In the 1880s, France was the centre of the hypnosis world, and it was split in two. In Paris, the most famous neurologist alive taught that hypnosis was a symptom of nervous disease. In the provincial city of Nancy, a country doctor and a professor of medicine argued that it was something anyone could experience.
They could not both be right. The way the argument ended shaped everything that followed.
Paris: the Salpêtrière
Jean-Martin Charcot ran the neurological service at the Salpêtrière hospital and is regarded as a founder of modern neurology. His name is attached to several conditions he described.
In the late 1870s he turned to hysteria, a diagnosis then given to patients, mostly women, with paralyses, seizures and losses of sensation that had no visible cause. He found that these patients could be hypnotized, and he made hypnosis respectable simply by studying it.
His conclusions were firm.
- Hypnosis was a pathological condition, found only in people with hysteria.
- It was physiological, produced by physical means such as fixing the gaze or pressing on the eyelids.
- It passed through three distinct stages: lethargy, catalepsy and somnambulism, each with its own physical signs.
He called this le grand hypnotisme. He demonstrated it in celebrated public lectures, where patients moved through the stages before audiences of doctors, writers and visitors from across Europe.
Nancy: Liébeault and Bernheim
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was a country doctor near Nancy who treated poor patients by hypnosis, often without charge. He used simple verbal suggestion and wrote a book that almost nobody read.
Hippolyte Bernheim was a respected professor of medicine at Nancy. He went to see Liébeault in the early 1880s as a sceptic, after a patient he had failed to help was reportedly cured. He came away convinced, adopted the method in his own hospital wards, and began publishing.
Their view was the opposite of Charcot’s.
- Hypnosis is not a disease. Most ordinary people can be hypnotized.
- It is produced by suggestion, an idea accepted by the mind.
- Charcot’s three stages were artefacts: produced by what the patients had learned was expected of them.
- The same effects can be obtained without hypnosis at all, by suggestion in the waking state.
The clash
The Paris school replied that Bernheim was so absorbed in suggestion that he had lost sight of hypnotism altogether.
The dispute spread into the courts. The Salpêtrière physician Georges Gilles de la Tourette, working with Charcot, argued that a hypnotized person could not be made to commit a crime. The Nancy school argued that suggestion could be powerful enough to do so, and the two sides gave opposing expert evidence in criminal trials.
Why Nancy won
Bernheim’s criticism was devastating because it could be tested.
- Charcot’s stages appeared reliably only at the Salpêtrière, in a small group of long-stay patients who had been hypnotized repeatedly, by assistants, in front of audiences.
- Elsewhere, with ordinary people, the stages did not appear unless they were suggested.
- Bernheim hypnotized large numbers of patients with no sign of hysteria.
The star patients had learned their parts. Not through deliberate fraud, but through repeated rehearsal and an environment in which everyone knew what was supposed to happen.
By the time Charcot died in 1893, the tide had turned, and some accounts suggest that he had begun to doubt his own position. The Nancy view became the accepted one.
What each side contributed
Charcot
- Made hypnosis a legitimate subject for scientific medicine
- Established that psychological factors could produce physical symptoms
- Trained a generation, including a young Viennese visitor named Sigmund Freud
Bernheim and Liébeault
- Showed that hypnosis is a normal human capacity
- Put suggestion at the centre
- Laid the ground for psychotherapy, and for the modern understanding of the placebo effect
The lesson that still applies
The Salpêtrière story is a warning about demand characteristics: the tendency of subjects to produce what the situation calls for. A century later the psychologist Martin Orne made it a central topic of research.
It is why:
- Phenomena that appear only in one clinic or one school should be treated with caution
- Good studies compare hypnotized people with people asked to simulate
- “Signs” of special states, such as stages of depth, need independent confirmation
Whenever a hypnosis teacher describes a new state with a fixed list of signs, it is worth asking whether those signs appear in people who have never been told about them.
How the debate lives on
Bernheim went further over time, eventually saying there was no hypnosis, only suggestion. That position anticipates the modern “non-state” view. The claim that hypnosis is a distinct condition anticipates the “state” view. The argument between them has continued, in more refined form, ever since.
The bottom line
Charcot gave hypnosis scientific standing and got its nature wrong. Bernheim got it right: hypnosis is what suggestion does in a normal mind. The episode also left a lasting caution about how easily an expert can create the very thing he believes he is observing.
Next in the series: Freud and Hypnosis: Why the Father of Psychoanalysis Gave It Up
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.