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#  Artificial Somnambulism and Hypnotism  

 





July 13, 2026

 

 

 [ Adam Crabtree ](https://philpeople.org/profiles/adam-crabtree) 

From ancient times, people were recognized to sometimes fall into a boundary state between waking and sleeping. In this state, individuals seem asleep but exhibit behaviour that looks like wakefulness: speaking, moving, even carrying out everyday tasks. This state was given the name “somnambulism”—a combination of the Latin words *somnus*, meaning “sleep,” and *ambulare*, meaning “to walk;” thus, somnambulism means “sleep walking.” The causes of somnambulism remained a mystery, whether by ingesting certain substances, breathing noxious vapors, or engaging in rhythmic movements. Children frequently become somnambulistic at night, and somnambulistic mediums danced to communicate with spirits. Somnambulism was surrounded by an aura of mystery, and this was the state of affairs up to the late eighteenth century.

I describe a series of events that led to a French aristocrat’s remarkable discovery in 1784. The Marquis de Puységur was a pupil of Franz Anton Mesmer, inventor of a healing technique called animal magnetism. Puységur brought to light a simple method for producing the somnambulistic state that came to be called “induced somnambulism” or “artificial somnambulism.” Although he accidentally uncovered this state in the process of applying Mesmer’s approach to magnetic physical healing, Puységur recognized the revolutionary importance of the psychological aspects of artificial somnambulism, marking a turn from the physical and physiological toward a focus on the mental and emotional states of the subject in magnetic healing. The discovery was quickly recognized and taken up by practitioners of Mesmer’s animal magnetism who recognized the power of opening this new door to the human psyche, which exposed a dynamic inner world that profoundly affects human thought, feeling, and motivation. James Braid called his own particular view of artificial somnambulism “hypnotism.” Several important fields of experimentation evolved from artificial somnambulism: Spiritism, Spiritualism, mind-body effects, and psychotherapy. Influenced by Puységur, Pierre Janet, a giant in later psychology, gave psychological workers such important concepts as disaggregation, dissociation, and the subconscious mind. I conclude this essay by reflecting on the problem of the resistance to new views that challenge orthodox ways of seeing things, and how this cultural rigidity and resistance remains active in our own day.



 

 

 

###  The Marquis de Puységur and Animal Magnetism 

In 1784, Armand Marc Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), discovered the means to bring about a somnambulistic state at will through a simple and repeatable technique. He named this state artificial somnambulism and described it in his book published that same year: *Mémoire pour server à l’histoire et à l’établissment du magnétisme animal* (*Memoirs to Serve the History and Establishment of Animal Magnetism*).\[[1](#notes)\] His discovery event radically changed our view of somnambulism, accessing the dynamic inner world of the mind and making available powerful resources for healing human ills and activating human potentials.

The word “scientist” had not yet been coined at this time, but scientific amateurs were found in many segments of the population. Because it took a great deal of money to set up scientific laboratories and commission the construction of scientific instruments, these science lovers were mainly drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy and well-to-do professionals. The Marquis de Puységur, head of an ancient French aristocratic family famous for its military leaders, was an amateur of this sort, and he built a scientific laboratory on his estate at Buzancy near Soissons.

In 1778, a medical doctor named Franz Anton Mesmer (1724–1815) from Vienna arrived in Paris and established a healing practice in the Place Vendôme, teaching “animal magnetism,” a theory of health and a healing technique. He believed that the cosmos is infused with a life giving “magnetic fluid” that flows through the bodies of all living things, building upon popular theories of so-called “mineral magnetism.” Lectures on scientific theory and demonstrations of scientific marvels were staged everywhere in Paris to enthusiastic reception, and it was not unusual for fist fights over rival theories to spill from auditoriums into the streets. Many physicians criticized Mesmer’s ideas and refused to let him into their medical associations. Eventually, his supporters persuaded Mesmer to teach seminars on the theory and practice of animal magnetic healing.\[[2](#notes)\]

In the spring of 1784, the Marquis de Puységur’s two younger brothers got word of Mesmer’s seminars and decided to attend. The brothers found Mesmer’s lectures fascinating and conveyed their enthusiasm to their older brother. After some hesitation, the Marquis decided to make the trip to Paris to attend Mesmer’s training seminars. He returned to the family estate, enthusiastic to test the effectiveness of what he had learned. Puységur saw more than a healing method in Mesmer’s theories; he recognized a cosmology portraying the universe as teeming with “magnetic fluid,” an energy pervading all space and every living thing. Mesmer applied that cosmology to healing illness, for magnetic fluid was the source of life and health. All illness was caused by the development of blocks to the free flow of magnetic fluid through the body. Healers or “magnetizers” could direct their internal magnetic flow toward the affected areas of an ill person’s body, dissolving those blocks. The healer makes “passes” or flowing gestures of the hands over the patient’s body, visualizing his own body as a magnet, his hands as two magnetic poles, concentrating his intention on healing the patient and paying attention to his personal intuitive sense about what the patient needs to regain strength and how to arrange the environment to help the healing process.

Puységur intended to practice Mesmer’s technique on people living and working on his estate. Word spread that he was interested in seeing whether his newly acquired skill would help domestic and agricultural workers. Still only thirty-three, he began treating family members, servants, tenants, and neighbors in an informal rural setting. Near the chateau, there was an artisan well and a large elm tree where locals gathered, and there Puységur and his brothers joined athletic games, impromptu musical performances, and were immersed in country life, and it is there that Puységur began to test Mesmer’s healing techniques. The first person who asked for treatment was a woman who served at the chateau. She had a toothache, and Puységur applied magnetic passes, hoping for the best. Her pain immediately disappeared. Another woman came forward with a toothache, and his ministrations had similar effects. At this point Puységur was about to make an era-changing discovery.



 

###  The Discovery 

Puységur’s next patient was a 23-year-old farmhand named Victor Race, who would inspire him to move beyond Mesmer’s healing framework. Victor was suffering from an illness, keeping him bed-ridden for four days with a congested chest, a stitch in his side, spitting blood, and fever. Puységur was asked if he could use animal magnetism to help Victor, and, one May evening, he went to Victor’s sickroom at eight o’clock, and he began to “magnetize” the young man.

In addition to applying the passes, Puységur encouraged Victor to move around, expending energy and working up a sweat. He had Victor imagine himself going to a party, playing games, and dancing. Puységur thought of a melody in his own mind. To his surprise, Victor hummed and even danced to the same tune. After giving Victor this imagination-based workout, Puységur let him rest and had the servants give Victor something to drink, feed him a clear bouillon, and serve him bread and a substantial soup. Then Victor was allowed to sleep.

Puységur continued this treatment. At the end of three days, the young man was healthy and well. Mesmer was not naturally oriented to psychological observation, nor did he converse with those he treated. If Mesmer’s patients began speaking in what he considered a delirious or irrational way, or if they lost consciousness, then he simply had them carried to a separate room to sleep it off. Puységur was different, paying close attention to Victor’s mental and emotional state.

