Extimate Revolt: Mesmerism, Haiti, and the Origin of Psychoanalysis (original) (raw)
Related papers
WORK UNIVERSITYOF PESHAWAR i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All praises to ALLAH, the most Merciful, Kind, and Beneficent, and source of all Knowledge, Wisdom within and beyond our comprehension. all respects and possible tributes goes to our Holly Profit MUHAMMAD (Swal Allaho Alaihy Wasallam), who is forever guidance and knowledge for all human beings on this earth. Thanks to Dr. Rahat Sajjad, Chairperson Psychology department, and the course instructor, who has contributed enthusiasm, support, sound advice, particularly her supportive attitude was always a source of motivation for me. She guided me in a polite and cooperative manner at every step. I am also in debt to all those writers who has written such informative and thought provoking books and other material. Imran Ahmad Sajid ii SUMMARY To many minds there have been four great scientific revolutions in the recent history of man. These are the revolutions wrought by Darwin, Marx, Einstein, and Freud. It is impossible nowadays, however much one may disagree with the tenets of psychoanalytic theory, to deny the enormous influence of Sigmund Freud on so many facets of everyday life. To many people who have never taken a psychology course, psychology begins and ends with psychoanalysis. Proponent of psychoanalysis believe that behavior is motivated by inner forces and conflicts over which the individual has little awareness and control. Dreams and slips of the tongue are viewed as indications of what a person is truly feeling within a seething cauldron of unconscious psychic activity. Psychoanalysis has its roots in hypnosis. The first contributor was Franz Mesmer, who is known for inducing a Trans like state called Mesmerism. He has presented the idea of animal magnetism. He also presented the thesis that the planets and moon has an effect on the body. He used magnets for the treatment of paralysis, later he claimed that he could treat paralysis without magnets by directing his own magnetic fluid to the patient's body. Liebault and Bernheim introduced Mesmerism in the Nancy school, France. They drew significant attention there. Jean Martin Charcot was a French Neurologist and he used to treat hysterical patients through the use of hypnosis. In 1885 Charcot introduced Freud to hypnosis. It was under Charcot's influence that Freud began developing his own theory of psychoanalysis. Josef Breuer introduced Freud to Cathartic method of treatment of hysteria.
Medicina nei secoli, 2019
The thought and work of Anton Mesmer had a great dissemination in the last decades of the XVIII century and all along the XIX, a dissemination that differed in its theoretical and practical valences in line with the peculiar cultural, social and political contexts of the main European countries. On the basis of a new ‘science of the mind’ social reforms were invoked, ranging from education to ethics and to the treatment of mental disorders, obviously passing through the questioning of the legal and political organization of the various States. A new ‘physiology’ justified and at the same time required to replace with the ‘scientific’ knowledge the basic ideological and social assumptions upon which the whole society was based, from schools to prisons and asylums. But does it really was ‘scientific’ knowledge? And who had the last word on this problem, a problem that was in the first place epistemological but had also enormous social implications? Key words: History of bio-medical an...
