Milton H. Erickson, M.D. was one of the most influential post-war hypnotherapists. He wrote several books and journal articles on the subject. During the 1960s, Erickson was responsible for popularizing a new branch of hypnotherapy, which became known as Ericksonian hypnotherapy, eventually characterised by, amongst other things, the absence of a formal hypnotic inductions, and the use of indirect suggestion, “metaphor” (actually they were analogies, rather than “metaphors”), confusion techniques, and double binds. However, the lack of resemblance between Erickson’s methods and those of traditional hypnotism led some of his contemporaries, such as André Weitzenhoffer, to seriously question whether he was actually practicing “hypnosis” at all, and the status of his approach in relation to traditional hypnotism has remained in question.

Erickson had no hesitation in presenting any suggested effect as being “hypnosis”, whether or not the subject was in a hypnotic state. In fact, he was not hesitant in passing off behaviour that was dubiously hypnotic as being hypnotic.

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Émile Coué (1857-1926) served for around two years as an assistant to Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in his group hypnotic at Nancy. However, after practicing for several years as a hypnotherapist employing the methods of Liébeault and Bernheim’s Nancy School, Coué gradually began to develop a new orientation called “conscious autosuggestion.” Several years after Liébeault’s death in 1904, Coué founded what became known as the New Nancy School, a loose collaboration of practitioners who taught and promoted his views. Coué’s method did not emphasise “sleep” or deep relaxation and instead focused upon teaching groups of clients how to use autosuggestion by trial and error learning involving a specific series of suggestion tests. Although Coué argued that he was no longer using hypnosis, some of his followers, such as Charles Baudouin, viewed his approach as a form of light self-hypnosis. Coué’s method became an internationally renowned self-help and psychotherapy technique, which contrasted with the methods of Freud’s method of psychoanalysis and prefigured subsequent self-hypnosis techniques and, in some regards, the development of cognitive therapy.

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Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, subsequently studied hypnotism at Charcot’s Paris school and briefly visited Bernheim’s Nancy school.

Initially, Freud was an enthusiastic proponent of hypnotherapy, and soon began to emphasise and popularise the use of hypnotic regression and ab reaction (catharsis) as therapeutic methods. He wrote a favorable encyclopedia article on hypnotism, translated one of Bernheim’s works into German, and published an influential series of case studies with his colleague Joseph Breuer entitled Studies on Hysteria (1895). This became the founding text of the subsequent tradition known as “hypno-analysis” or “regression hypnotherapy.”

However, Freud gradually abandoned the use of hypnotism in favour of his developing methods of psychoanalysis, through free association and interpretation of the unconscious. Struggling with the great expense of time required for psychoanalysis to be successful, Freud later suggested that it might be combined with hypnotic suggestion once more in an attempt to hasten the outcome of treatment,

It is very probable, too, that the application of our therapy to numbers will compel us to alloy the pure gold of analysis plentifully with the copper of direct [hypnotic] suggestion.

However, only a handful of Freud’s followers were sufficiently qualified in hypnosis to attempt the synthesis. Their work had a limited influence on the gradual emergence of the hypno-therapeutic approaches now known variously as “hypnotic regression”, “hypnotic progression”, and “hypnoanalysis”.

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Pierre Janet (1859-1947) reported some initial studies on a hypnotic subject in 1882 which came to the attention of Charcot who subsequently appointed him director of the psychological laboratory at the Salpêtrière in 1889, after Janet completed his PhD in philosophy which dealt with the subject of psychological automatism. In 1898 Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1902 he became chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France. Janet reconciled elements of his views with those of Bernheim and his followers, developing his own sophisticated hypnotic psychotherapy based upon the concept of psychological dissociation which, at the turn of the century, rivalled Freud’s attempt to provide a more comprehensive psychological theory of psychotherapy.

