Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [62]
In midcentury, a French country doctor named Auguste Liébeault discarded the remainder of the magical-mystical trappings of hypnotism. He had the patient stare into his eyes while he repeatedly suggested that the patient was growing sleepy. When the patient fell into a trance, the doctor told him that his symptoms would disappear, and in many cases they did. By the mid-1860s Liébeault, who had become a celebrity beyond his native Nancy, wrote a book about his method and its results; from then on, hypnotism, though still suspect and a subject of heated controversy, entered into medical practice.
Its most noted practitioner, late in the century, was Jean Martin Char-cot, director of the Salpêtrière, a hospital in Paris. Known as “the Napoleon of the neuroses,” he believed that hypnotic phenomena had much in common with hysterical symptoms and, indeed, that only a hysteric could be hypnotized. He hypnotized hysterical patients before groups of students to demonstrate the symptoms of hysteria, but did not consider hypnotism potentially therapeutic and did not use it as a therapy.
Charcot also believed, erroneously, that the trance was achieved only after the patient had passed through two prior stages, lethargy and catalepsy, each having specific symptoms and involving major changes in the functioning of the nervous system.2 His views were later disproved by the followers of Liébeault, who proved that the trance could be directly induced and that nonhysterics could be hypnotized. Still, it was thanks to Charcot’s prestige and his skill at inducing the trance that in 1882 the French Academy of Sciences accepted hypnosis as a neurological phenomenon that had nothing to do with magnetism.
A number of Charcot’s gifted students, among them Alfred Binet, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud, went on to offer psychological rather than neurological explanations of the hypnotic state and to use hypnosis in their own ways. In the past century, hypnosis has had a checkered history, partly as a sideshow entertainment and partly as a therapeutic tool useful in pain relief, particularly for persons who cannot tolerate anesthesia. Why it works (and why for many people it doesn’t) has been answered on two levels: It does not seem linked to most traits of personality, but some recent studies have linked it to absorption, or the capacity to concentrate totally on material outside oneself.3 Lately, with the advent of brain scans there has been evidence of a physiological mechanism at work: In highly hypnotizable people “top-down” neural processes, generated in the forebrain, override “bottom-up” processes that take place in the sensory perception areas of the brain, while in nonhypnotizables the opposite is true.4 Dr. Mesmer, could he know all this, would doubtless be outraged that his theory has been totally discarded but mightily pleased that his therapeutic claims have been vindicated.
The Skull Reader: Gall
Other physicalists, taking a totally different approach, palpated and measured the cranium in the belief that the details of its configuration were directly related to the individual’s personality traits and mental abilities.
The idea that external physical characteristics are linked to psychological traits was an ancient one. Physiognomy, the interpretation of character and mental abilities from the shape and size of the facial features, had existed since Greek times. It became popular in the late eighteenth century through the writings of Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian and mystic, whose four-volume Physiognomical Fragments, purporting to present the “science of physiognomy,” went through fifty-five editions between 1775 and 1810. Darwin later said that he almost missed out on his epochal trip on the Beagle because its captain, a disciple of Lavater’s,