Hypnotism and the Mind: From Mesmer to Modern Science

Hypnosis is one of those topics that sits at a fascinating crossroads of science, history, and human psychology. Today it’s recognized as a legitimate clinical tool used in hospitals and therapy rooms around the world. But its path from 18th-century parlor trick to evidence-based practice is anything but straightforward. It’s a story of competing theories, brilliant minds, and a gradual untangling of the psychological from the mystical.

What is hypnosis?
The origins: Mesmer and animal magnetism
James Braid and the birth of hypnotism as science
The great theoretical divide: psychological vs. physiological
The physiological view: Charcot and the Salpêtrière School
The psychological view: the Nancy School
The power of hypnotic suggestion: inducing and reversing symptoms
Modern applications: from therapy to neuroscience
Pain management
Psychotherapy and anxiety
Where psychological and physiological finally meet

What is hypnosis?

According to Britannica, the central phenomenon of hypnosis is suggestibility – a state of greatly enhanced receptiveness and responsiveness to suggestions presented by the hypnotist. A person in a hypnotic state has focused attention, a deeply relaxed mental and physical condition, and a heightened openness to suggestion. Crucially, this does not mean the person surrenders their will. Modern hypnosis is a collaborative process – it requires the subject’s willingness and cooperation. The hypnotized individual responds in a focused, automatic fashion while the outside world temporarily fades into the background.

The origins: Mesmer and animal magnetism

As documented in PubMed, the story of modern hypnosis begins with the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who proposed that an invisible natural force – a magnetic “fluid” – flowed through all living beings. According to Mesmer, disease was caused by blockages in this fluid, and health could be restored by manipulating it through magnetic passes and hands-on techniques. His sessions took place in dramatic, candlelit rooms where patients would grip iron rods submerged in magnetized water while Mesmer moved among them, making sweeping gestures. People convulsed, wept, and reportedly felt healed.

A French royal commission – which included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier – investigated Mesmer in 1784 and concluded that his effects were real, but his theory of animal magnetism was not. Despite being discredited, Mesmer left something important behind. As historians note, he was among the first in Western medicine to draw serious attention to the mind-body connection – a concept that would prove foundational to modern psychology and psychiatry.

James Braid and the birth of hypnotism as science

The transition from mesmerism to a scientifically grounded practice came in the 1840s, thanks to a Scottish surgeon named James Braid. After attending a demonstration of mesmerism by a traveling French magnetizer, Braid became fascinated – but deeply skeptical of the magnetic explanation. Through careful observation, he concluded that the trance state was not caused by any magnetic force but was a form of nervous sleep induced by sustained attention. He coined the term “hypnosis” from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, and published his findings in Neurhypnology in 1843.

Braid’s key contribution was methodological rigor. He demonstrated that hypnosis could be induced simply by having a subject fix their gaze on a bright object, and that the effect had nothing to do with the operator’s magnetism or charisma. He even conducted self-hypnosis experiments to prove the point. Braid also recognized that hypnosis was not actual sleep but a state of focused mental concentration – a distinction that remains central to how we understand the phenomenon today.

The great theoretical divide: psychological vs. physiological

Once hypnosis entered the scientific mainstream, two competing schools emerged with very different explanations for how it worked – and this debate would shape the field for decades.

The physiological view: Charcot and the Salpêtrière School

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) was one of the most influential neurologists of the 19th century – known today as the founder of modern neurology and associated with at least fifteen medical eponyms. He worked and taught at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris for 33 years. Alongside his landmark work on multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Charcot became deeply interested in hysteria – a now-outdated term used to describe a range of psychological and neurological symptoms, especially those involving the patient’s perception of their own body.

Charcot believed that the capacity to be hypnotized was itself a symptom of hysteria – a pathological neurological state rooted in hereditary weakness of the nervous system. His school at the Salpêtrière maintained that hypnosis was an atypical, disturbed mental state that should never be induced in ordinary people, as it could destabilize the mind. He used hypnosis as an investigative tool: by putting hysterical patients into an “experimental state,” he could reproduce their symptoms, study them systematically, and, importantly, reverse them.

In a landmark series of experiments, Charcot suggested to hypnotized subjects that their arms would become paralyzed – and they did, producing hypnotic paralyses that closely mirrored spontaneous hysterical and post-traumatic cases. He then reversed these paralyses under controlled conditions. These demonstrations, though later criticized for methodological flaws, were groundbreaking in showing that suggestion alone could produce and eliminate physical symptoms – including paralysis, blindness, and sensory loss.

Charcot’s public clinical demonstrations at the Salpêtrière – held in a floodlit amphitheater and open to the Parisian public and aristocracy – became cultural events. One of his students was a young Sigmund Freud, who observed Charcot’s work in 1885 and later credited it with redirecting his ambitions from neurology to psychology.