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For several decades, Braid’s work became more influential abroad than in his own country, except for a handful of followers, most notably Dr. John Milne Bramwell. The eminent neurologist Dr. George Miller Beard took Braid’s theories to America. Meanwhile his works were translated into German by Wilhelm T. Preyer, Professor of Physiology at Jena University. The psychiatrist Albert Moll subsequently continued German research, publishing his Hypnotism in 1889. However, the study of hypnotism mainly became focused in France, after Braid’s research was presented before the French Academy of Sciences by the eminent neurologist Dr. Étienne Eugène Azam who also translated Braid’s last manuscript (On Hypnotism, 1860) into French. The French Academy of Science, who had previously examined Mesmerism in 1784, therefore subsequently examined the writings of Braid, shortly after his demise, at the request of Azam, Paul Broca, and others.

Azam’s enthusiasm for hypnotism influenced Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, a country doctor whose enormously popular group hypnotherapy clinic was discovered by Hippolyte Bernheim who subsequently became himself an influential hypnotist. The study of hypnotism subsequently became centred upon a fierce rivalry and debate between Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim, the two most influential figures in late 19th century hypnotism.

An important argument developed between Charcot’s “Hysteria School”, centered on Charcot’s clinic at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (thus, also known as the “Paris School” or the “Salpêtrière School”) and Bernheim’s “Suggestion School”, centred on Bernheim’s Nancy clinic (thus, also known as the “Nancy School” over the true nature of hypnosis. Charcot, influenced more by the Mesmerists, argued that hypnotism was an abnormal state of nervous functioning found only in certain hysterical women. He claimed that it was manifested in the form of a series of physical reactions which could be divided into distinct stages. Bernheim argued against Charcot that anyone could be hypnotised, that it was an extension of normal psychological functioning, and that its effects were variable being primarily due to suggestion. After several decades of debate, Bernheim’s view eventually came to dominate and Charcot’s theory of hypnosis is now seen as little more than a historical curiosity.

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Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) believed that there was a magnetic force or “fluid” within the universe which influenced the health of the human body. He experimented with magnets to influence this field and so cause healing. By around 1774 he had concluded that the same effects could be created by passing the hands, at a distance, in front of the subject’s body, referred to as making “Mesmeric passes.” The word mesmerise originates from the name of Franz Mesmer; and was intentionally used to separate its users from the various “fluid” and “magnetic” theories embedded within the label “magnetist”.

In 1784, at the request of King Louis XVI, Mesmer’s theories were scrutinised by a series of French scientific committees, one of which included the American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin. They also investigated the practices of a disaffected student of Mesmer, one Charles d’Eslon (1750-1786), and on the basis of their examination of d’Eslon’s manner of working (not Mesmer’s), and despite the fact that they accepted that the results that were claimed by Mesmer were in fact veridical, their placebo controlled experiments of d’Eslon’s practices clearly demonstrate that the effects of Mesmerism were most likely due to belief and imagination rather than to any sort of invisible energy (”animal magnetism”) being transmitted from the body of the Mesmerist.

In other words, despite accepting that Mesmer’s practice seemed to have a certain efficacy, both committees totally rejected all of Mesmer’s theories.

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According to his writings, Braid began to hear reports concerning the practices of various Oriental meditation techniques immediately after the publication of his major book on hypnotism, Neurypnology (1843). Braid first discusses hypnotism’s historical precursors in a series of articles entitled Magic, Mesmerism, Hypnotism, etc., Historically & Physiologically Considered. He draws analogies between his own practice of hypnotism and various forms of Hindu yoga meditation and other ancient spiritual practices. Braid’s interest in meditation really developed when he was introduced to the Dabistan-i Mazahib, the “School of Religions”, an ancient Persian text describing a wide variety of Oriental religious practices.

Last May [1843], a gentleman residing in Edinburgh, personally unknown to me, who had long resided in India, favored me with a letter expressing his approbation of the views which I had published on the nature and causes of hypnotic and mesmeric phenomena. In corroboration of my views, he referred to what he had previously witnessed in oriental regions, and recommended me to look into the “Dabistan,” a book lately published, for additional proof to the same effect. On much recommendation I immediately sent for a copy of the “Dabistan”, in which I found many statements corroborative of the fact, that the eastern saints are all self-hypnotisers, adopting means essentially the same as those which I had recommended for similar purposes.