There is an incomparable garden with fine prospects and statues... a theatre, birdhouse, dovecote, and at the top a Belvedere that extends over towards the Prater." ...... The Mozarts stayed with the Mesmers a second time when they returned to Vienna in 1773. Then it was Franz Mesmer's turn to give them a concert. He'd become a competent musician on an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin, his Glass Harmonica. The instrument made quite a stir in Europe when it was first played in recitals by the Englishwoman Miss Davies. Mozart's celebrated piece for glass harmonica and string quartet was written as a gift for the blind musician Fraulein Kirchgessner. Leopold in another letter: ....." Dr. Mesmer played for us on Miss Davies' "harmonica" or glass instrument, and played very well. The instrument cost him nearly 50 ducats, for it is very finely made." . He goes on to say that Mesmer is the only person in Vienna that knows how to play it. 5 years later there may well have be no glass harmonica players in Vienna: Mesmer would be living in 18 exile in Paris, using its' peculiar rasping timbre to set the eerie mood of the seances around the magnetic baquet in the Place Vendome. Returning to the setting that opens this narrative: Vienna, morning of the 18th of March ,1781. We extend an open invitation to ou readers to stroll with us out onto the terrace of the formerly fashionable, scenically located and still beautiful garden of the Mesmers' Landstrasse estate. Soon we discover the astonishing young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , who is delighted to be visiting here once again. He stands up to greet us, shake our hands. No, he does not know where Madame Mesmer has gone . She was not in the house when he arrived yesterday night. To his amazement he was greeted at the door by someone he'd first met here in 1773, now the Mesmers' daughter-in-law, so thoroughly transformed in her disposition and general state of health as to be unrecognizable: Fräulein Franziska von Oesterling, known familiarly as "Franzl". In the long run, Franzl's would become famous in her own right. Her fame would not be due to any combination of talent, 19 intelligence or skill, nor indeed for anything she had done, but rather from her having been the subject of an experiment. A century and a half later her name would be enshrined as (depending on one's point of view) the first patient , or first victim, of Viennese psychotherapy. Unlike the hapless souls in the well known case histories of Dr. Sigmund Freud , Dora, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, and so on , she really had been cured of her 15 hysterical symptoms by the application of Anton Mesmer's precursor of Einstein's Unified Field, the 27 principles of Animal Magnetism. Since the days of his pioneering and courageous work, the superabundance of curious mental states provoked by hypnotism have been investigated by the Puysegur brothers, Braid, Elliotson, Bernheim, Liebhaut, Charcot, and in our own day, Ernest Hilgard and Erica Fromm among others. To this day no-one has come up with explanations for these phenomena that are scientifically more convincing than Mesmer's claim that there exists a: " universally distributed and continuous fluid, which is quite without vacuum and of an incomparably rarefied nature, and which 23 motion due to the presence of powerful sources of attraction. If he could control this tidal flow, he could perhaps bring about the salutary ' crisis', that would dissolve the 'blockage' of this fluid from her psyche. These ideas are not so far from those of modern psycho-therapy, whether it be the 'catharsis' or 'cathexis' of Freud, the 'orgasm', of Reich, the 'primal scream' of Janov. They are also simpler, less encumbered with pseudo-scientific sub-texts and, being easier to falsify, are probably closer to the truth. The great events of the scientific revolution of the previous centuries, the rising crescendo from Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo to Newton, had formed a mental disposition in educated society, a tendency to think of the entire universe as a kind of laboratory for doing experiments and making observations : stars, rocks, plants, weather, animals, numbers, shapes and bodies -even human beings.
Gassner’s Exorcism—not Mesmer’s Magnetism—is the Real Predecessor of Modern Hypnosis
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 2005
Usually, Mesmer-not Gassner --is considered to be the real predecessor of modern hypnosis and, in consequence, of psychotherapy. The author questions this commonly accepted view and asserts that Gassner's therapeutic approach was much more elaborate and psychologically oriented than Mesmer's. In light of the present understanding of psychotherapeutic and hypnotherapeutic techniques, Gassner's methods can be characterised as a special kind of hypnotic training in self-control.
Franz Anton Mesmer - Psychological Pioneer PDF
After a couple of centuries being mocked and condemned as a charlatan, Dr. Mesmer is increasingly being recognized as a pioneer in the exploration of the healing properties of the mind. His experimental approach, and that of his students and their followers provided some keys to the unconscious that were explored by Freud and contributed to the continuing development of psychotherapy.
When a form of thought seems to be growing old and nearing its end, we should question not its uncertain future but the long process of its maturation and coming to light to read there the omens of its destiny. A genealogy of psychoanalysis will instruct us about its fate more surely than its present successes or failures can. And when psychoanalysis, its therapy's usefulness ever more contested despite its popular audience, already wears the drab uniform of ideology, philosophy must explain the causes behind this decline by examining its theoretical corpus, initially presented as a total revolution in the manner of understanding man's most ntimate being' —his psyche— and thus as the reversal of philosophy itself, at least in its traditional form.
Psychoanalysis: Science or Fiction?
Jefferson Journal of Psychiatry, 1986
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Jefferson Digital Commons. The Jefferson Digital Commons is a service of Thomas Jefferson University's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). The Commons is a showcase for Jefferson books and journals, peer-reviewed scholarly publications, unique historical collections from the University archives, and teaching tools. The Jefferson Digital Commons allows researchers and interested readers anywhere in the world to learn about and keep up to date with Jefferson scholarship. This article has been accepted for inclusion in Jefferson