Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

A couple of fictional treatments of stage hypnotism in America of the nineteenth century conveniently illustrate the opposing views. In Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) there is a scene in which Priscilla, as the ‘Veiled Lady’, performs on stage ‘in communion with the spiritual world’ and in touch with ‘the Absolute’. She is in a cataleptic state, her will totally under the control of the unscrupulous Professor Westervelt. Hawthorne seems to believe that such people are genuinely in a trance (although Priscilla's trance is broken by her love for Hollingsworth, an attraction stronger than the magnetism of the charismatic but flawed Westervelt). In Alias Grace, however, Margaret Atwood's 1996 novel, the whole thing is portrayed as a sham – effective, and harmless, but still fraudulent.

  Mesmerism and the American Prophets

  When mesmerism first became all the rage in America, the rash of books stressed both the medical and the paranormal potential. By 1850, however, the latter was of far more interest than the former. Physicalist theories were abandoned in favour of various adaptations of traditional lore about the soul and the spirit, or in favour of Swedenborgism, since the Scandinavian prophet was immensely popular in the States, and mesmerists were supposed to prove the reality of Swedenborg's visions. In Mesmer and Swedenborg, for instance, written in 1847, George Bush reckoned that although Swedenborg had communicated with angels on his own, Mesmer had introduced a method by which others could be vouchsafed glimpses of the same realms. Bush accepted all the so-called ‘higher phenomena’ of mesmerism, from clairvoyance to the ability to see auras, because these were just the kinds of phenomena one would expect to find in the spiritual world if Swedenborg's teachings were true. Mesmerism, in fact, had been given to the world to prepare the way for the final acceptance of Swedenborgism. For whatever reasons, peculiar to the cultural history of the developing nation, mesmerism predisposed Americans to think not only of a lower unconscious, but also of a mystical higher unconscious, and to abandon scripturally based Christianity in favour of the psychological and experiential attempt to align oneself with higher or natural forces.

  It was, in a sense, Poyen's fault once again. He was the missionary who started the whole thing off by his direct influence on a couple of significant figures, Dr James Stanley Grimes (1807–1903) and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802– 66) and, through them, by his indirect influence on even more significant figures. By the time of this third generation, it is fair to say that mesmerism no longer played a major part in the lives or work of any of the major American prophets, but it was the original impetus that initiated the whole fascinating movement.

  Quimby, a thoughtful, respectable-looking man, met Poyen on tour in Belfast, Maine, in either 1836 or 1838, and was bowled over by his demonstration and lecture. He pestered Poyen with questions afterwards, and Poyen told him that he too could become a mesmerist if he applied himself. This was all Quimby needed to hear; he left his job as a clock-maker and followed Poyen around until he felt he had learnt enough from him and could set up as a magnetizer himself. With seventeen-year-old Lucius Burkmar as his somnambulist diagnostician, he rapidly became the most famous mesmerist in America. His services were in demand wherever he went.

  After a while, however, a niggling doubt began to surface: was this somnambulistic clairvoyance, or telepathy with the patients themselves? If the latter, Lucius was simply confirming what the patients already believed, and the reason the cures worked was not necessarily any particular efficacy in the herbal remedies Quimby prescribed as a result of Lucius's diagnoses, but the trust and confidence of the patient. In 1859 he moved to Portland, Maine, and set himself up in consulting rooms large enough to accommodate the hundreds of patients who came to see him. He found that he didn't need Lucius, but could cure patients himself, by putting them at their ease, sitting opposite them and staring at them until he went into a trance state. He then used psychic force to transmit healing energy from himself to the patient, and backed this up with herbal drugs.

