History of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, a timeline
This timeline offers a few key milestones in the development of hypnosis and hypnotherapy as practices for healing, emotional wellbeing, and mental health.
1027
The use of hypnosis as a healing practice can be traced back to ancient cultures in Egypt and Greece. Avicenna (Ibn Sina), a Persian philosopher and physician, wrote about the characteristics of the trance state in The Book of Healing in 1027.
1779
Franz Anton Mesmer was a German physician who is known for reintroducing the idea of using trance states in healing. He published A Memoir on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism in 1779.
1819
Abbé Faria, a Portuguese-Goan monk, challenged Mesmer’s use of magnets and found the phenomena relied on suggestion only. He published On the Cause of Lucid Sleep in 1819.
1843
The Scottish surgeon James Braid is known as the ‘father of modern hypnotism’. In 1843 he adopted the use of the word hypnotism to describe the practice. It was taken from the Greek hypnos meaning ‘sleep’ and osis meaning ‘condition’.
Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist who used hypnosis to treat hysteria, a condition that is no longer recognised as a disorder.
1887
Hippolyte Berheim was a French physician and neurologist who wrote Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on the Nature and Uses of Hypnotism in 1887. He is known for his theory of suggestibility and demonstrated the creation of false memories in patients who went into a hypnotic state.
1889
Sigmund Freud was a pupil of Bernheim and observed his practice with hospitalised patients in 1889. Psychoanalysis in part evolved out of Frued’s application of Berheim’s methods of suggestion and hypnosis. Although Freud adopted the use of hypnosis, he eventually rejected it for free association and other methods.
1886
Émile Coué was French psychologist and pharmacist who studied with Berheim in 1886 and 1887. He developed a method of self-healing based on optimistic autosuggestion and also discovered the placebo effect.
1976
Milton Erikson was an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist. He believed the unconscious mind was highly separate from the conscious mind, and developed methods to allow the unconscious to be creative and solution-generating.
Erikson suggested that there are many levels of trance state and that to be in a trance is a common, everyday occurrence. He was a prolific writer and his book Hypnotic Realities: The Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and Forms of Indirect Suggestion was published in 1976.
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