The psychological view: the Nancy School

While Charcot dominated scientific opinion initially, a rival perspective was taking shape in the provincial city of Nancy. Physicians Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim argued that hypnosis had nothing to do with hysteria or any neurological pathology. They concluded that hypnosis involved no physical forces and no abnormal physiological processes, but was simply a combination of psychologically mediated responses to suggestion – something that ordinary, healthy people could experience.

Bernheim’s view was direct: suggestion, not trance, was the essential mechanism. The rivalry between the two schools drove enormous advances in hypnosis research, exposing a generation of medical students – including Freud – to radically new ideas about the mind-body relationship. Over time, the Nancy School’s psychological model proved more durable. After Charcot’s death in 1893, it emerged that many of his patients had, in fact, been coached by his own staff, undermining the validity of his “three stages of hypnosis.”

The power of hypnotic suggestion: inducing and reversing symptoms

One of the most striking aspects of hypnosis – both historically and in modern research – is its capacity to produce real, measurable physical effects through suggestion alone. Under hypnosis, appropriate suggestions can induce a remarkably wide range of psychological, sensory, and motor responses: a subject can be made to behave as if deaf, blind, paralyzed, amnesic, or impervious to pain. Crucially, these symptoms can also be reversed through the same mechanism.

This duality – that suggestion can both create and remove symptoms – was central to Charcot’s experiments and remains one of hypnosis’s most clinically significant properties. It points to the profound degree to which mental processes shape physical experience. In a hypnotic state, individuals are more open to suggestions, finding it easier to visualize scenarios or follow therapeutic recommendations, without being forced into actions against their will. The subject remains an active, responsive participant – not a passive object.

A related phenomenon is posthypnotic suggestion – where instructions given during a trance are carried out later, after the person has returned to a normal waking state, often without conscious awareness that they are following a prior instruction. This hints at how deeply suggestion can influence behavior beyond the immediate hypnotic session.

Modern applications: from therapy to neuroscience

Today, clinical hypnosis has moved well beyond its contested origins. Scientific research shows that hypnosis promotes neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to form new connections. The focused, receptive state it creates may serve as an ideal window for learning and behavioral change, allowing therapeutic suggestions to be integrated more readily.

Pain management

One of the most robustly supported applications of hypnosis is pain relief. A meta-analysis of 85 controlled experimental trials published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews found significant analgesic effects of hypnosis across all pain outcomes. Participants with high or medium hypnotic suggestibility showed clinically meaningful pain reductions of 42% and 29% respectively. The study concluded that hypnotic intervention may offer an effective and safe alternative to pharmaceutical pain management for most people.

Neurophysiological research further shows that hypnotic analgesia produces measurable changes in both brain and spinal-cord functioning – it’s not simply a matter of expectation or placebo. A separate systematic review and meta-analysis found that hypnosis was particularly effective for chronic musculoskeletal and neuropathic pain when administered over eight or more sessions, with moderate to large effect sizes compared to control conditions.

Psychotherapy and anxiety

Medical hypnosis, alone or combined with cognitive behavioral therapy, has shown promising results in treating anxiety, depression, smoking cessation, weight loss, and inflammatory bowel disease. It has also been shown to enhance post-operative recovery, reduce hospital stay length, and lower the need for opioid medication. Trauma and PTSD represent another important area: by guiding individuals through controlled re-engagement with traumatic memories in a safe environment, hypnotherapy can help reduce emotional reactivity and support healing.

Where psychological and physiological finally meet

The old debate between the Salpêtrière and Nancy Schools – physiological versus psychological – has not so much been resolved as transcended. Modern neuroscience shows that the two are inseparable. Hypnosis modulates conscious experience by altering expectations about pain, regulating attention, and activating cognitive and emotional mechanisms. The mind changes the body; the body changes the mind. In this sense, both Charcot and Bernheim were right – and both were incomplete.

From Mesmer’s magnetized bathtubs to neuroimaging labs, the history of hypnosis is really a history of how science has slowly come to terms with the power the mind holds over the body. What began as spectacle has become therapy; what was once dismissed as trickery is now measured in randomized controlled trials.

What do you think? If suggestion alone can produce physical symptoms like paralysis or pain relief, what does that tell us about the relationship between our mental states and our physical health? And given how long hypnosis was dismissed or misunderstood, what other therapeutic tools might we be underestimating today?

References

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Table of Contents

What is hypnosis? 🔗

The origins: Mesmer and animal magnetism 🔗

James Braid and the birth of hypnotism as science 🔗

The great theoretical divide: psychological vs. physiological 🔗

The physiological view: Charcot and the Salpêtrière School 🔗

The psychological view: the Nancy School 🔗

The power of hypnotic suggestion: inducing and reversing symptoms 🔗

Modern applications: from therapy to neuroscience 🔗

Pain management 🔗

Psychotherapy and anxiety 🔗

Where psychological and physiological finally meet 🔗