Word: mesmerized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hint from a Hypnotist. Austrian Anton Mesmer, who gave his name (mesmerism) to a technique now called hypnotism, has been called a faker. More likely, some modern psychiatrists think, he was a stupid man who blundered into an idea too big for him: the phenomena of suggestion and suggestibility. A Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, demonstrated that hypnotism could both arouse and quiet symptoms of hysteria. Charcot also bid for fame as the teacher of a Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud (rhymes with overjoyed...
...Mesmer & Magnetism. Hypnotism has been inspiring public interest and noisy argument ever since the days, in 18th Century Paris, when Franz Anton Mesmer developed his controversial technique. It was first called mesmerism and then hypnotism (from a Greek word meaning sleep). In Mesmer's day, "magnetism" was the scientific catchword that "atomic" is today. Mesmer had already been kicked out of his native Vienna for acting on his belief that people got sick when they ran short of "magnetic fluid." He was out to show Paris that he could relieve the shortage. The Mesmer clinics are described...
...Mesmer's method was to fill tubs with "magnetized water" (iron filings and pieces of glass). Hopeful sufferers sat around the tubs clutching at protruding iron rods while harmoniums, pianos and musical glasses tinkled and Mesmer and assistants in purple silk coats hovered about...
...scientific committee (which included Benjamin Franklin and that most gruesome of inventors, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin) investigated Mesmer and declared that his theories were unscientific. But the experiments went on. A later Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud, experimented for a while with electricity and hypnotism, and then abandoned hypnotism for his own techniques of psychoanalysis. He reasoned that a patient under hypnosis is apt to say what the physician wants him to say instead of revealing his "unconscious" mind. Besides, Freud decided, hypnotism's effects are too ephemeral and not everybody can be hypnotized...
...Klein is reckoned a great man at a party around Philadelphia. To Hobby Lobbyists last week he looked like the late Dr. Mesmer's star successor...