  But the doubts would not go away, and seemed to be confirmed by a discovery Quimby made. His poorer patients could not afford many of the drugs Quimby used to prescribe, and so he would recommend to them drugs which, while less expensive, were also less strong. To his surprise, he found that they were cured just as effectively, if they were cured at all. He realized it was his patients’ confidence in him as a healer that was doing the trick, and so he gave up using drugs – and magnetism – and became a faith healer. He claimed not that the cause of cure was confidence, but, more radically, that illness was caused in the first place by bad beliefs. Disease, he said, was ‘a deranged state of mind’. Eradication of these negative beliefs would not only cure disease, but keep one free from illness; in trying to cure the disease, doctors were taking an effect for a cause. It was important to Quimby, then, that his patients understood what the sources of illness and cure were; he would explain things to them, rather than imposing anything on them, and with this use of speech resembled a modern psychotherapist rather than one of the silent mesmerists of Victorian Britain. Magnetism could bring temporary relief, but only the right attitude could really cure. Like Coué after him, he stressed optimism (and putting the mind on higher things) as a shield against illness.

  Poyen influenced not only Quimby but also Dr Grimes in Poughkeepsie. Grimes was an itinerant lecturer and demonstrator, of the same generation as Sunderland and Dods, but not quite of their stature. A tailor, William Levingston, left one of his shows with a burning desire to test his own mesmeric powers, and found that he was highly successful with a young man called Andrew Jackson Davis, who had moved to Poughkeepsie not long before, in 1839, from Blooming Grove, New York, where he had been born in 1826. Davis soon demonstrated that he had extraordinary clairvoyant powers, and Levingston toured with him around the country. In addition to the usual run of medical diagnoses and foretelling the future, the ‘Poughkeepsie Seer’, as he became known, was famous for channelling (to use the modern term) a vision of the divine powers and workings of the universe as a whole, which he came to see as the beginning of a new revelation for humankind. As his fame grew, he left Levingston and moved to New York to spread his gospel more effectively, and took Dr Lyon as his magnetizer and the Reverend Fishbaugh as his scribe. Before long he came to prefer a self-induced trance to one that was externally imposed, at any rate for the dictation of the vast, rambling book in 800 pages, on science, love, religion and the spiritual world, which he called The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. ‘The poverty of blood which marked poor Andrew Jackson's childhood was reflected in his spiritual life. Surely to few other seers has been granted so limited and so purblind a vision of things celestial. He was almost wholly lacking in passion, human or Divine. His ideal of conduct was an emasculated stoicism, his highest virtue a milk and watery benevolence, his God a progressive nebula.’ But for all these shortcomings, the book was an enormous success, and ran to thirty-five editions in the thirty years following its publication in 1847. Davis's intelligence and enthusiasm shine from his eyes in contemporary portraits, and his personal magnetism helped to convince thousands of the truth of his visions.

  Quimby's Disciples

  Andrew Jackson Davis was only the first of the American prophets. Others soon followed, of whom the most significant and interesting was Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906). But they made no particularly significant use of mesmerism. In Davis's case it was mesmerism that first clearly revealed his clairvoyant faculty and triggered his later career; for Harris it was more that mesmerism had primed the American public to receive his message. Nevertheless, the history of mesmerism in the United States does have this peculiar twist. In Europe, when hypnotized subjects were used as seers, they were literally ‘mediums’: they were intermediaries, no more than mouthpieces for higher intelligences. In America some of these seers, like Davis and Harris, claimed religious status themselves, as prophets, dispensers of a new revelation.

