Where does hypnosis come from?

Hypnosis could be traced all the way back to the beginning of time because, of course, it has always been present. In ancient Egypt, they used forms of trance and hypnosis to heal people. In ancient Greece they had herbal chambers where you were treated wonderfully in trance.

A lot of cultures used the phenomenon without knowing it. Think of shamans in the jungle, the Indians, the Aborigines and other nature peoples. They will call it differently, but what they did and do was and is purely hypnotic.

So it's much older than most people think, but where it really originated is from Mesmerism

Mesmerism

Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer was born May 23, 1743 in Swabia, southern Germany and died March 5 in Meersburg, Germany. He was a peculiar man because Mesmer believed that humans consisted of animal magnetism. When that turned the wrong way there was an imbalance and that created disease, Mesmer said.

He believed that if you turned that animal magnetism back the right way that illnesses disappeared. In the beginning, he used a magnet that people had to hold. Later it became a bar that he had magnetized.

In its heyday, Mesmer had as many as 3,000 paying patients a day! Can you imagine? He could no longer help all those people himself so he had magnetized a tree in the garden and those people could then touch the tree. Very many healed by touching the tree.

Now when you think about that you probably think what nonsense or think of phenomena like Jomanda. The difference, however, is that Mesmer was a doctor and a scientist. A lot of other doctors also used his method and also got results. It was normal in those days.

The king of France wanted to reward Mesmer for his work and wanted to give him a salary of 50,000 francs a year for the rest of his life. Mesmer thought that was really too little and wanted at least 100,000 francs. The king thought that was a lot of money and then wanted more proof and sent Benjamin Franklin on it.

Franklin observes after watching Mesmer at work for a few hours: 'If anything happens it's the people themselves who make it happen. Mesmer doesn't do anything at all.'

He got nothing from the king and was exposed as a charlatan and his methods were discontinued. He never recovered from that. The man completely collapsed, so to speak, and doctors also stopped using his methods. Perhaps they threw the baby out with the bath water....

James Braid and hypnosis

Many people were studying his work at the time, including James Braid, a Scottish physician. Braid found Mesmer's work interesting after attending a demonstration in 1841 by Charles Lafontaine, a student of Mesmer.

Braid believed that it was mainly the suggestions that healed the patient and in 1843 he first wrote about hypnosis in his book "Neurypnology, or, the rationale of nervous sleep, considered in relation with animal magnetism

He also said, if everyone follows the rules I have written down in this book then anyone can hypnotize themselves just fine. So in that book the phenomenon of hypnosis was born and first described. The word hypnotist and hypnotize were also first described there. So those words are not very old.

Braid then found out that what he was doing was not hypnosis but more monoidaism, or focusing on a single idea. Unfortunately, he was never able to get that term through so hypnosis persisted with all the misunderstandings associated with it.

In fact, because hypnosis is derived from the word "sleep," a lot of people still think of it as sleeping, but of course it is not. On the contrary, you are much more present, and indeed you are often focused on a single idea.

Hypnosis for the first time in the Netherlands

Albert Willem van Renterghem (1845 - 1939) was a Dutch general practitioner in Goes who, following the example of the Frenchman Ambroise-Auguste Liébault, introduced hypnosis to the Netherlands.

In 1887, he founded a practice for "treatment by hypnotism" with Frederik van Eeden in Amsterdam. It was, as it were, the first practice to use hypnosis, and Albert was not given the name, the miracle doctor of Goes, for nothing. After all, it worked miraculously well, only they all attributed that to Albert's "gifts.

That's too bad, because hypnosis is something anyone could learn just fine if you wanted to. Would you like to learn it? Then start by downloading the hypnosis 2.0 report. It describes exactly what hypnosis is, definitely is not and what you can do with it.

Click here to download the hypnosis 2.0 report