The Story of Psychology (19 page)

Mesmer now saw a link between magnetism and his own theory of animal gravitation. He decided that the body is pervaded by a magnetic rather than a gravitational fluid, and that the resulting force field can become misaligned, causing illness; realignment through treatment would restore health. What he had previously called “animal gravitation” he renamed “animal magnetism.” The patient’s crisis he interpreted as a breakthrough of an obstacle to the flow of the body’s magnetic fluid and the consequent restoration of “harmony.”

Mesmer began treating other patients, telling them to expect certain reactions, including the crisis. They all obligingly responded as anticipated, and Viennese newspapers soon were full of stories of Mesmer’s cures. At some point Maximilian Hell publicly asserted that the idea was
his, not Mesmer’s, and a nasty dispute ensued. Mesmer boldly asserted that he had proposed the theory years earlier in his dissertation (a distortion of truth), won the dispute, and established himself as the discoverer of the phenomenon.

Riding the wave of his fame, Mesmer gave well-attended lectures and demonstrations in a number of cities. In Vienna, however, the flamboyance with which he publicized his cures offended the city’s influential doctors. They were further scandalized in 1777 by his claims concerning one patient, Maria Theresa von Paradies, the blind pianist for whom Mozart wrote his B-flat piano concerto, K.456. She came to Mesmer when she was eighteen, having been blind since the age of three. He claimed that under his care she regained partial vision but was able to see only in his presence and never when another witness was present. It is possible that her blindness was psychosomatic and that he did have an influence on her, but in 1778 her parents stopped the treatment, Viennese doctors denounced Mesmer as a charlatan, and he abruptly left everything behind, including his aging wife, and decamped for Paris.

In that jittery, fad-ridden city, Mesmer, with his talent for self-promotion, swiftly achieved great fame and, in time, notoriety. At first he treated patients individually, but as his practice burgeoned, he found it profitable to treat them en masse by means of his own invention, the
baquet
or oak tub, which dispensed magnetic fluid through the iron bars. Since he could also affect his patients by touch, gestures, or long intense looks, he began to think that neither magnets nor iron filings were essential and that his own body must be unusually magnetic, capable of transmitting invisible magnetic fluid directly.

“Mesmerism,” as the treatment was soon called, became the
dernier cri;
people flocked to Mesmer’s salon, acolytes studied under him, and his disciples wrote at least two hundred pamphlets and books about his treatment in less than a decade. But the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris and other orthodox medical institutions considered him a fraud and said so. If he had known himself to be a faker, he would surely not have responded as he did. Through his aristocratic connections, in 1784 he induced the King to appoint a special commission composed of distinguished doctors and academicians, including the chemist Lavoisier and the American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, to investigate his claims.

The commission conducted a careful study, including an experiment of a kind common in modern psychology. They told some subjects that they would be magnetized through a closed door, but then did no magnetizing.
The tricked subjects responded exactly as they would have had magnetization been performed. After consideration of all the evidence, the commission reported correctly that Mesmer’s magnetic fluid did not exist, incorrectly that the effects of magnetic treatment were nothing but “imagination.” With that, the popularity of mesmerism waned and the movement broke up into quarreling groups. Mesmer eventually left the scene of his disgrace and spent most of his last thirty years in Switzerland in relative seclusion.

For half a century, mesmerism remained a quasi-magical and thoroughly misunderstood phenomenon practiced by outright charlatans like Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (the pseudonym of a mountebank named Giuseppe Balsamo), sideshow performers, and a number of adventurous laymen and unorthodox doctors in France, England, and America. Most mesmerists gradually abandoned the use of magnets— Mesmer himself had been moving in that direction—claiming that they were able to transmit magnetic fluid by means of rituals and incantations, eye contact, and other procedures. These did, in fact, provoke trances and “crises” and yield relief from certain symptoms.

In England in the 1840s, mesmerism began to gain some respectability when John Elliotson, a physician, used it to treat neuroses, and W. S. Ward, a surgeon, amputated the leg of a patient anesthetized by mesmerism. James Braid, a Scottish physician, after performing a number of experiments with mesmerism, said that its major effect was due not to magnetism flowing from the mesmerist but, rather, to the susceptibility of the patient; in effect, he identified it as a psychological process. Braid renamed it “neuro-hypnology” (from the Greek
neuron
for “nerve” and
hypnos
for “sleep”), which shortly became, in common use, “hypnosis,” as it has been known ever since.

In midcentury, a French country doctor named Auguste Liébeault discarded the remainder of the magical-mystical trappings of hypnotism. He had the patient stare into his eyes while he repeatedly suggested that the patient was growing sleepy. When the patient fell into a trance, the doctor told him that his symptoms would disappear, and in many cases they did. By the mid-1860s Liébeault, who had become a celebrity beyond his native Nancy, wrote a book about his method and its results; from then on, hypnotism, though still suspect and a subject of heated controversy, entered into medical practice.

Its most noted practitioner, late in the century, was Jean Martin Char-cot, director of the Salpêtrière, a hospital in Paris. Known as “the Napoleon of the neuroses,” he believed that hypnotic phenomena had much
in common with hysterical symptoms and, indeed, that only a hysteric could be hypnotized. He hypnotized hysterical patients before groups of students to demonstrate the symptoms of hysteria, but did not consider hypnotism potentially therapeutic and did not use it as a therapy.

Charcot also believed, erroneously, that the trance was achieved only after the patient had passed through two prior stages, lethargy and catalepsy, each having specific symptoms and involving major changes in the functioning of the nervous system.
²
His views were later disproved by the followers of Liébeault, who proved that the trance could be directly induced and that nonhysterics could be hypnotized. Still, it was thanks to Charcot’s prestige and his skill at inducing the trance that in 1882 the French Academy of Sciences accepted hypnosis as a neurological phenomenon that had nothing to do with magnetism.

