History of Hypnosis: The Effect Everyone Explained Wrong

The short answer

Nobody invented hypnosis. The phenomenon is older than any of its names; what has a history is the attempt to explain it. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), a Viennese physician working in Paris in the 1770s and 80s, made it a public matter under a theory that turned out to be false — "animal magnetism". The Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795–1860) gave the state its modern name and its first physiological explanation in the 1840s, which is why he, and not Mesmer, is usually called the father of hypnosis.

The turning points, in order

• 1770s–1780s — Mesmer in Paris. Animal magnetism becomes a sensation, a treatment fashion and a scandal, all at once.
• 1784 — The royal commission. An investigation involving Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier finds no magnetic fluid and attributes the effects to imagination.
• After Mesmer — Puységur. One of Mesmer's own pupils describes "artificial somnambulism": the calm, responsive state itself, separated from the theory around it.
• 1833 — Chevreul. Michel-Eugène Chevreul shows that a hand-held pendulum swings on unconscious muscle impulses. The ideomotor effect gets its first clean description.
• 1840s — Elliotson and Esdaile. James Esdaile performs hundreds of operations in India under mesmeric analgesia; John Elliotson works along the same lines.
• 1841 — Braid meets Lafontaine. A sceptical Manchester surgeon watches the magnetiser Charles Lafontaine perform, and goes home to take the mechanism apart.
• After 1841 — the name. Braid coins "neurypnology", later hypnosis, after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, and explains the state through eye fixation and fatigue rather than fluid.
• Braid's own revision — monoideism. He concludes that concentration on a single idea matters more than what the eyes are doing, and corrects himself in public.
• Paris versus Nancy. Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière calls hypnosis a pathology of hysteria; Hippolyte Bernheim and Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault of the Nancy school call it ordinary suggestion in healthy people. Nancy is right.
• The detour — Freud. Sigmund Freud studies with Charcot in Paris and in Nancy, uses hypnosis, then drops it for free association. The field loses decades.
• 1933 — Hull at Yale. Clark Hull begins the first systematic experimental laboratory research.
• Mid-century — Erickson. Milton H. Erickson (1901–1980) turns suggestion indirect and permissive, and reshapes clinical practice.
• 1955 and 1958 — official recognition. The British Medical Association, then the American Medical Association, take up hypnosis and acknowledge its therapeutic value.
• Hilgard at Stanford. Ernest Hilgard standardises measurement with the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, describes the "hidden observer", and proposes neodissociation.
• Now — imaging and expectancy. David Spiegel at Stanford and others measure the state in the brain; Irving Kirsch puts expectation at the centre.

Mesmer, and the fluid that was not there

Mesmer's theory went like this: an invisible fluid runs through all living bodies, illness comes from blockages in its flow, and a trained operator can redistribute it. In Paris it worked spectacularly — as theatre and as treatment. People convulsed, people wept, people walked out of the room without the complaint they had walked in with. Paris talked. The physicians grumbled.

The theory was nonsense. The results were not. That combination is the whole problem in miniature, and 1784 is the year someone finally tested it properly.

The royal commission had Franklin and Lavoisier involved, and its method is the part I genuinely admire. Rather than argue about whether an invisible fluid exists — an argument nobody wins — they built situations in which people believed they were being magnetised and were not, and situations in which they were being magnetised and did not know it. The effects followed the belief, not the treatment. Verdict: no fluid, and what the patients experienced came from imagination.

That is widely regarded as the first controlled, placebo-style investigation in medical history. It was also the first time the field made its signature mistake: because "imagination" sounded like a polite word for "nothing", the profession threw out the effect along with the theory. Wrong explanation, real phenomenon, honest investigators, three separate facts that got collapsed into one dismissal. It happens again about once a century.

The moment the phenomenon got separated from the theory

The Marquis de Puységur was one of Mesmer's pupils and shared his teacher's wrong explanation entirely. What he did not share was the fixation on convulsions. He noticed that some subjects, instead of thrashing, slipped into something quiet: a lucid, sleep-like state in which they could talk, answer, follow instruction and afterwards remember it — or not. He called it artificial somnambulism.

Strip the vocabulary away and that is trance, described accurately, decades before anyone had a working theory for it. The phenomenon had been isolated from the magnetism. It simply did not have a usable name yet.

Surgery, before there was anything better

The 1840s produced the strongest evidence the field has ever had, and then lost it. James Esdaile operated in India using mesmeric analgesia — hundreds of procedures, the sort of surgery where the alternative at the time was being held down. Elliotson pursued the same approach. This was not a parlour demonstration. It was major surgery, on unmedicated bodies, made survivable by nothing but a state of mind.

Then ether and chloroform arrived, and mesmeric analgesia vanished almost overnight. Reasonably so: a gas that works on everybody in three minutes beats a technique that needs a skilled operator, a cooperative patient and an hour of quiet. The effect did not stop being real. It stopped being necessary — and the field lost its best argument at exactly the moment it needed one.

Braid names it, then corrects himself

Manchester, 1841. James Braid attends a demonstration by the travelling magnetiser Charles Lafontaine, expecting to catch a fraud. He catches one, in the theory. But he also sees something he cannot dismiss: the subjects could not open their eyes. Something in that room was genuine, whatever the man on stage claimed was causing it.