He spoke with his patient Victor and noted responses that he considered significant: (1) a sleep-waking state that he called “magnetic sleep” or “magnetic somnambulism,” which seemed to resemble a natural sleep-walking condition; (2) “rapport,” a special emotional connection with the magnetizer, a connection which could expand to include others; (3) suggestibility with a heightened capacity to imagine vividly; (4) amnesia in the waking state regarding events during the magnetic sleep, but continuous memory for events from previous somnambulistic sessions, what is today called state-specific memory; (5) an ability of Victor to read his thoughts; (6) Victor’s capacity to diagnose his own illness and the illnesses of others; and (7) a striking change in Victor’s personality with an elevation of alertness and sense of self-confidence. In addition, Puységur believed Victor possessed a remarkable capacity to know what was needed for his own healing, and what was needed for the healing of others. When Victor made suggestions in that regard, Puységur always followed them. Puységur took careful notes, on all his observations which he published in his memoirs, later refining his ideas in several works.



 

###  Artificial Somnambulism 

The simple application of Mesmer-inspired magnetic passes could bring about a state resembling naturally occurring sleepwalking states, hence, “magnetic somnambulism.” Unlike natural somnambulism, magnetic or artificial somnambulism produced a special connection or rapport between the magnetic healer and the ill person. Through this connection and dialogue, Puységur gained valuable information about illnesses and suggestions for effective healing remedies. On some occasions, magnetic somnambulists spoke straightforwardly about matters they ordinarily kept secret. Puységur even described somnambulists’ apparent ability to read a magnetizer’s thoughts and manifest “clairvoyant” abilities to see below the surface of things and discern the nature of the illnesses of those whom he had placed in rapport.

Puységur’s most complete treatment of artificial somnambulism occurred in his 1811 book *Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l’homme dans l’état de somnambulisme naturel et dans le somnambulisme provoqué par l’acte magnétique* (*Investigations, Experiments, and Physiological Observations on Man in the State of Natural Somnambulism and in the State of Somnambulism Induced by Magnetic Action*).\[[3](#notes)\] Natural somnambulists may speak in coherent sentences, he explained, but may not always be aware to whom they are speaking, and it cannot be assumed that words spoken to natural sleepwalkers will be heard or understood by them (parents sometimes note this regarding their sleepwalking children). Natural somnambulists may carry out routine tasks like sweeping a floor, making a bed, or even checking financial records, indicating a functional mental life. With regard to artificial somnambulists, Puységur noted an important difference. Natural somnambulists, as a rule, cannot communicate with people who address them, but artificial somnambulists can and do communicate with their magnetizer and anyone included in rapport, while remaining oblivious to communication from anyone else. If the magnetizer explicitly calls the somnambulist’s attention to another person present, magnetic rapport extends to that third person. As I noted in “1784: The Marquis de Puységur and the Psychological Turn in the West,”\[[4](#notes)\] Puységur’s understanding of magnetic rapport evolved:

> We must take note that in the early decades of magnetic somnambulistic practice, the subject being healed would often go into a state of *complete somnambulism*, as it was called. As time went on, more and more healing subjects entered a state of *incomplete somnambulism*. In that state, they enjoyed many of the healing benefits of complete somnambulism but might have some degree of awareness of others who were present in the room. Also, although in the state of complete magnetic somnambulism they would always have total amnesia when waking for what occurred when somnambulistic, in a state of incomplete magnetic somnambulism, they might, when awakened, be able to remember some of the exchanges that occurred in the magnetic state. In the early decades following Puységur’s discovery, total lack of awareness of bystanders and total amnesia for the magnetic state were regarded as a reliable sign that complete magnetic somnambulism had been achieved.

By 1811, Puységur significantly distanced himself from Mesmer’s emphasis on the importance of convulsions as a sign of success in the healing process. He noted that when Mesmer was working with magnetic subjects, they would often experience convulsions, but Puységur’s own patients tended to remain calm. Magnetic action is considered an intentional act, requiring organic magnetic power and the will to direct that power. The magnetized patient becomes a single and unified organism with the magnetizer, who could cause movements in the subject’s body, just as he caused movements in his own body.\[[5](#notes)\] If the magnetizer only had a vague intention in his mind and did not make the goal of the somnambulistic session clear to his patient, then the subject could easily fall into convulsions, and unfocused action. The connection between subject and magnetizer makes magnetic healing work orderly and effective.\[[6](#notes)\] Puységur noted that when Mesmer was working with magnetic subjects, they would often experience convulsions, but Puységur’s own patients remained calm.

Taking these factors into account, Puységur stated that inducing magnetic somnambulism directs the healing process, accounting for two related differences between natural somnambulism and artificial somnambulism. (1) Natural somnambulists are haphazardly activated by nature, while artificial somnambulists are placed in somnambulism by their magnetizers and remain under their influence while in that state. (2) The actions of natural somnambulists tend to be disorganized, while the actions of artificial somnambulists are organized through rapport with the magnetizer.\[[7](#notes)\] Puységur believed artificial somnambulism provides a readily accessible gateway to remarkable human capacities. Some of these capacities had been reported in natural somnambulists, but they occurred haphazardly. However these capacities were made predictably available in artificial somnambulists.

Puységur’s theory of somnambulism, natural or artificial, defines the state as a “sleep of the senses” in which subjects have little or no sense awareness of physical surrounding and hear nothing when bystanders speak—their senses are asleep. Magnetized clients, Puységur notes, will complain they are not able to navigate their physical environment because they rely on only the vague awareness of their surroundings provided through rapport with the magnetizer and not their ordinary sensations. Yet, magnetic somnambulists deprived of their senses somehow acquire and display knowledge. In a state of complete somnambulism, Puységur proposed, the somnambulist is “clairvoyant,” using the French *clair-voyant*, “see clearly,” theorizing that somnambulists possess some “organ” or a kind of sixth sense that provides them with knowledge, like Arthur Schopenhauer’s “dream organ.”\[[8](#notes)\] This theorized organ explains the extraordinary capacities displayed by somnambulists.

Puységur realized the limitations of his own awarenesses of the nature of the illnesses and possible effective remedies, but artificial somnambulists possessed knowledge of illnesses and remedies to cure illnesses that he did not. Acknowledging his limitations and without embarrassment, he asked somnambulistic subjects to assist diagnosing and suggesting treatment for their own illnesses and for others in rapport. Puységur was so confident in somnambulists’ capacities to “see clearly” that he accepted their diagnoses and prescriptions without hesitation, believing somnambulistic patients were specially connected to that mysterious substrate of life he called Nature, a hidden aspect at work everywhere and available to all magnetic somnambulists that supplied the knowledge and power of healing. Nature explained magnetic healing reports, though these events, lacking the influence of an order-inducing magnetic rapport, were uncommon, haphazard, and unpredictable.

Puységur knew other magnetic healers would be interested because this method paid more attention to the inner life of the patient and the relationship between healer and less concentration, as in Mesmer, on the action of magnetic fluid. Artificial somnambulism was a means to open the door to the unconscious dimensions of the mind at will. In 1784, while preparing to publish his experiences in book form in his *Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissment du magnétisme animal*, he found himself reluctant to make his findings public. Puységur explains in the book’s introduction that he would only allow a small group of trusted magnetizers to see what he had written:

> Until at least fifty magnetizers have been able to successfully reproduce and publish the results of similar experiments, we should not expect to convince even people who are reasonable and of good faith—much less the multitude. If my experiences were to be published prematurely, I would be compromised. It would be most unpleasant to hear that people doubt my truthfulness in these matters. I am concentrating on convincing my friends, not the public.\[[9](#notes)\]

Puységur handed out only a few copies of his *Mémoires* to friends and skillful magnetic practitioners. Only four or five copies of this first edition are extant today, and there is no way to know how many copies were actually distributed.