A number of Charcot’s gifted students, among them Alfred Binet, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud, went on to offer psychological rather than neurological explanations of the hypnotic state and to use hypnosis in their own ways. In the past century, hypnosis has had a checkered history, partly as a sideshow entertainment and partly as a therapeutic tool useful in pain relief, particularly for persons who cannot tolerate anesthesia. Why it works (and why for many people it doesn’t) has been answered on two levels: It does not seem linked to most traits of personality, but some recent studies have linked it to absorption, or the capacity to concentrate totally on material outside oneself.
³
Lately, with the advent of brain scans there has been evidence of a physiological mechanism at work: In highly hypnotizable people “top-down” neural processes, generated in the forebrain, override “bottom-up” processes that take place in the sensory perception areas of the brain, while in nonhypnotizables the opposite is true.
⁴
Dr. Mesmer, could he know all this, would doubtless be outraged that his theory has been totally discarded but mightily pleased that his therapeutic claims have been vindicated.

Other physicalists, taking a totally different approach, palpated and measured the cranium in the belief that the details of its configuration were directly related to the individual’s personality traits and mental abilities.

The idea that external physical characteristics are linked to psychological
traits was an ancient one. Physiognomy, the interpretation of character and mental abilities from the shape and size of the facial features, had existed since Greek times. It became popular in the late eighteenth century through the writings of Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian and mystic, whose four-volume
Physiognomical Fragments
, purporting to present the “science of physiognomy,” went through fifty-five editions between 1775 and 1810. Darwin later said that he almost missed out on his epochal trip on the
Beagle
because its captain, a disciple of Lavater’s, “doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.”
⁵

Physiognomy had no influence on psychology, but it prepared the way for a related theory that did, namely, phrenology, the doctrine that the contours of the skull are determined by the development of specific areas of the brain and therefore are indicative of character and mental abilities.

The chief proponent of the theory was Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), a doctor and neurophysiologist born in Germany and trained in Vienna, where he received his medical degree in 1785.
⁶
Gall, whose small, petulant features seemed bunched low in his face—his numerous eminent patients apparently did not believe in physiognomy—was a chronic nonconformist, ever on the outs with authority, vehement in controversy, given to blatant womanizing, and so unabashedly greedy that, defying convention, he charged admission to his scientific demonstrations.

For all that, he was a first-rate brain anatomist who, by means of his own technique of dissection, first showed that the two halves of the brain are connected by stalks of white matter (the “commissures”); that the fibers of the spinal cord cross over when connecting to the lower brain (with the result that sensations from one side of the body reach the brain on the opposite side); and that the larger the amount of cortex—gray matter on the surface of the brain—a species possesses, the greater its intelligence.

These contributions by Gall became, and still are, part of standard neurological knowledge, but they deeply displeased the ecclesiastical authorities and Emperor Francis I because they attributed the higher mental processes of human beings to the developed brain rather than to an incorporeal soul or mind. In 1801 the Emperor forbade Gall to give further lectures on the grounds that they led to materialism, immorality, and atheism. After repeatedly appealing to the Emperor to lift the ban, to no avail, in 1807 Gall quit Vienna for Paris, where, though Napoleon
sought to restrict his influence and his ideas were rejected by the Institut de France, he remained for the rest of his life.

Gall’s contributions to the knowledge of brain structure and its relationship to intelligence should have won him a respected place in the history of psychology, but he is best known for, and usually judged by, the theory he called “cranioscopy,” which became popularly known as phrenology.

When Gall first realized that human intelligence is superior to that of animals because of the greater development of the human cortex, it occurred to him that, similarly, differences among human beings in intelligence and personality might be due to measurable differences in individual cortical development. This would explain something that had puzzled him for many years. As a schoolboy, and again as a medical student, he had been irked that some of his schoolfellows, though not as bright as he, got better grades because they were better memorizers— and, mystifyingly, all had large, bulging eyes. Gall now guessed this must mean that the area of cortex just behind the eyes was the seat of verbal memory, and that in people who have excellent memories the area is unusually developed and tends to push the eyes forward.

If so, might not every higher faculty be embodied in a particular area or “organ” of the cerebral cortex? Might there not be an organ, for instance, that generates “combativeness,” another that produces “benevolence,” and so on? Gall was familiar with the several dozen “mental faculties” propounded by Thomas Reid, the Scottish associationist; perhaps each faculty resided in a particular cortical area that was unusually developed in people who possessed that faculty in unusual degree.

He could hardly open up people’s skulls to test his theory, and X-rays had not yet been discovered, but Gall came up with a convenient new hypothesis. Just as the eyes of those with good memories were pushed forward, so the skull probably protruded somewhat over any unusually developed area. And,
mirabile dictu
, when he began looking for the evidence, he found it everywhere. Here is how he first located the “organ of acquisitiveness”:

Gall and a colleague, a young doctor named Johann Christoph Spurzheim, painstakingly examined the heads of hundreds of patients, friends, prisoners, inmates of insane asylums, and others, and mapped out twenty-seven regions of the skull (later expanded by Spurzheim to thirty-seven), each of which represented an underlying organ or cortical area in which a particular faculty was located and which, in those in whom that trait was pronounced, was elevated. (Gall’s portrait shows him with both hands spread over a model of a head, fingers deftly feeling bumps.) Among the areas Gall and Spurzheim identified were those of amativeness (just below the back of the skull), benevolence (the center of the upper forehead), combativeness (in back of each ear), reverence (just forward of the crown of the head), mirthfulness (midway up and toward the sides of the forehead), and so on.