed the role of a transitional figure in the development of therapeutic procedures for functional disorders. Yet his actual contributions to psychological theory and medical knowledge have been largely forgotten. In the lexicon of psychology, "hypnotism," a word coined by the Scottish physician James Braid, has supplanted the term "mesmerism," and psychoanalysis has substituted the couch and the attentive analyst for the magnetic trance and the spellbinding hypnotist. Although "mesmerism" and "animal magnetism" (Mesmer's own name for his discovery) linger on in our language today, both terms are used in a strictly metaphorical sense. They have become near equivalents for hypnotism but have taken on — for reasons that will become clear in this chapter — distinct erotic overtones which are absent from their synonymous relative.
Mesmer's theories find a place somewhere near the middle of the spectrum where primitive psychotherapy shades off into psychoanalysis, faith healing merges with Christian Science, and ancient superstition blends with spiritualism and parapsychology. The royal commission appointed by Louis XVI in 1784 to investigate Mesmer's claims reported that the doctrine of animal magnetism was an "ancient fallacy." Opponents of animal magnetism had always been eager to point out that Mesmer's precursors were legion and that, far from introducing a unique therapeutic procedure, Mesmer had borrowed his magnets, fluids, and occult forces from a variety of disreputable sources. Although historians of science have documented the ancestry of animal magnetism in detail, it will be instructive to review the precedents they cite for Mesmer's precepts and techniques.
Mesmer drew largely on two traditions to formulate the central tenets of his teachings. He capitalized first of all on the age-old view that certain individuals are endowed with healing powers which they can turn to account by focusing their gaze on others or by touching them. Centuries before Mesmer performed his cures in the French capital, medicine men and shamans had taken advantage of hypnosis and suggestion to achieve effects rivaling those of modern psychologists and psychoanalysts. The venerable history of healing by touch can be traced back to Pyrrhus of Epirus, who cured his patients of colic by touching them with his big toe. When Jesus of Nazareth placed his hands on the afflicted areas of persons possessing "great faith," he miraculously restored their health. Secular rulers in Western Europe later revived this art by specializing in a "royal touch," which they used to cure scrofula, a disease of the neck commonly known as the "King's Evil." The extraordinary success attending measures taken by saints and sorcerers throughout the ages to heal the sick no doubt stemmed from the development of a psychological situation closely resembling hypnotic rapport — a situation that fostered responsiveness to suggestion.
The cosmological underpinnings of Mesmer's theories derived from the concept of an imponderable fluid permeating the entire universe and infusing both matter and spirit with its vital force. This fluid, Mesmer reasoned, could be pressed into the service of medicine with the aid of magnets. As early as the sixteenth century, Paracelsus had taught that an ethereal fluid issues from the earth and the stars to converge upon the human body, which, like a magnet, attracts effluvia of both a good and evil nature. By placing a magnet at the source of his patient's pain, Paracelsus hoped to draw out the baneful qualities of astral and terrestrial fluids and to send them swirling through the atmosphere until they returned to their point of origin. Eighteenth-century scientists brought these fluids back down to earth by identifying them as the sources of light, heat, magnetism, electricity, and gravity. Mesmer at first entertained the notion of endorsing gravity and electricity as universal agents of health, but he ultimately gave his support to the magnetic fluid backed by Paracelsus and his disciples Johann Baptist van Helmont, William Maxwell, and Robert Fludd.
How heavily Mesmer relied on these antecedents in developing his theories is not clear. His own writings reveal that he was not a learned man and that he acquired his scientific knowledge from a small number of secondhand sources. Furthermore, his decision to postulate the existence of a subtle magnetic fluid and to extol its therapeutic benefits was not shaped by a combination of extensive reading and painstaking experimentation, but emerged in the course of polemical arguments advanced to defend the originality of his discovery. Mesmer, however, repeatedly stressed the empirical basis of animal magnetism in much the same way that Christian Science and spiritualism, lineal descendants of mesmerism, persistently underscore the scientific foundations of their persuasions.
