Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [60]
Although today his procedures seem pure flimflam, and he himself was given to sharp practices, most scholars think that he truly believed in what he was doing and in the theory by which he accounted for his results. Mesmer, born in Swabia, came from a family of modest position—his father was a forester, his mother the daughter of a locksmith— but he worked his way through the Bavarian and Austrian educational systems, first meaning to become a priest, then a lawyer, and finally a doctor. At thirty-two he received his medical degree in Vienna; his professors, fortunately for him, were unaware that much of his dissertation, On the Influence of the Planets, was plagiarized from a work of a colleague of Isaac Newton’s. Despite the title, his dissertation was not about astrology; it proposed that there was a connection between Newton’s “universal gravitation” and the condition of the human body and mind. In the part of the dissertation that was Mesmer’s own work, he advanced the theory, based on a passing comment by Newton, that the human body is pervaded by an invisible fluid that is responsive to planetary gravitation. Health or illness, Mesmer argued, depends on whether the body’s “animal gravitation” is in harmony with, or discord with, that of the planets.
Two years after earning his degree, he married a wealthy Viennese widow much older than himself and thereby gained entrance to Viennese society. Freed from the need to practice more than part-time, he devoted much of his attention to cultural and scientific developments. When Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica, Mesmer, a competent amateur musician, bought one and became a skillful performer on it. Passionate music lovers, he and his wife saw a good deal of Leopold Mozart and his family, and twelve-year-old Wolfgang’s first opera, Bastien und Bastienne, had its debut in the garden of the Mesmer home.
While enjoying these delights, Mesmer was becoming a medical and psychological pioneer. In 1773 a twenty-seven-year-old woman came to him suffering from symptoms that other doctors had been unable to relieve. Nor was Mesmer able to help her until he recalled a talk he had had with a Jesuit priest named Maximilian Hell, who suggested that magnetism might influence the body. Mesmer bought a set of magnets, and the next time the woman came to see him he gingerly touched the magnets, one after another, to different parts of her body. She began to tremble and shortly went into convulsions—Mesmer decided this was “the crisis”—and, when she had calmed down, declared that her symptoms were much relieved. A series of further treatments cured her completely. (Today, her illness would be considered a hysterical neurosis and her recovery the result of suggestion.)
Mesmer now saw a link between magnetism and his own theory of animal gravitation. He decided that the body is pervaded by a magnetic rather than a gravitational fluid, and that the resulting force field can become misaligned, causing illness; realignment through treatment would restore health. What he had previously called “animal gravitation” he renamed “animal magnetism.” The patient’s crisis he interpreted as a breakthrough of an obstacle to the flow of the body’s magnetic fluid and the consequent restoration of “harmony.”
Mesmer began treating other patients, telling them to expect certain reactions, including the crisis. They all obligingly responded as anticipated, and Viennese newspapers soon were full of stories of Mesmer’s cures. At some point Maximilian Hell publicly asserted that the idea was his, not Mesmer’s, and a nasty dispute ensued. Mesmer boldly asserted that he had proposed the theory years earlier in his dissertation (a distortion of truth), won