Puységur soon changed his mind and published a follow-up to *Mémoires* titled *Suite des mémoires\[*[*10*](#notes)*\]* in 1785 and a volume containing both the *Mémoires* and the *Suite des mémoires*, a year later.\[[11](#notes)\] Puységur’s discoveries spread broadly, and many Mesmer-style magnetic healers adopted his ideas. In a massive two-volume work published in 1826, Simon Mialle documents more than two hundred magnetic practitioners and a thirty-five page catalogue of works on animal magnetism, a striking picture of the rapid growth in the influence of artificial somnambulism during the first decades of magnetic healing.\[[12](#notes)\]



 

###  Spirits, Stage Shows, and the Psychological Turn 

Societies were formed to discuss theories and techniques of magnetic healing, many considering such healing work to be a spiritual undertaking, with some connection to Spiritism. Membership of these societies was largely made up of aristocrats, who were expected to do their magnetic work free of charge. Some magnetizers followed Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a popular writer and mystic who professed a spiritual framework that saw human beings as a kind of battleground for good and evil spirits. Books and articles connected magnetic healing to Freemasonry and other spiritual philosophies. Others attributed magnetic healing successes to the intervention of spiritual beings, bringing their healing power to bear upon those in somnambulistic states. Many saw disease as the work of evil spirits in the body of the patient, and healing as the action of good spirits ejecting the evil influence. Good spirits would even take possession of a patient’s body and speak words of advice for treatment.

Laying out the classic spiritistic stance with regard to what today would be called dissociated psychological phenomena, the Stockholm Exegetical and Philanthropic Society wrote in a letter to magnetizers in France:

> That state of the Somnambulist, during the magnetic sleep, may be called ecstatic \[...\] Such a state plainly demonstrates that what is said or done through the sleepers organs are not the act of his soul but of some other being who has taken possession of his organs and operates through them \[...\] So soon as the magnetized person begins to talk in his sleep, it is a sure sign that a spiritual being, one friendly to the person \[...\] has succeeded if not entirely to remove the disease, or rather the spirit of the disease, has at least in so far rebuked its influence, that he who is a benevolent being, is able to speak and act through the means of the patient’s organs, and to give suitable advice to those present to promote his recovery.\[[13](#notes)\]

Artificial somnambulism must involve mental acts not taking place in the consciousness of the somnambulist. It was not sufficient, in the Stockholm Society’s opinion, to say that magnetic somnambulism proved the soul is a spiritual entity. The somnambulists’ source and process for obtaining and processing information must be discerned, for the wisdom involved in diagnosing and healing requires intellectual and spiritual agency beyond the somnambulist, namely a beneficent spirit, since somnambulistic subjects have no identifiable conscious process to gain such wisdom. This puzzle about somnambulists and spirits could not be adequately explored, let alone answered, at the time.

These magnetizers were searching for an arena of mental processing that was neither the mind of an external, spiritual entity nor the conscious mind of the somnambulist. Mental acts that occur within human beings but are unavailable to consciousness would have to occur in a subconscious or unconscious mental arena. Explicit awareness of such an arena would only develop decades later when advanced forms of experimentation with mediumship and the study of hysterical patients who exhibit double or multiple consciousnesses or personal centers of awareness began to be conducted. In the meantime, widespread remarkable phenomena provided clues.

Individual magnetizers went on the road, offering travelling healing shows. Having found and formed partnerships with individuals who were particularly susceptible to going into somnambulistic states, they traversed the countryside, offering demonstrations in front of large crowds, at a price. These itinerant healers were a kind of shadow side to more respectable practitioners. Itinerant somnambulists claimed to be in touch with helpful spirits who would aid in the healing process. They founded in France what came be the “Spiritist” movement. Systematized principally by Allan Kardec in the mid-nineteenth century, the Spiritists held that human beings have spirits apart from their bodies who undergo repeated incarnations. Somnambulistic mediums can communicate with them cooperatively. Similar itinerant pairs began to appear in the United States, and an offshoot movement called “Spiritualism,” was initiated by the Fox sisters in upstate New York.

 In this movement, as in French Spiritism, somnambulistic mediums spread the good news of survival after death. In 1847, living in a tiny upstate New York farmhouse with their parents, three sisters heard noises ostensibly produced by spirits of their departed family and friends resounding in the walls and floorboards spelling out alphabetical messages. Neighbors investigated and started listening for the sounds in their own homes. In 1852, word of these seances spread to Europe and back to America, and participants began identifying their approach as “American Spiritualism” to distinguish themselves from French Spiritism.

Thousands of people saw demonstrations of somnambulistic trance, witnessed apparent instances of clairvoyance, and heard about the remarkable curative powers of animal magnetism. Charles Lafontaine (1803–1888), a Paris born magnetizer came to England in June 1841 and enthralled audiences with spectacular Mesmeric phenomena. British medical doctors came into their own as Mesmeric healers, speaking and writing in support of magnetic phenomena.\[[14](#notes)\] Among those sitting in the audience of Lafontaine’s demonstrations was a Manchester physician named James Braid (1795–1860). He was skeptical about Lafontaine’s authenticity and believed he would observe firsthand evidence of collusion or delusion. He saw nothing to contradict his skepticism on the first night. At the next meeting, six nights later, however, Braid noted that the mesmerized subject could not open his eyes and conjectured that the subject was directed to maintain a fixed stare, inducing paralysis of the eyelid muscles.

Braid decided to test his conjecture by directing experimental subjects to stare at fixed points placed high enough above subjects’ heads to cause eye strain. His subjects’ eyelids became paralyzed and their whole bodies and minds exhibited passivity. As Braid records:

> The phenomena of mesmerism were to be accounted for on the principle of derangement of the state of the cerebro-spinal centres, and of the circulatory, and respiratory, and muscular systems, induced, as I have explained, by a fixed stare, absolute repose of the body, fixed attention, and suppressed respiration with the fixity of attention. The whole depended on the physical and psychical condition of the patient, arising from the causes referred to, and not at all on the volition or passes of the operator, throwing out a magnetic fluid, or exciting into activity some mystical universal fluid or medium.\[[15](#notes)\]

Braid proposed the state he induced should be called neurohypnology, “the sleep of the nerves,” and it was the underlying secret of all magnetism, asserting that his findings leave animal magnetizers “no space to claim healing as their exclusive domain.”\[[16](#notes)\] He describes successfully inducing this state in a woman suffering from a painful illness. “After a certain time, and frequency of being operated on in this way, the brain has an impressibility stamped on it which renders the patient subject to be acted on entirely through the imagination, and this is the grand source of the follies which have misled animal magnetizers.”\[[17](#notes)\]

Braid published a pamphlet in 1842 titled *Satanic Agency and Mesmerism Revie*wed, a foundational work in the history of hypnotism, offering four different explanations for the phenomena of mesmerism.\[[18](#notes)\] (1) They are due to a system of delusion and collusion. (2) They are genuine but are the result of imagination, and sympathy. (3) They are due to the influence of a magnetic medium, i.e., the Mesmerists’ magnetic fluid. Braid personally held that (4) the phenomena are solely attributable to a particular physiological state of the brain and spinal cord. Magnetic sleep results from the rapid exhaustion of sensory and nervous systems, producing somnolence in which the mind metaphorically slips out of gear. This state can be used for extracting teeth, relieving chronic pain, removing paralysis, and restoring hearing and sight.