By furnishing a scientific explanation for his cures, Mesmer had hoped to liberate medicine from the mystical and religious constraints imposed upon it during previous centuries. Yet the flavor of the occult that permeated the tenets of animal magnetism allowed mesmerists of a later generation to dispense with the physical fluids invoked by Mesmer and to embrace metaphysical and theological solutions to the riddles posed by the magnetic trance. In Europe, Mesmer exercised a pervasive and widespread influence on his own epoch, and animal magnetism stimulated interest not only in faith healing and in the spiritual world, but also in the laws governing the human psyche. Mesmerism deserves serious consideration, if only for the reason that for several decades it aroused enormous excitement throughout Europe and captured the imagination of physicians, scientists, politicians, philosophers, and poets. While many of these men recognized the fraudulent dimensions of animal magnetism, they also perceived that this new art of healing was more than a sophisticated form of hocus-pocus. An investigation of the direct line of influence extending from Mesmer through Bernheim and Charcot to Freud can set the mesmerist movement in its historical perspective and elucidate the tremendous appeal that Mesmer's views possessed for his contemporaries.
I
Franz Anton Mesmer was born in the village of Iznang just north of Lake Constance in 1734. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and received his degree in 1766 after seven years of undistinguished academic work and the publication of a highly derivative study entitled De planetarum influxu. A line cited from Horace's Ars poetica served as the epigraph for this dissertation: "Many things that have fallen out of use will be born again, and those things that are now held in esteem will fall." Unhappily for Mesmer, both parts of the quotation proved prophetic for his ideas. The nebulously conceived admixture of astrological theories and Newtonian principles that he served up to the faculty of medicine in Vienna claimed to demonstrate that the sun, the moon, and other heavenly bodies exert a vital influence on earth. By means of a force that Mesmer tentatively called "animal gravity," these celestial spheres controlled not only tidal and atmospheric conditions, but also a fluid that animates matter. Disturbances in the ebb and flow of this superfine fluid, Mesmer declared, could give rise to severe nervous disorders and intense physical pain. Shortly after the publication of this treatise, Mesmer turned his attention to less ambitious projects and began — as yet without the aid of his ethereal fluid — to practice medicine in Vienna.
Mesmer's practice did not flourish immediately. His willingness to extend credit to affluent patients and to treat less prosperous patients free of charge rendered his financial situation highly precarious. Determined to resume his earlier scientific investigations, he conducted elaborate experiments that drained his dwindling financial reserves. Marriage to a wealthy Austrian widow in 1768 lifted the disagreeable burden of material cares and enabled him to pursue both his research and his hobbies freely. Mesmer could now indulge his most extravagant fancies. His spacious house on the Landstrasse overlooking the Prater contained a laboratory equipped with the finest and most sophisticated instruments; his drawing rooms and gardens provided elegant surroundings for parties and concerts attended by celebrities no less distinguished than Gluck and Haydn. Mesmer, in fact, earned a footnote in musical history by extending his patronage to the twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When a series of court intrigues prevented the performance of a full-scale comic opera composed by the musical prodigy, Mesmer came to the rescue and graciously offered his own gardens for the production of a less grandiose but more polished composition, Bastien und Bastienne. Many years later, Mozart immortalized his former patron (in a not altogether flattering way) by introducing into the libretto of Così fan tutte an allusion to Dr. Mesmer, who "became so famous in France."
Life in the Landstrasse was nonetheless relatively uneventful. Mesmer continued his efforts to document the influence of the planets and stars on the human body and tried to define more precisely the fluid described in his dissertation. For a time he speculated that this fluid might have some connection with electricity, but discarded that possibility when he learned of a series of remarkable cures performed with magnets. Father Hell, professor of astronomy at the University of Vienna and court astrologer to Maria Theresa, had manufactured steel magnets of various shapes and sizes which he applied to the diseased areas of his patients' bodies: for the ears he used semicircular magnets, for the breast heart-shaped ones, and for the soles of the feet round, flat magnets. The twenty cures that Hell ascribed to the magnetic force of his steel tractors received extensive coverage in the Viennese press. Intrigued by these reports and apparently somewhat envious of the attention that Hell was receiving, Mesmer ordered a supply of magnets from the miracle worker at the court. After testing them on his own patients, he concluded that the magnets, by removing obstacles placed in the path of his magnetic fluid, allowed that fluid to course freely through the body. With the hope of sharing the publicity accorded to Hell, Mesmer rushed into print with a summary of his studies on magnetism. This report, which took the form of a letter addressed to a colleague, ostensibly reiterated the ideas set forth in his dissertation, but in fact introduced significant changes. Mesmer ingeniously substituted the term "animal magnetism" for animal gravity and modified his original definition of the concept with the result that animal magnetism became a property of organic matter rather than an extraterrestrial force operating upon it. Health, Mesmer now claimed, depended on the proper distribution of an imponderable magnetic fluid that responds to planetary motion. Using Hell's magnets, he could promote a natural rhythm in the ebb and flow governing the fluid's movement through the human body and thereby restore health, or harmony between man and the universe.
