Franz Anton MESMER (1734 – 1815)
While studying at the Vienna Faculty of Medicine, Mesmer, who was aware of the views on magnetism, said in 1765 that the “Stars of the Stars” and the Physiological Effects of Planets on the Human Body” based on some claims that combine astronomy and medicine. In this thesis, he claimed that people lived under the influence of the stars, and that a magnetic current that filled the universe penetrated people, causing them to get sick and stay healthy. If this magnetic current was evenly distributed throughout the human body, the person would be healthy, and if it was unevenly distributed, the person would become ill.
Mesmer was influenced by these views as well as by the vitalist theory of Hofman (1660-1741), one of the medical authorities of the time, who tried to introduce the Monads view of the philosopher Laibniz into medicine.
Jesuit priest Hell, meanwhile, was very interested in Mesmer’s doctoral thesis, as he already believed in the healing effect of magnets and tried to treat the person by producing magnets in the form of organs to be treated. And sent him some magnets. Mesmer, who achieved a brilliant result by performing magnet therapy on a person with heart complaints for the first time; Since the current in the magnet passes into the body and stays there, he started to think that it is possible to digest this current to the body, use it by flowing it with the hands, and heal. His second patient was Baron Hareczky, whom Vienna’s most famous physicians could not treat, and he was suffering from esophageal stricture. After successfully treating him as well, Mesmer’s reputation skyrocketed, and from 1778 he began to treat his patients with his new technique. Thus, as of this date, Animal (live) Magnetism was born!
Many of his colleagues were unable to attract Mesmer because of his brilliant achievements, and due to these jealousies he eventually left Vienna. The final straw in this abandonment was the treatment of Theresa Paradi, a blind but highly skilled pianist, patronized by the Empress. The most famous physicians of Europe at that time diagnosed Therasa’s ailment with paralysis of the optic nerves and could not find a cure. Mesmer treated this hysterical blind girl, and she gradually started to see. This event has been determined in detail from the written memoirs of Teresa’s father that have survived to the present day. Hearing of the success, the court doctor Van Stoerk and the famous ophthalmologist Wenzel, under the influence of their jealousy, scared the girl’s mother by saying that if Theresa recovered, she would cut the empress’s allowance. Finally, in a dramatic scene between the mother who wanted to keep her daughter from the treatment of Mesmer and her daughter who refused, a slap in the face of the girl was blinded again, and when the doctors who examined her declared Mesmer’s failure, Mesmer also left Vienna.
Mesmer, who came to Paris, rented a large flat in a hotel in the Vendome square, turned it into a practice with Deslon, one of the faculty physicians, and began to treat his patients, whose fame spread rapidly. Societies of magnetism, called «Societe del’harmarie», were established in the main cities of France. Finally, the year 1874 King XVI. Louis ordered the establishment of a commission for the scientific study of this subject, and immediately, not one, but two commissions were formed.
Since the first commission could not meet with Mesmer, they examined other magnetizers. The report of this commission, which was formed by the members of the Academy of Sciences and some professors from the Faculty of Medicine, was negative. The second commission was created by the Medical Academy, but the result was still the same. After the commission reports, everything and everyone suddenly turned against Mesmer. Especially the death of a patient who was treated with magnetism, while his open gratitude was published in the newspapers, brought ridicule and insults to the last point. Mesmer, who experienced all the pain of the defeat, left France while feeling the clouds of the great French Revolution gathered on the horizon, settled in Switzerland and died in Mersebourg on March 15, 1815, devoting his life to caring for the poor patients.
Marquise De Puysegur
One of A. Mesmer’s students, the Marquise de Puysegur, while continuing to work on his teacher’s path, one day realized that he had created a sleepwalking state in a shepherd by chance. He was trying to normalize the shepherd’s magnetic order by touching the aching parts of the patient with his hands. Meanwhile, he was constantly looking into the eyes of the patient. Two or three minutes later the person had fallen into Puysegur’s arms. It was a completely different situation from magnetism. After a while, he saw the patient standing still, walking, talking and answering the questions asked. The person did not wake up despite all the noise, shouting and calling. It was like he was in a sleep. Puysegur realized that the patient was not really sleeping and that he could understand and respond to what was said, so he started to give positive suggestions by talking about happy things with his patient. After a while, the person who woke up was completely healed and joyful. He couldn’t remember any of their conversations.
Puysegur, who spent May and June 1784 with such experiences, putting 10 people into artificial sleepwalking, named this state as artificial sleepwalking because he compared it to normal sleepwalking. With the discovery of this phenomenon, a new era was opened in the history of magnetism.
After this discovery of Puysegur, Petetine in 1787 and Deleuze in 1813 published books on artificial sleepwalking. When artificial sleepwalking came to the attention again, in 1825, the French Academy of Medicine felt the need to discuss the issue again. By deciding to cancel the previous decision against Mesmer; declared that he accepted the magnetic effects.
