The History of Hypnotism – The Marquis De Puysegur
Armand Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur, (ugh!), 1751 – 1825, was a staunch disciple of Mesmer.
A French aristocrat, he is without a doubt one of the most underrated hypnosis practitioners in history. He could have taken much more genuine credit for himself than he did, but for his unwavering support of Mesmer.
He learned about hypnotism from his brother, Antoine-Hyacinthe, Count de Chastenet.
The family employed a 23-year-old peasant named Victor Race, and Puysegur used him as a subject. He discovered that he could easily hypnotize the young man, who fell into a sort of sleep trance. He even walked in this state, which Puysegur called ‘artificial somnambulism’, or somnambulism.
This is the state we know today as hypnotism, but of course this name was coined by James Braid many years later.
The methods Puysegur used to induce this state are actually the same ones used by hypnotherapists today, namely relaxation and calming techniques. However, it was not long before the Marquis became known for his abilities and his great success.
He helped people a lot, and they came from all over France to meet him and be treated by him. In those days, hypnotism was still called “animal magnetism” or mesmerism.
In 1785, he lectured the local Masonic Society on the subject and even taught a course. This led him to develop The Harmonic Society of Friends Reunis, which was a hypnotic training school. It flourished and spread rapidly until the Revolution descended on France like a black cloud.
Poor old Puysegur was imprisoned for two years, but after the Napoleons were overthrown, he saw himself as the patriarch of the new generation of hypnotists. They eschewed Mesmer’s methods in favor of Puysegur’s. Always a faithful disciple of Mesmer, he never claimed credit for developing the procedure we now know as hypnotic induction.
He could have become much more famous, but sadly his reluctance to claim the credit that is rightfully his has caused him to be almost entirely lost to history. His resurrection, so to speak, is due entirely to a gentleman named Charles Richet, who rediscovered his writings in 1884.
This find from Puysegur’s works overturned a large number of apple carts, showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that much of what other people had been claiming as their own discoveries were actually not his at all, but Puysegur’s.
One problem Puysegur encountered during his life was that if he had to be absent from his practice for any reason, his patients would be thrown into utter confusion. What were they going to do without the help of the marquis? To overcome his fears, he developed a system in which he magnetized certain trees in the neighborhood and told his patients to go and touch them whenever they felt the need. Surprisingly, they claimed that it worked.
It’s a mystery, as the obvious reason for it to work would have been autosuggestion. However, there are today’s energy conscious hypnotists who use very similar ‘touch’ techniques.
Puysegur, then, was a very important figure in the entire development of hypnosis. The fact that he has been relegated to the background for so many years is a terrible shame. Still, it must be admitted that in many ways he was responsible for his own darkness.