So Braid went home and did what surgeons do — he dismantled the mechanism. His explanation was physiological. Have a person fixate a bright object slightly above the natural line of sight and hold it. The eye muscles tire, the lids grow heavy, attention collapses inward. No fluid, no operator's power, nothing transmitted from one person to another. He named the state neurypnology, later hypnosis, after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep — a name he came to consider misleading, since the state plainly is not sleep. We have been correcting that misunderstanding ever since. Braid's shiny fixation point, set swinging, is also the direct ancestor of the pendulum: a working tool, not an amulet.

Eight years before Braid's Manchester evening, Chevreul had already published the other half of the puzzle — that a pendulum held in a supposedly still hand moves because of unconscious muscle impulses generated by the holder's own expectation. The ideomotor effect explained how imagination reaches the muscles without passing through a decision. Braid explained how attention gets narrow enough for that to happen reliably. Nobody at the time put the two together as neatly as they deserved.

And then Braid did the thing that makes him worth admiring rather than merely citing. He kept working, and concluded his own first explanation was too narrow. Eye fatigue was a dependable route in, not the mechanism. What actually mattered was the mind concentrating on a single idea — monoideism, in his term. He had built his reputation on the eyes, and he moved off it in public because the evidence moved. I will take a practitioner who does that over one who never does, in any century.

Paris versus Nancy

The most consequential fight in this history was about whether hypnosis is a symptom or a capacity.

Charcot, at the Salpêtrière, held that it was pathological — a phenomenon of hysteria, producible only in the ill. He was one of the most celebrated neurologists of his generation, and the weight of his authority is hard to overstate. Against him stood the Nancy school — Liébeault and Bernheim — arguing that hypnosis was nothing but suggestion, that it was entirely normal, and that it worked perfectly well on healthy people.

Nancy was right, and the consequences run all the way to the present. Had Charcot won, hypnosis would today be a symptom you diagnose. Because Nancy won, it is an ordinary capacity of ordinary minds that simply varies from person to person — which is the only reason a suggestibility test makes any sense. You cannot measure a spectrum you believe to be a disease.

The detour

Freud learned hypnosis from both camps: he studied with Charcot in Paris and he went to Nancy. He used it in his early practice. Then he set it aside in favour of free association, and the most influential psychological thinker of the century had, in effect, tried the thing and moved on. For decades that was the last word most educated people heard on the subject.

Hypnosis retreated to stages and fairgrounds, where it survived by becoming entertainment. That is where the cultural image comes from that I still spend half my working life arguing with — the swinging watch, the clucking volunteer, the stolen will. How hypnosis actually works had been described accurately by Braid nearly a century earlier. Almost nobody was reading him.

Back into the laboratory

Hull's Yale work in 1933 is where the subject re-enters science properly: measurement, controls, counting. The question shifted from does this exist to how much, in whom, under which conditions — which is the only version of the question that can be answered.

Erickson pushed from the other side. Instead of commanding, he offered. Instead of telling someone what would happen, he described what they might notice. Almost every modern clinical induction carries his fingerprints, including plenty written by people who have never read a word of him.

Hilgard supplied what the field had been missing since 1784: a scale. Once responsiveness can be scored, it can be studied, compared and predicted. His hidden observer experiments and his neodissociation theory reframed the state as one in which streams of awareness run alongside each other, rather than one in which awareness switches off. And in 1955 the British Medical Association, followed in 1958 by the American Medical Association, took the subject up and acknowledged that it had therapeutic value. Not a blessing. An admission that it belonged in the room.

The current explanation, which is also temporary

Today the state gets measured directly. Imaging work, Spiegel's among it, shows hypnosis corresponding to shifts in how brain networks communicate with each other. Kirsch's research puts expectation at the centre: what a person anticipates shapes what a person experiences. Which is, if you look at it squarely, the 1784 commission's verdict about imagination — promoted from insult to mechanism.

Notice the shape of that. We explain hypnosis today with the most prestigious science we have available, exactly as Mesmer did with magnetism, Braid with nervous physiology and Charcot with pathology. That does not make the current account wrong; network measurements are testable in a way that invisible fluid never was. It does argue for a certain modesty in the wording.

Here is the part I actually use. The effect does not depend on the story told about it — but the story decides who is allowed to touch it. Mesmer's story made it a spectacle. Charcot's made it an illness. Braid's made it a craft, which is the only version anyone can learn on purpose. And what that craft can build between two consenting adults is what my books are for.

— Mira

FAQ

Who invented hypnosis? Nobody. The phenomenon predates every name it has been given. If you need one person, James Braid is the standard answer: he named the modern state and gave it its first physiological explanation in the 1840s. Franz Mesmer made it famous a lifetime earlier, but under a theory that was false.

Where does the word "hypnosis" come from? From Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. Braid coined it, then came to regard it as a poor choice — the state is not sleep, and the name has been generating misunderstandings for well over a century.

Was Mesmer a fraud? No, and that is what makes him interesting. He believed his own theory. The 1784 Paris commission, with Franklin and Lavoisier involved, established that no magnetic fluid existed and that the effects came from imagination. Wrong explanation, genuine effects, sincere man — three findings people still insist on treating as one.

Was surgery really performed under hypnosis? Yes. Esdaile carried out hundreds of operations in India in the 1840s using mesmeric analgesia, and Elliotson worked along similar lines. The practice disappeared once ether and chloroform became available, because they were faster, more reliable and worked on everyone.

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