News of the sensational magnetic cures performed by Mesmer met with the same enthusiastic reception that had attended reports of Hell's success. The Viennese press did not hesitate to applaud the heroic feats and pioneering spirit of Dr. Mesmer. But to Mesmer's dismay, Hell then announced that the effectiveness of magnetic treatment was contingent on the size and shape of the magnets. Mesmer shrewdly retaliated by eliminating Hell's magnets from his procedure. The magnetic fluid, he now contended, could be controlled more dexterously with his hands than with Hell's magnets, and he proceeded to demonstrate that mere passes of the hand in no way diminished the salutary effects of magnetic treatment. While Mesmer's private practice thrived as a result of the controversy, the medical world generally remained indifferent, if not openly hostile to his methods. The learned societies of Europe showed little desire to champion his magnetic fluid; they were even reluctant to acknowledge his letters of inquiry. Only the Berlin Academy of Sciences responded to a request for endorsement, and it politely instructed Mesmer to provide more adequate documentation for the existence of his universal fluid. Academic recognition seemed at last within his reach when Max Joseph of Bavaria summoned him to Munich to demonstrate his magnetic powers. Mesmer put on so dazzling a performance for the court and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences that he subsequently won nomination to membership in the academy. But the medical faculty of Vienna remained singularly unimpressed with the honors bestowed on Mesmer and continued to disparage his discoveries.
In 1777 Mesmer undertook a cure that brought him public notoriety and ultimately precipitated his decision to leave Vienna and seek more fertile terrain for his ideas. Maria-Theresa von Paradies, a young pianist blind from the age of three, suffered from a debilitating nervous condition — no doubt severely aggravated by the three thousand electrical shocks that well-meaning physicians had administered to her over a period of months. Magnetic therapy appeared to relieve the most serious symptoms of her illness and partially restored her sight. The overjoyed parents quickly circulated the news of their daughter's remarkable recovery. Residents of Vienna flocked to Mesmer's palatial residence with the hope of catching a glimpse of the child who had derived such benefit from magnetic treatment. But a number of prominent physicians in the city resented the attention lavished on Mesmer and voiced grave doubts about his claims. Mesmer later charged that they had spoken privately with Herr von Paradies and had intimated that the empress might curtail her financial support were Maria-Theresa to regain her sight. Rumors that his daughter had developed an inordinately strong attachment to her physician finally prompted the father to act. He stormed Mesmer's home to demand the return of his child and removed her from the premises. Shortly thereafter, a commission appointed to investigate Mesmer's procedures reached the conclusion that animal magnetism constituted a public menace and demanded that the doctor put an end to his fraudulent practice. Faced with the choice of withdrawing from the medical profession or leaving Vienna, Mesmer quietly packed his bags and headed for Paris.
Following a brief tour of Bavaria and Switzerland, Mesmer settled into comfortable quarters near the Place Vendôme. During the decade preceding the Revolution, the occult sciences enjoyed a brief golden age in the French capital. Fortune tellers, astrologers, and faith healers catered to the perennial appetite for low-priced miracles among the working classes. Courses on "la physique amusante" and "la haute science" drew crowds to museums and lecture halls. The Freemasons, who prided themselves on the presence of nearly two hundred lodges in France alone and on an impressive membership list including Voltaire, Lafayette, and Benjamin Franklin, gratified the mystical tastes cultivated by the aristocracy and wealthier bourgeoisie. In an age that witnessed the first balloon flights, the harnessing of electrical energy, and a host of wonders ranging from chess-playing robots to talking dogs, it was not always easy to discern the line dividing science from sorcery. Mesmer's own art seems to have occupied a position somewhere between these two extremes. Many of Mesmer's cures were no doubt authentic, but the magnetic fluid he defended until his death was no more effective than the "sympathetic powders" and other magical potions hawked by street vendors in Paris.
Although Mesmer was highly gratified by the large clientele that gathered at the Place Vendôme, he aspired above all to secure some kind of official endorsement for his views. He therefore prudently set about courting the favor of figures influential in France's most prestigious scientific bodies: the faculty of medicine at the University of Paris, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the Academy of Sciences. As a first step toward acceptance by the Establishment, he published his Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, a brief treatise setting forth the main tenets of his system. Twenty-seven postulates appended to this slim volume defined the magnetic fluid's attributes and made it clear that a physician who understood its properties and laws of operation could learn to cure any disease. "There is only one disease and one cure alone for it," Mesmer was later to assert.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spellbound by Maria M. Tatar. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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