Book Review

From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing

N Engl J Med 1994; 330:1242-1243April 28, 1994

Article

From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing
By Adam Crabtree. 413 pp. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1994. $45. ISBN: 0-300-05588-9

Sigmund Freud is widely thought of as the great discoverer of the unconscious and of its role in normal and pathologic mental events. Although Freud's explorations of unconscious processes and his theories about their place in mental experiences have had an enormous influence on 20th-century concepts of the mind, he was by no means the first to deal with such issues. Crabtree's book reminds us of that fact by carefully tracing some of the early roots of the alternate-consciousness paradigm that Freud and his later followers subsequently developed.

This book revisits major stages in the history of clinical investigations of unconscious processes that occurred during the century preceding Freud's work. In so doing, Crabtree emphasizes the seminal role in this history of 18th-century “animal magnetizers” such as Franz Anton Mesmer and his pupil and disciple the Marquis de Puysegur, and points out the special importance of the discovery of “magnetic sleep.” This early version of what, by the 19th century, came to be known as hypnosis opened up an entire area of scientific and therapeutic work. The controversies that swirled around this powerful healing method brought into sharp focus the central influence of psychological factors in mental disorders. Crabtree shows how this paradigm slowly came to replace the hypothesis of demonic possession as well as the early organic-physiologic theories then used to account for mental aberrations.

In tracing this history, Crabtree touches on the diagnostic and healing uses to which early hypnotic methods were put, and explores in some depth the range of normal and paranormal phenomena in which researchers of the 18th and 19th centuries became interested. (Indeed, the association of this early work in hypnotism with such arcane phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and other-worldly spirit influences has left a faint lingering aura of disreputability that contemporary hypnotic researchers and clinicians must still struggle to dispel).

The book details the way in which European and American writers came to see the phenomenon of “double consciousness” as a fundamental factor in psychological disturbances. Crabtree argues that their attempts to explain the seemingly inexplicable phenomena of what we now think of as mental dissociation inevitably led to the conclusion that psychological experience could occur at multiple levels, that the mind was capable of operating with more than a single focus, and that not all of these levels were accessible to usual conscious experience. From here, the evolution to the psychoanalytic concept of the dynamic unconscious was but a small step.

Crabtree highlights the work of the French psychological researcher and ground-breaking therapist Pierre Janet in exploring the processes of mental dissociation and automatism, as well as the writings of the little-known Frederic Myers on the unconscious or “subliminal self.” He shows their ideas to be immediate forerunners of Josef Breuer and Freud's approach to the treatment of hysterical disorders. And so a clear line of influences is laid out, founded on hypnotic methods and the investigation of mental experiences that emerged from the use of this technique.

There is little in this book that is truly original, and many others have explored the contributions of these early workers. However, Crabtree does present an excellent, sweeping outline of the progression of ideas and intellectual traditions from which later psychodynamic therapies arose.

The book is not without notable flaws. Although the book is scholarly in approach, the writing is at times rather turgid, and many chapters consist of a sometimes repetitious listing of what writer X said about topic Y, with minimal analysis or synthesis by the author. More careful editing would also have helped eliminate such glitches as a footnote number in the text with no evidence of the footnote to which it refers, erroneous dating of an important reference, and the unseemly use of a nickname in referring to a major contemporary writer on dissociative disorders, Richard Kluft. The scholarly value of the book is also somewhat diminished by the fact that the extensive bibliographic citations presented in footnotes and duly listed in the bibliography are omitted from the index.

It would also have been helpful had the author related some of the historical material to contemporary issues. For example, the extended discussion of the subliminal self and unconscious mental processes is not tied in any way to contemporary concepts of subliminal perception.

Two thirds of the way through the book, Crabtree presents a truly innovative idea -- that the concept of multiple personality disorder could only have emerged after the cultural and psychological climate had generated a “symptom language” derived from the concept of multiple levels of consciousness. He immediately weakens his point, however, by conceding that these clinical phenomena probably first appeared in settings in which it is unlikely that either the patient or the clinician could have had much contact with such ideas.

Despite its minor flaws, the historical reach of this book makes it worthy of inclusion in any library's section on the history of science. Today's researchers and clinicians could also explore this work with profit and emerge with a better understanding of how the efforts of several centuries' worth of pioneer explorers of the mind combined to incubate the concepts that we now use to understand basic aspects of the human psyche.

Robert H. Goldstein, Ph.D.
University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14642