Braid published his magnum opus *Neurypnology or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism* in 1843, eschewing prior magnetic and somnambulistic terminology and devising a new nomenclature. He combined the Greek words “nerve” (*neuron*) and “sleep” (*hypnos*) to form the term “neuro-hypnotism” or “nervous sleep.” Because of the awkwardness of the term, he dropped the “neuro” and was left with “hypnotism.” Braid restructured and reinterpreted the phenomena and rejected all phenomena he could not fit into his theory. He accepted as genuine whatever mesmerists’ claims could be reinterpreted using his new theory. Braid hoped to make acceptable to the medical profession those mesmeric practices that were based on genuine phenomena. Braid framed hypnotism in purely psychological terms. The hypnotic subject focuses concentration on one idea so intensely that no other ideas can be admitted. Braid attributed all peculiar phenomena of memory, apparently paranormal perceptions, unusual physiological effects, and curative effects to this intense focus of attention and the power of suggestions. He hoped future investigators would discover the reasons why “monoideism,” a dominance of one idea in the mind, as he called it, had such powerful effects on the body.

Braid did not completely reject Puységur. His description of hypnotism echoes Puységur’s definition of artificial somnambulism as a “sleep of the senses,” and he agreed with Puységur’s observation of the somnambulistic subject’s division of memory as “double consciousness,” though Puységur used the term “two different existences.” Braid’s description of amnesia in the “full hypnotic state” resembles Puységur’s description of “complete somnambulism.” Perhaps the main difference between the two figures is that Braid’s detailed description of what happens to the nerves and the brain was tied to a rather primitive physiology, explaining hypnotism as a paralysis of the eye lids spreading to the rest of the body along with a dominant idea being instilled in the brain. In this sense, hypnotism became a narrowed and somewhat watered-down version of artificial somnambulism. Puységur’s vision, on the other hand, made room for a panoply of possible somnambulistic phenomena.



 

###  Hypnotic Sleep versus Magnetic Somnambulism 

A flurry of books and articles comparing Braid’s hypnotism to the artificial somnambulism produced by techniques of animal magnetism appeared in the 1880s and 1890s, written by researchers working with patients. I call attention to the conclusions of some of the principal investigators below. For clarity, I will designate artificial somnambulism produced by techniques of animal magnetism as “magnetic somnambulism” and Braid’s hypnotism as “hypnotic sleep.”

Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917) was a leading investigator of the effects of animal magnetism on subjects treated with magnetic somnambulism. He found that some magnetic subjects were able to view objects, persons, and events at a distance. He considered these experiments in “eyeless vision” to be conclusive\[[19](#notes)\] but found hypnotic sleep and magnetic somnambulation very different. The hypnotizer develops subjects who are natural automatons who can be maneuvered this way and that through suggestive influences. The magnetizer, in contrast, is viewed as a spiritual person able to call upon hidden forces of Nature. Physical actions of one organism on the other in magnetic somnambulism produces phenomena not observed in hypnotic sleep, including communication of thought without using senses and the reception of distant impressions.

In 1890, H. R. Paul Schroeder, whose life and death dates are not available, compared the characteristics of hypnotic sleep and magnetic somnambulism, concluding they are different phenomena. Hypnotic sleep is brought about by suggestion that creates rigidity of muscles and a state of passivity or lack of will where subjects enter into a mental state in which they are unaware of pain can be induced to carry out suggested actions. The hypnotized person obeys the commands of the hypnotizer. Magnetic somnambulism results from a kind of transfusion of life energy from magnetizer to magnetic subject. Schroeder contended that in magnetic somnambulism the subject retains his own mind and spirit and will, whereas in hypnotic sleep the subject becomes a virtual machine operated by the hypnotizer.\[[20](#notes)\]

Thomson Jay Hudson (1834–1903) introduced a unique and sophisticated complexity to explain the differences between hypnotic sleep and magnetic somnambulism.\[[21](#notes)\] The human mind is dual, with an objective mind and a subjective mind. The objective mind is immune to suggestion; the subjective mind is highly susceptible. The objective mind deals with the objective world, observing reality through the five senses; the subjective mind knows its environment through a kind of “intuition” independent of the five senses. The objective mind is the function of the physical brain; the subjective mind is a distinct entity, possessing independent powers and capacities, able to sustain existence independently of the body and is the seat of emotions, the storehouse of memory, operating most effectively when the five senses are in abeyance. The subjective mind manifests in magnetic somnambulism. Hudson asks why the peculiar effects so commonly reported by mesmerists—the “higher phenomena” like telepathy, clairvoyance and distant healing, self-diagnosis and diagnosis of others in rapport—are more or less absent in hypnotism, pointing out that Braid shifted the action from the magnetizer to the subject, causing the phenomena to change. When inducing hypnotism, the hypnotic subject may gain access to his subjective mind, and the hypnotizer is unchanged by the process. By contrast, the magnetizer employs traditional methods of inducing the subjective state—passes, fixed gazes, and mental concentration—and, at the same time, he entrances himself by magnetizing the subject.

Hudson believed that healing in magnetic somnambulism took place through the force of one subjective mind, the magnetizer, acting on the other, the magnetized, but both subjective minds must be engaged. Double subjectivity was the reason both healing and the “higher phenomena” of somnambulism could take place. With hypnotic sleep, the subjective mind of the healer is not involved, so there is less evidence of the extraordinary effect. Importantly, Hudson’s theories could be tested by experimentation. Hudson illustrated the significance of the operator mesmerizing himself by describing how trainers control animals, using magnetic methods, wittingly or unwittingly, to induce self-magnetization. The trainer’s subjective mind comes to the fore and dominates the subjective mind of the animal which are easily controlled, for they have little objective mind.



 

###  The Currents from the Discovery of Artificial Somnambulism 

In my 1988 book *Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research, 1766–1925*, I identify three distinct currents of thought that derive from Puységur’s discovery: a Healing Stream, a Spiritual Stream, and a Psychological Stream.\[[22](#notes)\]

First, the Healing Stream. Puységur’s healing techniques rapidly infiltrated the published works by magnetizers impressed by his reports. Puységur reported that many somnambulistic patients self-diagnose their illnesses and diagnose illnesses of others in rapport, frequently prescribing healing treatments by specific herbs, medicines, or procedures. Artificial somnambulism was also used as a surgical anesthetic. The first well-documented painless surgical operation using artificial somnambulism was performed in Paris on April 16, 1829 when a cancerous breast was removed from a sixty-four-year-old woman. One of the earliest uses of animal magnetism as an anesthetic seems to be a painless tooth extraction in 1836. In England, the leg of a somnambulist man was painlessly amputated in 1842. Beginning in the 1840s, John Elliotson, an influential British physician, strenuously supported the use of animal magnetism as an anesthetic in surgery, as did the surgeon James Esdaile, practicing in India. The use of magnetism in surgery quickly faded when ether was introduced in 1847.

Second, the Spiritual Stream, in three parts. Psychical research, the scientific study of the paranormal— officially beginning with the establishment, in 1882, of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain—was the result of three developments arising from artificial somnambulism: (1) the occult medico-philosophical tradition in Germany that adopted animal-magnetic theory, (2) the development of “magnetic magic” in France, and, especially, (3) the rise of Spiritualism in the United States.

