sing patients come to be classified alongside subjects responding to suggestions for body sway and arm levitation, lifting weights, experiencing hallucinations, committing antisocial acts, falling into a state of profound relaxation and so on (Wagstaff, 1981)?Thornton (1976) concluded that in most cases that dealt with diseases of the nervous system, Mesmer was treating epilepsy. He believed this to be true because the techniques that Mesmer used to bring about the “grand crisis” are the same techniques that are known to produce epileptic convulsions. “The history of magnetism, from which hypnosis arose, is a comedy of errors (Thornton, 1976, p. 43). It is sad that this comedy of errors occurred because Mesmerists had only a rudimentary understanding of the nervous system.We now have a term “hypnosis” which relates to mimicking of these clinical symptoms, and the bizarre range of extrapolations and exaggerated effects that accompanied and developed from them, by normal people (i.e., non-sufferers from pathological illnesses such as epilepsy). In blunt terms, when “normal” subjects are given modern hypnosis scales they are being asked to perform, to the best of their ability, what really amounts to a parody of epileptic symptoms (Wagstaff, 1981, p.218).Although Mesmer’s animal magnetism was discredited, Mesmer’s role was essential in the history of hypnotism, since it was he who initiated the movement that was taken up later and then modified by others.What Hypnosis Is, What Hypnosis Is Not Today, many medical authorities are convinced that there is no such state of altered consciousness and that what we term hypnosis is in fact a fascinatingly complex combination of social compliance, relaxation, and suggestibility that can account for many esoteric behavioral manifestations (Baker, 1990).Suggestion is the key to hypnosis, and basic...