  By far the most famous of the native American prophet
s was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Mesmerism certainly left its mark on her life and work. In the first place, although she later denied it (but then she was somewhat given to lying, especially about her childhood), she was a disciple of Quimby, who in fact coined the term ‘Christian Science’, as well as giving her the principles. Eddy's life displays a pattern of attaching herself to men (often younger) and then turning on them later and accusing them of malevolence towards her. For instance, after the foundation of Christian Science, she relied on a man called Richard Kennedy to do most of the healing, while she took charge of the lecturing. Kennedy later took her to court for not paying him fairly, and he won both the court case and her lifelong enmity. Her vehement denials that she owed anything to Quimby, whose writings she undoubtedly plundered for her Science and Health (1875), are simply part of this pattern. In the second place, in her later, somewhat paranoid years, Eddy was convinced that her illnesses – and indeed anything that went wrong – were due to a force she called ‘malignant animal magnetism’ (or sometimes the ‘red dragon’) being directed towards her by her enemies, so she clearly remained a believer in the efficacy of magnetism. (Even today Christian Scientists persist in calling hypnotism ‘animal magnetism’, and they are some of the foremost denouncers of hypnotism as unremittingly evil.) In fact, she used to keep a rotating staff of students in residence at her Brookline mansion whose major responsibility was to ward off the malicious animal magnetism generated by her enemies and to look after her household. They were not particularly successful, because Eddy was plagued by a string of court cases from patients who claimed she had overcharged them. In the third place, with their Quimby-like faith in the power of affirmative thinking, some of the practices of Christian Scientists resemble self-hypnosis.

  Mary Baker Eddy was born Mary A. Morse Baker in July 1821, the daughter of a poor New Hampshire farmer, and the youngest of six children. She married a bricklayer called George Washington Glover, and moved to South Carolina, where Glover died. Mary Glover, then aged twenty-three, gave their son away to neighbours to bring up and didn't see him again for twenty-three years. Not long afterwards, she married Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist, but this marriage quickly broke down. In 1862, suffering from back pain, she consulted Quimby, and was cured. Quimby, as we have seen, was concerned to educate his patients, not just to cure them, and so Mary Patterson learnt all she could from the great man. In 1866 the pain returned as a result of a fall, but she healed herself, and went on to found Christian Science, beginning by advertising a course teaching people how to heal themselves without drugs, electricity and so on.

  The principles of Christian Science are encapsulated in the following quotation from Science and Health, and the reader will immediately notice the resemblance to Quimby's teachings: ‘You say a boil is painful; but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests through inflammation and swelling a belief in pain; and this belief is called a boil.’ In 1870 she moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, and established a practice. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, who died in 1882. She herself lived on until 1910, by which time there were already some 90,000 Christian Scientists in the States alone. In her later years she had delusions of divinity and in 1938 the board of directors of the Christian Science Church confirmed that she was the spiritual idea of God typified by the woman in the Apocalypse and now come to life. This belief in the near divinity of Mary Baker Eddy is reflected in some of the Christian Science practices, which include, for instance, self-healing by focusing on her teachings, which are the carriers of positive wholesome beliefs.

  Christian Science has weathered well, and is still a flourishing movement, but in her day Mary Baker Eddy was no more famous than two more of Quimby's pupils, Julius and Annetta Dresser, the founders of New Thought. An impression of New Thought may be conveyed by comparing it with Christian Science. First, where Christian Science is authoritarian, regarding Mary Baker Eddy's writings as final revelations, the Dressers stressed that spiritual truths go on being revealed. Second, where Christian Science stresses the negative (disease does not exist, vigilance is necessary against malignant animal magnetism), New Thought stressed affirmation – I am well, I am perfect and so on. Third, New Thought was more flexible on the issue of cooperation with doctors. But whatever the differences, all mind-curists share the belief that mind has power over matter – a belief that was undoubtedly generated within the matrix of mesmerism.

  In its day, New Thought was a massive movement, whose most famous proponents were Warren Felt Evans, Henry Wood and Ralph Waldo Trine. Trine's book In Tune with the Infinite, published in 1897, sold 1.5 million copies. He taught that unhappiness, illness and so on are due to our being out of touch or harmony with God. We are in fact united with God, but can fail to realize it. Affirmations, visualizations, prayer, music and breathing exercises can help to restore the balance. At first, all mind-curists used the laying-on of hands, but by the end of the century fears of manipulation and mind control by Svengali-like characters meant that it became a religion of the printed word. Mind-curists promoted not just cures, but general success in life: we are the product of our desires, therefore all you have to do is desire something strongly enough and it shall be yours – especially if you live a good Christian life. Their attitude towards mesmerism was not hostile, but rather indifferent. Evans, for instance, maintained that, since people cured themselves, there was no need for a magnetizer except perhaps to relax one and put one into a calm frame of mind.