Animal magnetism in occult-medical philosophy developed a strong early following in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century among those influenced by Romantic philosophy, which emphasized emotion, individualism, and a deep connection to nature, contrasting sharply with Enlightenment rationalism. Intellectual figures including literary men such as Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) and E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), physicians including Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) and Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762–1836), and the religious philosopher Johannes Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817) found most genial the notion of a universal magnetic agent connecting all beings as the source of life. In mid-life, the spiritual philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) had a profound vision in which his spiritual eyes were opened, and he was able to converse with spiritual beings; his thought became popular among late eighteenth-century German intelligentsia. Some magnetic somnambulists began to have Swedenborgian visions, communicating with the spirit world during magnetic ecstasy. Clairvoyance and precognition were common among magnetic somnambulists, astounding curious observers. While many accounted for these marvels through a Romantic, occult-oriented philosophy, others felt the need for a more scientific approach that could systematically examine the facts of these phenomena and evaluate their credibility. This need would not be met until the rise of psychical research in the late nineteenth century.

Baron Du Potet de Sennevoy (1796–1881) proposed a system called “magnetic magic” that became influential in nineteenth century France. He revised animal magnetism’s doctrine of a universal magnetic fluid by incorporating older notions of a universal spiritual power as the basis for natural magic that directly manipulates and influences forces of Nature. Breaking from the mechanical viewpoint of Mesmer, he considered magnetism to be the bond between spirit and matter or between soul and body. For Du Potet, mesmerizers recognizing the true nature of magnetism could work magnetic magic, producing marvelous cures and paranormal phenomena.

 In the United States from the mid-1830s, animal magnetism began making significant inroads, leading to the formation of Spiritualism, the third development in the spiritual stream. Lectures on animal magnetism by Charles Poyen St. Sauveur (d. 1844) excited the imaginations of Americans, particularly in eastern regions. Soon, an American version of Europe’s itinerant magnetizers accompanied by clairvoyant somnambulists began to spread the word of animal magnetism. It is American Spiritualism, inspired by animal magnetism, that became the most significant spiritual stream flowing from Puységur. In 1848, a phenomenon developed in Hydesville, New York, when the three daughters of John Fox, a local farmer, were disturbed by sounds resembling furniture being moved and pounding sounds coming from the walls. They interpreted these sounds as communication from spirits of the dead. As word of these “spirit rappings” spread through the countryside, others attempted to communicate with the spirits in their own homes. In 1852, a new type of paranormal phenomenon in America called “table-turning” or “table-tapping” began to manifest, and it spread to England and Europe. These events combined to form the foundation of a movement known as American Spiritualism, which will be described more below. In Germany, France, England, and the United States, there was a strong association between Spiritualist phenomena and magnetic somnambulism. Publications wove back and forth between spiritualistic magnetic somnambulism, giving the impression that it was impossible to discuss one without the other. In the same way, the Society for Psychical Research investigated not only the validity of Spiritualist phenomena but the nature of animal magnetism and hypnotism.

Third, Puységur discovered artificial somnambulism while experimenting with Mesmer’s techniques for healing physical ills. As he gradually applied these techniques to psychological ills, he began to pay close attention to patients’ mental experiences during the healing process, especially as interpersonal exchanges became part of the magnetic procedure. Progressing toward a focus on mental aspects led him to investigate ways to improve psychological health, and early writings about mental healing by other practitioners during this period introduced questions about the role of suggestion in magnetic healing and to what degree success in the cure depended on psychological factors.\[[23](#notes)\] From the earliest attempt to explain the effects of animal magnetism, the role of inadvertent suggestion was frequently used. Puységur himself described his successful treatment of a case of mental illness through the use of artificial somnambulism, developing an early theory of the nature of mental disturbance and the role played by magnetic rapport in healing.\[[24](#notes)\]

The French physician Pierre Janet (1859–1947) took up where Puységur left off, carrying out pioneering work with individuals suffering from hysteria, today largely equated with dissociative disorders. Janet openly declared that his success was dependent on the “magnetists” like Puységur:

> The magnetists considered that in this state the human mind was transformed; thought which differed from normal thought must be a supremely powerful thought, rid of all the limitations that are imposed on mind by the hard necessities of our senses, the laws of time and space. The somnambulists make one think of inspired prophets, of pythonesses, of sybils. It would seem rather futile to control the thought process, to see with closed eyes, to perform acts while sleeping, if we were not able to see through obstacles, to see at any distance, to see the past and the future. This was a revelation: artificial somnambulism became enormously interesting and occupied the minds of everyone. To transform a human mind, to render it capable of seeing everything and understanding everything, of knowing everything, what a magnificent divine undertaking! What service such a mind could render to humanity! The means of bringing about such mental changes must be investigated at any cost, as well as the means for encouraging such tendencies, for learning to use these wonderful tools which are to be created. In a word, men must set about to produce clairvoyant somnambulists.\[[25](#notes)\]

Janet saw that Puységur’s discovery made it possible to induce this marvelous state by strict experimental methods at any desired moment and also to return subjects to their normal state without great difficulty. People who do this kind of scientific work, Janet said, need to be able to recognize the patients’ mental states generally so they would accurately recognize when patients are somnambulistic. As scientists, they must take scrupulous notes of everything that happens. It is difficult to know whether or not psychological healers throughout this period realized what a “stupendous project” they had set out, but Janet formed a clear-sighted view:

> For more than half a century, then, there developed a whole group of studies that led up to contemporary psychology. These two lines of investigation, the one psychological, the other therapeutic, aroused an unheard-of enthusiasm, and toward 1840 animal magnetism had a period of development and of success that ought not to be forgotten if we are to appreciate, later on, other movements of like enthusiasm although of somewhat greater restraint.\[[26](#notes)\]

Janet was not a spiritist, but he was an astute observer of the somnambulistic productions of spiritist mediums, as we see in his master work on the subconscious mind, *L’automatisme psychologique* (1889),\[[27](#notes)\] but context is needed to see what Janet studied and how he came to foreshadow important psychological ideas.



 

###  Table-moving and a Co-conscious Dynamic Realm 

An 1853 German newspaper gave the first public account of puzzling phenomena associated with moving tables and Spiritualism. To summarize, people seated around a table are given instructions to rest their hands palms down on the tabletop, the participants’ linked little fingers forming a continuous chain. They were instructed not to touch the table legs. After some minutes, the table would rotate right to left, then left to right. According to some observers, the whole table would then change its position, and the chairs would be drawn away when participants stood. The table’s rotation would sometimes be so rapid that participants could not keep up. Similar accounts appeared in other papers. This table-moving fad spread throughout Europe, to England, and then back again to the United States. After a few months, similar experimental sessions were happening in the parlors of thousands of homes on two continents.

In America, the purely physical aspects of these experiments expanded, and the table became a means to literally telegraph messages alphabetically spelled out through spontaneous raps occurring somewhere within the material of the table or by table legs tapping the floor. Around the same time, an amateur inventor named Adolphus Wagner devised what came to be called the “planchette,” a glass plate upon which rested a pointer. Multiple participants would rest their hands on the pointer, and soon the pointer would move to select alphabetical letters written on a surface beneath the glass. Messages spelled out by these instruments, later called spirit boards or Ouija boards, purportedly came from discarnate spirits.\[[28](#notes)\] There was a great rush to devise explanations.