John Elliotson became interested in magnetism in 1837. However, this behavior was not accepted by the official authorities. When this was the case, John Elliotson resigned from his university. Continuing his studies of magnetism, J. Elliotson published a journal called Zoist in 1843.
Dr. in Kolkata, India. James Essdaile became interested in the subject by reading Zoist magazine and continued his surgeries with magnetic anesthesia, which he started in 1845, until 1851. He successfully completed thousands of surgeries in this time span. However, when he returned to his native Scotland in 1851, he died before anyone could believe what he had done.
Meanwhile, with the development of chemical anesthesia techniques (1844; nitrous oxide, 1846; ether), the surgical use of magnetism gradually decreased.
DR. JAMES BRAID
While James Braid was watching a stage show by master magnetizers very closely, he noticed that the eyes of the person being magnetized were fixed. He thought to himself that this artificial state of sleepwalking could only be possible by tiring the eye nerves. And he gave it up to try. In his studies on his relatives, he directed people’s gaze 
to a bright object and tried to tire their eyes. After a while, he saw that the same state of sleep had occurred. He named this condition Hypnos (1841), which means sleep in Greek. Dr. Thanks to J. Braid, it has been shown that artificial sleepwalking can be achieved very simply. Later, Braid realized that hypnosis was not sleep, but the name stuck.
In 1842, Dr. A demonstration of hypnosis proposed by J. Braid to the British Medical Society was rejected. In 1843, Dr. Braid published his work called Neurohypnology. But the British Medical Society dismissed this work and ridiculed it. Still, the name hypnosis set Braid’s work apart from the work of his predecessors. Braid’s reputation as an acknowledged and conservative medical professional and his emphasis on the scientific approach soon brought hypnosis to a respected position in England for the first time.
Braid was the first to argue that a hypnotic state could be created without magnetic flux. He believed that the hypnotist affects the person only through suggestion. For this reason, hypnosis is not based on the secret, magical powers of the person performing the hypnosis; concluded that it depends on the individual’s susceptibility to suggestion. Therefore, in his hypnotic practice known as Braidism, he asked his patients to focus on one point while he gave the appropriate suggestions.
Jean Martin CHARCOT
French neurologist Jean – Martin Charcot was looking at the event from a different angle. He necessarily regarded the hypnotized people as people with an overt or covert hysterical personality. According to him, being hypnotized was the product of an abnormal nervous structure. He stated that normal people cannot be hypnotized. Although Charcot did not become a part of the modern view of hypnosis with this view, the fact that such a highly respected medical authority found hypnosis worth researching contributed significantly to making hypnosis respectable and acceptable. 
LIEBEAULT and BERNHEIM (NANCY SCHOOL)
The influence of Braidism made itself felt in France with the efforts of a French rural physician who read Braid’s book years later. This physician, named Liebeault, used hypnotism successfully for twenty years, skillfully adding verbal suggestion to Braid’s fixed gaze technique. He did not receive any money from the treatment he performed with this technique. Only one copy was sold when he published his book on the subject. Even his friends made fun of him and his work. This ridicule even led to Professor LIEBEAULT Bernheim writing an article declaring that he was a charlatan. In fact, one day, when Bernheim heard that a patient suffering from sciatic pain was being treated by Liebeault without his knowledge, he became angry and decided to go and put him in his place. But Bernheim was first and foremost a scientist, and when he saw a conversation with Liebeault and his hypnotism techniques up close, he changed his mind. Thus, a famous professor accepted the treatment method of a simple village doctor and started working with him. And they treated 10,000 people with this technique.
Liebeault and Bernheim took a stand against Charcot and his school, declaring that hypnosis is only a state of suggestion. In 1886 Bernheim published his book Suggestion Therapies. As one of France’s most famous physicians, his turn to hypnotherapy had a huge positive impact. Bernheim and Liebeault founded the Nancy School of Hypnotism. Primarily because of their efforts, hypnosis has been widely accepted by physicians and psychologists all over the Continent of Europe. BERNEHEIM
Emile COUE
The young pharmacist from Troyes first encountered Liebeault in 1885. This meeting he had at the age of 28 would change the course of his life. Liebeault was just a provincial doctor. He was not pretentious and ambitious. He was the first to openly reveal the phenomenon of suggestion, and to perform almost miracles. He had finally settled in Nancy. Here he found his student Bernheim, who later introduced his ideas to the world. After participating in some of Liebeault’s experiments, Emile Coue began studying and practicing hypnotic suggestions. He soon realized the potentials it contained. He applied Liebeault’s hypnotic technique on individual patients for a while, then turned to collective suggestion therapy. Coue had the patients who applied to him lie on the sunbeds and put them on the couches, gradually giving up on immersing them in a deep hypnotic sleep, contented with providing a slight relaxation in his patients, and trying to heal them by means of suggestion, by speaking effectively to all of the patients. But Coue not only gave suggestions to his patients, he focused his work on training them to practice the technique of autosuggestion. This is where the great importance of the Coue technique came from, and at this point it was a step forward that should not be underestimated.