  As well as Christian Science and New Thought, a number of other mind-cure movements flourished in the States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There was Jewish Science, founded by Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein, which taught, among other things, a method of passing beyond the hypnotic state into a ‘superconscious state’. Divine Science taught that disease was of man's own making, not God's. There was Scientific Christianity (not to be confused with Christian Science) which used scripture readings rather than Mary Baker Eddy's writings to effect faith healing. There was the Nazarene Movement founded by the Reverend Henry Blauvelt of Boonton, New Jersey, which conducted healing services in churches, and there was the Emmanuel Movement, which was part of the Episcopalian Church (or the Church of England, as it is called over here). The popularity of all such movements, including New Thought and faith healing in general, was due to a widespread dissatisfaction with physicians for their lack of sympathy and negative suggestions. Nor was faith healing entirely without its merits: it proved good for neuroses, addictions and general improvement of morale.

  Whereas the majority of these movements are the grandchildren of mesmerism, and made little or no use of it themselves, the Emmanuel Movement returned to its roots. Founded in the Emmanuel Church, Boston, in 1906 by the Reverend Elwood Worcestor and the Reverend Samuel McComb, it used hypnosis, backed up by scripture reading, prayer and teachings, and claimed a high degree of success with non-organic illnesses. Worcestor had studied psychology in Germany and France, and was a follower of the Nancy school of hypnotism (on which see Chapter 7). He would lightly stroke a patient's forehead and temples to get him to relax, before inducing a deeper trance by getting him to fix his attention on a crystal ball. Once the patient was entranced, he guided the patient's thoughts away from mundane reality towards bright realms of optimism, on the principle that the subconscious is not only suggestible and liable to moral influence and direction, but actually good in its natural state. This pure natural state could be reached by hypnosis, so that a person could become more accustomed to live in accordance with its primitive, moral and healthful dictates. The movement spread rapidly, and the two priests soon had more patients than they could handle; but the movement fell into disrepute after being attacked by the medical community as naive, unreliable and potentially dangerous, and by members of religious communities of all stripes as evil. These attacks were largely born of ignorance; Freud has shown that the subconscious is not as pure and innocent as W
orcestor and his colleagues believed, but that only makes them guilty of naivety, not of dealing with the devil.

  Spiritism and the Decline of Popular Mesmerism

  Spiritism started in the States in 1847 with the Hydesville rappings, and within half a dozen years it had swept like wildfire through the States and into Europe too. It all began when mysterious knockings disturbed the house in Hydesville, New York, into which John Fox had recently moved with his wife and two teenage daughters. The noises soon settled into a kind of coded language, and were believed to be messages delivered by the spirit of a man who had been murdered in the house and buried in the basement, though no such body was found even when the basement was excavated, and the knocking followed the Foxes wherever they went. They came to realize that the noises centred on their daughters, so they separated them, sending Maggie, aged fifteen and a half, to her older brother David, and Kate, aged twelve, to her older sister Leah. But the noises continued in both houses, and soon objects started flying around the room where Kate was: hair-combs removed themselves from one old lady's head and inserted themselves in the hair of another; chairs and tables shook and turned over.

  By now everyone was convinced that all this was the frenzied attempt of spirits to communicate with our world, and friends of the Foxes in Rochester evolved the system of ‘spiritual telegraphy’: someone went through the alphabet, and the spirits rapped the table when the appropriate letter of the alphabet was reached, to spell out words. The very first message received was one which has reverberated down through the generations of subsequent spiritists: ‘We are all your dear friends and relatives.’ It seemed to be possible to communicate with the dear departed. The Foxes took the show on the road, and before long there were many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic. By the 1870s there were 11 million self-professed spiritists in America alone.