Spiritualists held that spirits of the deceased desired to communicate with living family members and loved ones. The messages were not random but meaningful, and they could not be explained as physical forces like magnetism emanating from the human body.\[[29](#notes)\] An Anglican clergyman, Nathaniel Steadman Godfrey, contended that the motions of the table were produced by Satan. Asking the table questions in his capacity as a theologian, he became convinced he was dealing with the Evil One; notably, the responses Godfrey received were consonant with his own religious beliefs.\[[30](#notes)\] Skeptics believed collusion, deceit, and fraud were the source, but, at least at this stage, most phenomena were not produced by paid or publicly known and publicly performing mediums. These events occurred in the private parlors of thousands of homes, often through the mediumship of a family member or close friend, and deceit suggested an unlikely epidemic of moral depravity with relatives and friends deliberately tricking each other. Deliberate fraud satisfied few investigators; delusion seemed more palatable. It seemed perfectly possible that those involved in table-moving experiences were physically producing the effect without conscious intent.\[[31](#notes)\] There were strong believers in the “magnetic fluid” of Mesmerism among mid-nineteen century American spiritualists, proposing that magnetic fluid had the ability to affect physical objects, causing rotating and rapping or tapping tables and other paranormal events.\[[32](#notes)\]

The principal puzzle was how to explain the intelligent nature of messages produced. In many cases, a dialogue occurred between the table and the people present, with the table exhibiting originality and a sense of humor. If the explanation was given in terms of purely physical forces or magnetic fluid, then how do physical forces produce intelligent information? How can an insentient table think? How can its movements communicate anything but gibberish?

Gradually, explanations for table-moving phenomena began to focus on the role of the medium. One of the most astute investigators was Edward Coit Rogers:

> To know a word is to be conscious of it. Should the mind, therefore, express the word, it would do it knowingly, consciously. It follows, therefore, that if a word is expressed without knowledge, without consciousness, it did not come from the mind. That is, it did not come from an intelligent thinking, self-conscious, self-determining, responsible agent. Either, therefore, there must be two totally distinct minds to one person, one self-conscious, &c., and the other unconscious,—which is a solecism—or a mind which is always necessarily conscious of its own acts, and therefore, responsible for them, and another part which is not the mind, and is not necessarily conscious of its own acts, and is not, therefore, a responsible agent.\[[33](#notes)\]

By the part “which is not the mind,” Rogers meant the brain. In his framework, the brain is not conscious of its own acts, and it may operate in an automatic fashion. The brain, an instrument of the mind, stores mental information and may produce intelligible communications on its own. This split between mind and brain could manifest itself in striking ways. Under peculiar conditions, Rogers says, the brain will act independent of the mind’s control, even directly opposite to the decisions of the mind, and people can seem divided against themselves. Rogers was not so much interested in how a mind can cause physical sounds in the table but how an honest medium of good will can produce intelligible messages without any awareness of producing them. He concluded that the physical brain is a storehouse of the medium’s memory and could be the source of the messages.

Rogers brings us very close to what today we call the conscious and unconscious minds, but he is not quite there. The final step toward this split-understanding of the mind was taken in an 1855 Spiritist pamphlet titled *Letter de Grosjean à son évêque* (*The Letter of Grosjean to his Bishop*),\[[34](#notes)\] presumably written by an author named Paul Tasher, and this takes us back to Pierre Janet.



 

###  Pierre Janet and Dissociation 

In an 1899 book, Pierre Janet describes walking along the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, browsing bookstores, and purchasing the pamphlet mentioned above. About the author, Janet writes the following:

> I think he is a philosopher who is associated with the eclectic school, with which he shares a clarity, ease and pleasantness of style and whose doctrines he shares. He has the habit, (as do the psychologists of this school) of personifying the faculties of the human spirit, yet by this means he manages to explain, in the most sensible and scientific way, phenomena very little studied and so misunderstood in his time.\[[35](#notes)\]

In this small brochure from 1855, Janet finds ideas expressed that he had thought were entirely new concepts, proposed only in recent years by Charles Richet (1850–1935) and Frederic Myers (1843–1901) and, even more recently, advanced by himself during the process of studying automatic writing and somnambulism. He did not expect to encounter such inspiring ideas in this type of source or in a source from out of the past.

The pamphlet’s unexpected ideas, Janet explains, are of great importance concerning what he calls the disaggregation of human consciousness in which human beings can develop separated parts of their psyche that function separately. The pamphlet depicts the psyche functioning from separate thinking faculties unknown to each other. Janet said that these ideas are subtle and deep and formulated in crude spiritistic terms. Following the intellectual trends of the Eclectic School in France, which constructs systems of thought by combining elements of the established philosophical systems of a previous age, Janet finds identical conclusions eclectically formed in different sources, some Spiritist and some scientific. He connects Spiritism to what he calls “involuntary and unconscious action,” establishing a common Spiritist and Scientific truth:

> The essential point of spiritism is, we acknowledge (with Grosjean), the disaggregation of psychological phenomena and the formation, outside of personal perception, of a second series of thought unrelated to the first. As for the means that the second personality uses to manifest itself without the knowledge of the first (movement of the tables, automatic writing or speech, etc.), that is a secondary matter. Where does the noise, heard in the tables or in the walls, and answering questions come from? Is it a movement of the toes, or a contraction of the peroneal tendon supposed by Jobert de Lamballe (which caused such a stir at the Academy)? Is it the contraction of the stomach and a true ventriloquism, as Grosjean supposed, or else another particular physical action as yet unknown? Are they produced by automatic movements of the medium herself, or else (as seems probable to me in certain cases), by the subconscious actions of one of the assistants, who, in the midst of the darkness demanded by spiritists, deceives the others and deceives themselves, and becomes an accomplice without knowing it. It does not matter now. The action, whatever it is, is always an *involuntary and unconscious action* of one kind or another, and “the involuntary speech of the intestines is no more miraculous than the involuntary speech of the mouth.” It is the psychological side of the phenomenon which is the most interesting and which should be studied further. Although the work \[...\] was written in 1855, it was not understood, nor did it have any influence, either on spiritists, which is natural, or on psychologists, which is more astonishing.\[[36](#notes)\]

Janet spent decades exploring the implications of this central idea and came to call it psychological disaggregation.

Artificial somnambulism revealed to Janet a new paradigm for understanding the human psyche, and I, in 1985, proposed calling this the “alternate consciousness paradigm.”\[[37](#notes)\] We have not just one consciousness but harbor a second or alternate world of consciousnesses unavailable to our ordinary awareness. Janet established four main characteristics of the alternate consciousness that it is (1) intelligent, meaning it is capable of understanding facts and events and making judgments based on reasoning; (2) reactive, meaning it is aware of what is happening in the environment and capable of responding to those events; (3) purposeful, so it is able to pursue its own goals and take action based on its own criteria, which may differ from those of the individual’s normal consciousness; and (4) co-conscious, existing simultaneously with the consciousness of daily life, even though it is unrecognized by that consciousness.

