Readers of The Count of Monte Cristo will remember the Abbé Faria: the learned old prisoner who educates the hero in the dungeon of the Château d’If. Alexandre Dumas borrowed the name from a real man, whose actual life was more remarkable than the novel, and who understood something about hypnosis that the rest of Europe took another sixty years to accept.
From Goa to Paris
José Custódio de Faria was born on 31 May 1756 in Goa, on the west coast of India, then a Portuguese colony. He was of Goan Brahmin Catholic background. His parents separated to enter religious life, and his father took him to Lisbon and then to Rome, where he studied for the priesthood and earned a doctorate.
A well-known story is told of his early years. Invited to preach before the Portuguese court, the young priest froze in the pulpit. His father, seated below, whispered to him in Konkani, their mother tongue, words to the effect of: “They are all vegetables. Cut the vegetables.” The fear left him and he preached. Faria is said to have wondered ever afterwards how a single phrase could so change a person’s state.
He moved to Paris, lived through the Revolution, and reportedly spent time in prison.
The public sessions
By 1813 animal magnetism had revived in Paris. Faria began giving public lectures and demonstrations. They were well attended and caused a stir.
His method was strikingly simple. He would seat a subject comfortably, ask them to close their eyes and concentrate on sleep, and then say in a firm voice: “Sleep!” If that did not work, he might ask the person to gaze at his hand, or touch them lightly on the forehead. With suitable subjects, it was enough.
No magnets. No passes. No tub of iron filings.
What he taught
Faria rejected the central doctrine of the magnetisers. There was, he said, no magnetic fluid and no special power in the operator.
His conclusions were radical for 1813.
The cause is in the subject. The state arises from the person’s own mind: their concentration, their expectation, their willingness.
The operator only guides. A magnetiser no more causes the sleep than someone who says “walk” causes a person’s legs to work.
People differ. Faria estimated that only a minority, perhaps one in five or six, were readily susceptible. He thought this depended on the individual, not on the skill of the operator. Modern research on hypnotizability has confirmed the principle.
It is a natural state. He called it lucid sleep, and compared it to ordinary sleep and concentration.
Suggestion produces effects. He demonstrated that a subject given water and told it was wine would taste wine, and that suggestions could produce or relieve sensations. He also described what we would now call post-hypnotic suggestion.
Every one of these points is part of the modern understanding.
Why he was ignored
Faria made enemies on all sides. The magnetisers resented having their theory dismissed. The Church was suspicious. And he was a foreigner with an accent.
His reputation was damaged by ridicule. An actor is said to have attended a session, pretended to be entranced, and then exposed the “trick” to laughter. A popular stage farce mocked him. Audiences drifted away.
He spent his last years as chaplain to a religious house, writing down his ideas. His book, On the Cause of Lucid Sleep, was published in 1819. He died of a stroke on 20 September that year, reportedly on the very day it appeared. Only the first of the planned volumes was ever printed.
Vindication
His ideas did not disappear. They were kept alive by a few French writers, and they anticipated almost exactly the position taken in the 1880s by Liébeault and Bernheim of the Nancy school, who established that hypnosis is a product of suggestion.
The Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, a Nobel laureate, later wrote a study of Faria and called him the creator of the doctrine of suggestion.
In Goa he is remembered with pride. A bronze statue in Panaji shows him in his cassock, arms outstretched over a woman he is hypnotizing.
Faria and Braid
James Braid, the Scottish surgeon usually credited with founding modern hypnotism in the 1840s, reached similar conclusions by a different route. Braid emphasised fixed attention and eye fatigue. Faria had emphasised expectation and the subject’s own mind. In some respects the priest was nearer to today’s view.
What he got wrong
Faria was a man of his era. Some of his physiological explanations, involving the thickness of the blood, have not survived. He overestimated what could be achieved. And his authoritative “Sleep!” belongs to a style that many people today would find off-putting.
What we can take from him
- The power is yours. Nobody puts you into hypnosis. You go.
- Simple methods work. Elaborate ritual is not required.
- People vary, and that is nobody’s fault.
- A few words can change a state. A whispered phrase in a pulpit, or a calm sentence in a clinic.
The bottom line
In 1813, a priest from Goa told Paris that hypnosis has nothing to do with magnetism and everything to do with the subject’s own mind. He was laughed off the stage. He was also right, sixty years ahead of the science.
Next in the series: James Esdaile: Surgery Without Pain in 1840s India
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.