Coue wrote “Self-Dominance Through Conscious Auto-suggestion” in 1922, “How Suggestion And Auto-suggestion Is Applied” in 1923, and “My Technique: American Impressions” in 1923.
Sigmund FREUD
Sigmund Freud began his glorious career by learning about hypnosis. Even before he came to France, he was convinced of the fact that the Austrian neuropathologist Breuer had put forward. Through hypnosis, Breuer was treating a hysterical young girl named Bertha Pappenheim. Thus, he would find the regression arrangement through dialogue.
Young, quite beautiful, very intelligent, this girl was afflicted with a severe nervous hysteria that showed symptoms such as multi-faceted restlessness, aversion to food, contraction of organs, and ecstasy… Breuer was encouraging her to trust him.
The doctor determined to his amazement that every sign of Bertha’s neurosis had arisen with excitement, and the patient 
disappeared as the cause of the emotional stimulus was reliving the event. Breuer used this technique; He named it ‘catharsis’, which in Greek means ‘purification, or refreshment of the soul’.
In the waking state, the young girl, like other patients, could not tell how the symptoms of the disease arose, the connection between them, and any effect on her life. In the case of hypnosis, however, the young girl immediately found the connections sought. Freud immediately believed this finding. Hypnosis was lowering the level of consciousness. Thus, the emotions hidden in the subconscious were coming to the surface. By flashback, the person was reliving the memories stored in the depths, making himself independent by sweeping the symptom.
It is interesting to identify Freud’s interest in hypnotism before he set out to create psychoanalysis. At that age, however, Freud believed that in the waking state, the young girl could indifferently pour out her sigh. The psychoanalytic approach becomes evident when Freud writes: The aim of the treatment is to transfer the emotional load that has taken the wrong path, in other words, the young girl who is stuck there, to the usual paths in which she can move forward.
Freud is enthusiastic as he describes his hypnotized processes in his book My Life and Psychoanalysis: “In Paris, I could see the harmless use of hypnotism to elicit symptoms on patients and then erase them…suggestion became my principal tool of study. .. moreover, the work through hypnosis was dazzling… for the first time, one assimilated the feeling of having overcome one’s own unique weakness; was lauded for being a miracle worker.” This account is the example that Freud himself gives for someone who wants to analyze himself.
Freud, however, soon turned his back on hypnosis. Let’s listen to his detailed reasons for this from himself: “One day while I was working, what I had long suspected revealed itself to me directly. That day I was bringing a young girl from one of my most docile patients out of a state of hypnosis, which was ending her agonizing depressions from past causes. When my patient woke up, he wrapped his arms around my neck. I was too cold-blooded to attribute this incident to my personal intolerance. Now I was thinking about the mysterious element behind the hypnosis. Instead of removing it, or at least isolating it, I should have given up on hypnosis.”
Freud thus found the displacer phenomenon. His friend Breuer admitted to him that he had a similar adventure with Bertha Pappenheim. When her beautiful patient recovered, she was not only declaring her love, but exhibiting all the signs of an imaginary pregnancy for which she inadvertently claimed to be responsible.
Fear of psychic displacement is one of the factors that led Freud to turn his back on hypnosis; The stubborn mystery of hypnosis may be the second reason. Freud was now hostile to hypnotic suggestion, which he regarded as a magical act that inflicts real plunder on the patient’s personality. Moreover, perhaps the main reason was Freud’s inability to master this technique. If Freud had been a good hypnotist; psychoanalysis today would perhaps exist earlier as ‘hypno-analysis’.
In 1891 the British Medical Society appointed a committee to explore the nature and value of hypnosis. In the report prepared at the end of the research, it was stated that the hypnosis phenomenon was real and the use of hypnosis in the treatment process was also satisfactory. It was also stated that it is not appropriate to use hypnosis for entertainment purposes. But despite the positive results of the investigation; Interest in hypnosis, both in and outside Britain, continued to wane. In particular, Freud’s abandonment of this approach greatly regressed hypnosis. With few exceptions, the use of hypnosis again fell into the hands of charlatans, the entertainment world; This frightened the experts in dealing with him.
There was no resurgence in interest in hypnosis until the need for rapid healing of war neuroses arose during the First World War. Hypnotherapy has proven its worth in this field and has once again gained attention. Although most of the early studies were conducted by doctors, the development of psychology in the 20th century increased the role of psychologists in the process of bringing hypnosis under scientific scrutiny.
The first modern book on the subject was written by Clark L. Hull (1884–1952) in 1933: “Hypnosis and Suggestion: An Experiential Approach” Following the publication of Hull’s classic book, the literature began to expand rapidly and continues to this day. so it continued. In 1953 the British Medical Society formally approved the use of hypnosis in both physical and psychological disorders in a report by a committee it appointed. The American Medical Association gave this approval three years later.