Janet developed the first alternate consciousness psychology, naming it the realm of “subconscious acts.” We have an ordinary center of consciousness, our ordinary self or primary self. We also have other centers of consciousness that operate in a hidden subconscious realm. Secondary centers of consciousness exist on a subconscious level. These secondary centers perceive, think, react, and take action like the ordinary self, but the ordinary self is not aware of them. These secondary centers of consciousness are co-temporal and co-exist with the ordinary self. They carry on a conscious life and are, in fact, persons with identities of their own, but their active life is “below” our ordinary everyday consciousness. Janet insisted these secondary consciousnesses are not unconscious per se, for they think, will, and act like our ordinary consciousness does. Secondary centers are personalities. When they communicate, they say “I,” showing that they are unified groupings of ideas or sensations, groupings dissociated from the ordinary self.

Janet’s ideas provided a way to understand cases of multiple personality, a dramatic disorder in which individuals openly manifest a multiplicity of centers of consciousness with identities of their own. Today, multiple personality is broadly defined as an extreme form of dissociative disorder in which subconscious personalities establish personal social lives outside the awareness of the functioning ordinary personality. In articles written in the 1880s, Janet was the first thinker to use the word “dissociation” with a psychological meaning. These secondary personalities are “dissociated” insofar as they are separated from the functioning everyday personality, the ordinary personality. Pathological dissociative identities disrupt personal relationships in important ways, but the condition responds to psychotherapy that skillfully applies the knowledge of dissociated states as described by Janet.

Dissociation does not involve undoing an existing unity; it involves the association or attachment of a psychic event immediately when it occurs to one system of ideas and not to another. Psychic events are grouped as they occur rather than being dissociated from a unified personality. Janet proposes two laws of dissociation from which modern notions of dissociative disorders arise. In the first law, ideas can be conscious but not associated with the groupings of sensations and memories that make up the “I” of daily life or normal personality. These ideas are not conscious to the normal personality, and they should thereby be considered secondary. In the second law, every phenomenon artificially associated with or artificially attached to a secondary personality is withdrawn from the awareness of the normal personality.

Janet called the area of activity of these secondary consciousnesses the *subconscious* mind, not the unconscious mind*.* Freud’s concept of the unconscious has a very different meaning in which the Unconscious is a noun, the part of us where psychic events occur without our awareness. The Conscious mind, for Freud, is singular, the aspect of the mental world that alone possesses awareness. Janet used the word “unconscious,” but he always used the word as an *adjective*, such as “unconscious ideas.” Freud insisted there is only one Conscious mind, whereas Janet insisted many consciousness function in us all the time.

Many of Janet’s important works, before his death in 1947, are cited as key to the origins of the many schools of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Largely due to the wave of interest in modern cases of multiple personality and other dissociative pathologies, Janet’s ideas have enjoyed a revival since the 1970s, for they better address the dynamics in dissociative disorders than Freud’s one-conscious system that only awkwardly explains co-temporal coconscious multiplicity of identities. Historians of psychotherapy, starting from the influential writings of Henri Ellenberger, have increasingly recognized Janet as an important figure in their surveys of the modern forms of psychological treatment; in fact, Ellenberger felicitously gave the name “psychodynamic” to this alternate-consciousness view of human psyche initiated by Puységur.\[[38](#notes)\]



 

###  Conclusion 

Puységur knew well that core ideas of his vision came close to being crushed by the sceptics. It is fitting to repeat here the beginning of his *Mémoires*:

> My Good Sir:
> 
> I have the honor to send you the details and results of my experiments carried out at my home using animal magnetism \[...\] I believe it is not yet time to publish the things that I have seen, for they will be difficult to believe, even though I have attached a great number of supporting testimonies. For that reason, Monsieur, please do not lend these *Memoirs* out to anyone. They are for your personal use to reflect on and benefit your magnetic practice. Until at least fifty magnetizers have been able to successfully reproduce and publish the results of similar experiments, we should not expect to convince even people who are reasonable and of good faith—much less the multitude. At present what happens to animal magnetism affects my reputation. If my experiences were to be published prematurely, I would be compromised \[...\] I am confident, Monsieur, that you will exercise discretion in regard to what I am putting in your hands.\[[39](#notes)\]

Puységur’s discoveries opened a profound abyss that made available a rich fund of power and transformation, an abyss that could stir both excitement and fear, and those who felt the fear and ran from that abyss posed a danger to the discoverer. Despite his trepidation, Puységur did not let that threat stop him from exploring what emerged from these awesome depths.

 Chief among Puységur’s original reasons to not publish in 1784 was his desire not to stir up opposition to animal magnetism before sufficient credible evidence had been accumulated to put it on solid ground. He knew well that conventional medical thinking would not easily accept a radically new healing vision. Progress in any field depends on new discoveries. Eventually, resistance to the new and fear of the unknown gives way to the success of the new ideas. Once commonly accepted, the new becomes orthodox, which will eventually be challenged by new ideas. Orthodoxy attempts to suppress the new; fear of the new and unknown is an age old problem. The door of discovery opened by Puységur led to a vision of the world only barely glimpsed before. Puységur’s discovery was vaster than what was revealed by the discovery of a new gas or a new species of insect or the elliptical orbit traced by the earth around the sun. It had the potential to force a revaluation of the very foundations of human ethics and the very meaning of human existence.

The new territory could rightly be named an “abyss,” in Friedrich Nietzsche’s meaning of the term. I believe Puységur sensed what Nietzsche would point out years later: “When you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”\[[40](#notes)\] This abyss is a vastness that instills a deep sense of awe and fear, a place not containable by boundaries, and whose depths cannot be plumbed by any human mind. If we look into the abyss and seek some solid, immovable, totally reliable place to stand to make sense of the reality in which we are immersed, we cannot find it. Yet, we are driven, driven hard, to discover rock-bottom answers. Philosophical endeavors, mathematical speculations, scientific theories, historical and sociological research, and even artistic productions are driven by the desire to penetrate the mystery we find everywhere. Every time we think we land on some satisfying answer, some fixed immovable rock, we realize it is only the next step in an endless trek, and what seems an immovable rock is only a temporary resting place. Any ultimate solution requiring nothing more is a delusion.

There are many openings to look into the abyss and many doorways though which we can step to explore and journey into the other side. Puységur opened one of the most intriguing doorways. We learn deeply when we journey into the mysterious abyss, and those openings to the abyss can indeed take us somewhere. We find many “true” things,” but we never find “the truth.” We never find an ultimate solution or final answer to the mystery. Exploring the abyss seems so fruitful that we are sometimes tempted to say, “This time I have found the answer, the ultimate truth.” We are so hungry for success that we can easily deceive ourselves. Today, there is a danger we will believe we have found the ultimate truth in the psychological and psychotherapeutic systems we have cobbled together. Carl Jung saw this danger clearly. The attitude he adopted to traversing the abyss was not one of self-deception that he had or could reach the conclusion of his journey. He delighted in the journey itself. His break with Freud shows that he valued change and the new. It led him on a path of psychological discovery that evolved over decades.