Although he disputed the religious interpretation given to these phenomena throughout this article and elsewhere in his writings, Braid seized upon these accounts of Oriental meditation as proof that the effects of hypnotism could be produced in solitude, without the presence of a magnetiser, and therefore saw this as evidence that the real precursor of hypnotism was to be sought in the ancient practices of meditation rather than in the more recent theory and practice of Mesmerism. As he later wrote:

In as much as patients can throw themselves into the nervous sleep, and manifest all the usual phenomena of Mesmerism, through their own unaided efforts, as I have so repeatedly proved by causing them to maintain a steady fixed gaze at any point, concentrating their whole mental energies on the idea of the object looked at; or that the same may arise by the patient looking at the point of his own finger, or as the Magi of Persia and Yogi of India have practised for the last 2,400 years, for religious purposes, throwing themselves into their ecstatic trances by each maintaining a steady fixed gaze at the tip of his own nose; it is obvious that there is no need for an exoteric influence to produce the phenomena of Mesmerism. The great object in all these processes is to induce a habit of abstraction or concentration of attention, in which the subject is entirely absorbed with one idea, or train of ideas, whilst he is unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, every other object, purpose, or action.

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Braid made a rough distinction between different stages of hypnosis which he termed the first and second conscious stage of hypnotism, he later replaced this with a distinction between “sub-hypnotic”, “full hypnotic”, and “hypnotic coma” stages. Jean-Martin Charcot made a similar distinction between stages named somnambulism, lethargy, and catalepsy. However, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Bernheim introduced more complex hypnotic “depth” scales, based on a combination of behavioural, physiological and subjective responses, some of which were due to direct suggestion and some of which were not. In the first few decades of the 20th century, these early clinical “depth” scales were superseded by more sophisticated “hypnotic susceptibility” scales based on experimental research. The most influential were the Davis-Husband and Friedlander-Sarbin scales developed in the 1930s. Andre Weitzenhoffer and Ernest R. Hilgard developed the Stanford Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility in 1959, consisting of 12 suggestion test items following a standardised hypnotic eye-fixation induction script, and this has become one of the most widely-referenced research tools in the field of hypnosis. Soon after, in 1962, Ronald Shor and Emily Carota Orne developed a similar group scale called the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (HGSHS).

Whereas the older “depth scales” tried to infer the level of “hypnotic trance” based upon supposed observable signs, such as spontaneous amnesia, most subsequent scales measure the degree of observed or self-evaluated responsiveness to specific suggestion tests, such as direct suggestions of arm rigidity (catalepsy).

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Post-hypnotic suggestion can be used to change people’s behaviour after emerging from hypnosis. One author wrote that “a person can act, some time later, on a suggestion seeded during the hypnotic session… A hypnotherapist told one of his patients, who was also a friend: ‘When I touch you on the finger you will immediately be hypnotised.’ Fourteen years later, at a dinner party, he touched him deliberately on the finger and his head fell back against the chair.”

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Some hypnotists conceive of suggestions as being a form of communication directed primarily to the subject’s conscious mind, whereas others view suggestion as a means of communicating with the “unconscious” or “subconscious” mind. These concepts were introduced into hypnotism at the end of 19th century by Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet. The original Victorian pioneers of hypnotism, including Braid and Bernheim, did not employ these concepts but considered hypnotic Milton Erickson, made more use of indirect suggestions, such as metaphors or stories, whose intended meaning may be concealed from the subject’s conscious mind. The concept of subliminal suggestion also depends upon this view of the mind. By contrast, hypnotists who believed that responses to suggestion are primarily mediated by the conscious mind, such as Theodore Barber and Nicholas Spanos tended to make more use of direct verbal suggestions and instructions.

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