In the spring of 1784, on a country estate in northern France, a young marquis tried a fashionable medical treatment on one of his tenants. It did not go as the textbook said it should. What happened instead changed the direction of an entire field, though almost nobody remembers his name.
The marquis
Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, was a great landowner and a colonel of artillery. Like many aristocrats of his day he had taken up the new “animal magnetism” of Franz Mesmer and had trained with him in Paris.
Mesmer taught that an invisible fluid flowed through all living things, and that a magnetiser could direct it by passing his hands over a patient. The expected result was a crisis: convulsions, crying or fainting, after which the patient would be better.
Victor
At Buzancy, the marquis’s estate, he was called to help Victor Race, a young man of about 23, son of the estate steward. Victor was ill in bed with what is described as an inflammation of the lungs.
Puységur began the magnetic passes and waited for the convulsions.
They did not come. Within a few minutes Victor fell peacefully asleep in his arms. But it was a strange sort of sleep. He spoke. He answered questions. He seemed more alert than when awake.
And he seemed changed. The quiet, deferential peasant spoke freely and fluently to his lord, reportedly in better French than his usual dialect. He discussed his worries. He appeared to respond to the marquis’s unspoken wishes. When he woke, he remembered none of it.
A new state
Puységur recognised the resemblance to sleepwalking and named the condition artificial somnambulism, or magnetic sleep.
He noted its features.
- A sleep-like state with the eyes closed
- The ability to talk and respond while in it
- Heightened responsiveness to the magnetiser
- Apparently sharpened mental abilities
- No memory of it afterwards
Anyone familiar with hypnosis will recognise the description. This was a calm, cooperative, verbal state, nothing like Mesmer’s convulsing patients.
What Puységur concluded
He drew conclusions that moved a long way from his teacher.
The crisis was unnecessary. Convulsions were not the healing agent and were better avoided.
The key was in the magnetiser’s mind. Puységur came to think the physical fluid mattered less than the operator’s will and intention. His motto was “Believe and will.”
The relationship was central. He stressed the rapport between magnetiser and patient.
The patient could be a partner. In somnambulism, he believed, the patient could describe their own illness and suggest their own treatment.
He was still wrong about a good deal. He believed in the fluid, and he credited his subjects with clairvoyance and the ability to diagnose other people’s diseases. But he had shifted attention from a physical force to a psychological relationship.
The elm tree
Demand grew so great that Puységur could not treat everyone individually. So he “magnetised” a large elm tree on the village green and tied ropes to its branches. Peasants sat on benches round the tree, held the ropes, and were reported to improve in large numbers.
It is a delightful image, and a telling one. An ordinary tree worked because people believed it would.
Why it mattered
- It gave the field its central phenomenon. For the next half century, “magnetic sleep” was what magnetisers sought.
- It replaced violence with calm. Hypnosis as a peaceful state begins here.
- It pointed to psychology. If intention and rapport mattered more than fluid, the way was open for an explanation in terms of suggestion.
- It revealed something about the mind. Victor behaved almost like another person and forgot it afterwards. That fed a century of thinking about mental life outside awareness.
What became of them
The French Revolution interrupted everything. Puységur, as an aristocrat, spent two years in prison, but survived, resumed his work, wrote several books, and became mayor of the nearby city of Soissons. He died in 1825.
Victor Race remained on the estate. He and the marquis are said to have stayed on good terms for life. Victor died in 1818, and Puységur had an inscription placed on his grave.
Reading it today
A modern reader can see what the marquis could not.
- Victor was a tenant being treated by his landlord, in a society built on deference. His responsiveness and his apparent reading of his master’s wishes need no mysterious explanation.
- His new fluency may have been the release of inhibition that a permitted, special situation allows.
- His forgetting matches the spontaneous amnesia sometimes seen in very responsive people, and what he had learned was expected.
- The clairvoyance was wishful observation.
None of that removes the significance of the event. Something real happened in that room: a state of calm, focused, responsive attention, produced by one person’s words and manner and another’s willingness.
What came next
A Portuguese priest, the Abbé Faria, soon argued that the state was produced entirely by the subject. A Scottish surgeon, James Braid, gave it a new explanation and a new name in the 1840s. Each step moved further from magnetism and closer to what we now understand.
The bottom line
Mesmer had the fame. Puységur had the discovery. In a farmhand who fell quietly asleep and began to talk, he found the calm, responsive state at the heart of hypnosis, and began to suspect that its cause lay in minds and not in magnets.
Next in the series: The Abbé Faria: The Goan Priest Who Understood Hypnosis First
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.