The abyss is not evil. There are many openings through which to perceive, to explore, and even to enjoy it. Openings into the abyss are punched through by the desire to become enriched by what we can find there. Entering the abyss is an opportunity to see and experience the utter richness of reality. The abyss is only experienced as dangerous when we project onto it unacknowledged elements from the unconscious. The abyss creates a reflection of aspects of ourselves that we have not integrated because of our fear. Nietzsche addressed the fallacy of believing we can discover the final truth of things in this aphorism: “Where you’re standing, dig dig out: Down below’s the Well: Let them that walk in darkness shout: ‘Down below there’s Hell.”\[[41](#notes)\]

The abyss is not Hell but a well, and we can drink deeply from that well and we can descend into that well. Nietzsche advises us to “dig dig out where you are standing.” Access to the abyss can occur anywhere and at any time. There are a multitude of openings that offer access to that place of transcendence, and there are a million paths available to explore within that place. If we do not fear what is unknown in ourselves, we are likely to discover and widen those openings into the abyss. Our journeys are inward journeys, ones always available to us, wherever we start to dig. And if we do not fear, we will encourage others in their own unique exploratory journeys. Puységur did not let fear stop him, and he opened the door to a great vision of reality and access to an immense power of transformation. We ought take inspiration from his bold experiments and his era-changing discovery.



 

###  Notes 

\[1\] Armond Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement* *du magnétisme animal* (n.p., 1784).

\[2\] Franz Anton Mesmer, *Mémoires sur la découverte du magnétisme animal* (Didot le jeune, 1779).

\[3\] Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, *Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l’homme dans l’état de somnambulisme naturel, et dans let somnambulisme provoqué par l’acte magnétique* (J. G. Dentu, 1811).

\[4\] Adam Crabtree, “1784: The Marquis de Puységur and the Psychological Turn in the West*,”* *Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences* 55 (2019): 199–⁠215*.*

\[5\] Marquis de Puységur, *Recherches*, 73.

\[6\] Ibid., 74.

\[7\] Ibid.*,* 77.

\[8\] Arthur Schopenhaur, “Essays in Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith,” in *Pererga and Paralipomena,* ed. E. F. Payne (Clarendon Press, 1974), 239–⁠52.

\[9\] Adam Crabtree and Sarah Osei-Bonsu, eds. and translators, *The Marquis* Puységur, *Artificial Somnambulism, and the Discovery of the Unconscious Mind*: *Memoirs to Serve the History and Establishment of Animal Magnetism* (Routledge, 2025), 1.

\[10\] Armond Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, *Suite des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal* (n.p., 1785).

\[11\] Armond Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magétisme animal, et* *Suite des mémoires pour servir, &c.* (n.p. 1786).

\[12\] Mialle Simon, *Exposé par ordre alphabétique des cures opérées en France par le magnétisme animal, depuis Mesmer jusqu’ à nos jours* *(1774–⁠1826)* (*Alphabetical exposition of cures carried out in France using animal magnetism, from Mesmer up to the present (1774–⁠1826)* (J.G. Dentu, 1826).

\[13\] George Bush, *Mesmer & Swedenborg; or the Relation of the Developments of Mesmerism to the Doctrines of Swedenborg*, (John Allen, 1847) 268–⁠69.

\[14\] These promoters included famous physicians such as John Elliotson, James Esdaile, John Campbell Colquhoun, Edwin Lee, and John Wilson.

\[15\] James Braid, *Neurypnology or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism* (John Churchill, 1843) 101–⁠2. Note that the term in the title is not neurohypnotism or neurohypnology.

\[16\] James Braid, *Satanic Agency and Mesmerism Reviewed* (Sims and Dinham, 1842), 283.

\[17\] Ibid.

\[18\] Ibid.

\[19\] Julian Ochorowicz, *De la suggestion mental* (Octave Doin, 1887).

\[20\] H.R. Paul Schroeder, *Die Heilmethode des Lebensmagnetismus. Theorie und Praxis besprochen und mit eine Nachweise über dem wesentlichen Unterschied zwischen Hypnotismus und Heilmagnetismus versehen* (n.p., 1890).

\[21\] Thomson Jay Hudson, *The Law of Psychic Phenomena* (A. C. McClurg and Co, 1895).

\[22\] Adam Crabtree, *Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research, 1766–1925. An Annotated Bibliography* (Kraus International, 1988), vii–xvi.

\[23\] Inquiries of this kind were explored by practitioners such as Alexandre Bertrand (1795–1831), Ambroise Liébeault (1823–1901), Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), and Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919).

\[24\] Adam Crabtree, *From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing* (Yale University Press, 1993), 79–82.

\[25\] Pierre Janet, *Principles of Psychotherapy* (George Allen & Unwin, 1924), 8*.*

\[26\] Janet, *Principles*, 10.

\[27\] Pierre Janet, *L’automatisme psycholgique: essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine* (Félix Alcan, 1889).

\[28\] Anonymous, *Table Turning and Table Talking. Containing Detailed Reports* (Henry Vizetelly, 1853).

\[29\] For a description of many examples, see S. B. Brittan and B. W. Richmond, *A Discussion of the Facts and Philosophy of Ancient and Modern Spiritualism* (Partridge & Brittan, 1853).

\[30\] Nathaniel Godfrey, *Table-moving Tested and Proved to be the Result of Satanic Agency* (Seeleys, 1853).

\[31\] See for example Michael Faraday, “Professor Faraday on Table Moving,” *The Atheneaum* no. 1340, July 2, 1853.

\[32\] See for example Agénor Etien Comte de Gasparin, *Des tables tournantes, du surnaturel en général et des esprits*, 2 Vol. (J. G. Dentu, 1854) and J. A. C. Kerner, *Die Somnambulen Tische. Zur Geschichte und Erklarung dieser Erscheinung* (Ebner & Seubert, 1853).

\[33\] Edward Coit Rogers, *Philosophy of Mysterious Agents, Human and Divine* (John Jewett, 1853), 168.

\[34\] \[Paul Tascher\], *Second letter de Grosjean à son évêque* (Ledoyen, 1855). As far as anyone knows there was a first letter, but it has totally disappeared.

\[35\] Pierre Janet, *Partial Automatism: Subconscious Acts, Anesthesias and Psychological Disaggregation of Psychological Automatism*, trans. Adam Crabtree and Sarah Osei-Bonsu (Routledge, 2022), 17. The book translates the second half of *L’automatisme psychologique*, originally published in 1889.

\[36\] Janet, *Subconscious Acts*, 119–20.

\[37\] See Adam Crabtree, “Mesmerism, Divided Consciousness and Multiple Personality” in *Franz Anton Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus* (Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 133–43; see also Crabtree, *From Mesmer to Freud*, 1993, 289–91, *ad passim*.

\[38\] Henri Ellenberger, *The Discovery of the Unconsciousness.* (Basic Books, 1970).

\[39\] Crabtree and Osei-Bonsu, *The Marquis de Puységur*, 1.

\[40\] Friedrich Nietzsche, *Beyond Good and Evil*, trans. Ian Johnston (Richer Resources, 2014), 66.

\[41\] Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Joyful Wisdom,* trans. Thomas Common (n.p, n.d.), 9.



 

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Author Biography

### Adam Crabtree 

 

Adam Crabtree is a Toronto-based psychotherapist and scholar of consciousness who teaches and supervises at the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy in Toronto and is an affiliate at the Center for Theory and Research at Esalen. His primary interests are hypnosis, dissociative disorders and the history of psychodynamic psychotherapy. His writings in these fields include *Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research* (1988), *From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing* (1993*),* and "1784: The Marquis de Puységur and the psychological turn in the West*"* (*Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,* 2019)***.***



 



      ![Adam Crabtree looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/AdamCrabtree.headshot.png?itok=hQZy9cjf) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences)