Italiano · English · Français · Deutsch · Русский · Español
Anyone searching for “regression hypnosis” is looking for a precise idea: that there is a state, different from waking, in which memories come back that cannot be found when awake, and that in that state one can go back to the oldest memory, the one where a disorder began. This idea is not modern. It is more than two hundred years old, and it was put together one piece at a time, by different people. This article tells those pieces, in order.
The thread, in five steps
- 1784. A sleep-like state is discovered in which a person talks and reasons, and on waking remembers nothing.
- 1813-1823. It is noticed that in that state things long forgotten also come back.
- 1819-1843. It becomes clear that no mysterious force is needed: what counts is the person who enters that state. And people learn how to make that person carry the memory over into waking.
- 1898-1904. A physician uses that state to go back, memory after memory, to the origin of a symptom.
- 1919-1950. The method works only sometimes. In 1950 someone tries to keep the going back and drop the hypnosis.
1784First step: a state in which one is another person
We have to start with Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician working in Paris. Mesmer was convinced that there was an invisible fluid, “animal magnetism”, and that illness came from an imbalance in it. He treated patients in groups, seated around a large wooden tub filled with water and iron filings, the baquet, from which metal rods came out to be placed against the body. The sign that the cure was working was the “crisis”: convulsions, screams, fainting. In 1784 a royal commission, whose members included Benjamin Franklin and Lavoisier, concluded that the fluid did not exist and that everything was an effect of the imagination.
In the same year a pupil of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puységur, on his estate at Buzancy in northern France, obtains something different. He is treating a twenty-three-year-old peasant, Victor Race, with Mesmer’s method, which at the time was called “magnetizing”: the physician sits facing the patient, stares at him and slowly moves his hands along the body, from the head downwards, without touching it or barely brushing it, convinced that he is passing the fluid into him. These were the magnetic “passes”. Instead of convulsions, Puységur sees this:
“What was my surprise to see this man fall peacefully asleep in my arms, without convulsions or pain!… he talked, he busied himself aloud with his affairs… the next day, no longer remembering my evening visit…”
«Quelle fut ma surprise de voir… cet homme s’endormir paisiblement dans mes bras, sans convulsions ni douleurs!… il parloit, s’occupoit tout haut de ses affaires… le lendemain, ne se souvenant plus de ma visite du soir…» — Puységur, Mémoires, 1786 ed., pp. 22-23.
Victor asleep seems more awake than Victor awake: he reasons better, he understands faster. But when he wakes up he knows nothing of what he has said and done. This is the first piece of the idea: there is a state different from waking, and between the two there is a wall of memory. It was called “artificial somnambulism”. The word “hypnosis” would arrive sixty years later.
1813Second step: in that state forgotten things come back
Thirty years later a Parisian naturalist, Joseph Deleuze, collects the cases and notices that the wall works in both directions. When awake, one does not remember the sleep; but in the sleep one remembers things that had been lost while awake:
“He finds again in his memory the recollection of things he had forgotten while awake… [and on waking] these two states are as foreign to each other as if the somnambulist and the waking man were two different beings.”
«Il retrouve dans sa mémoire le souvenir des choses qu’il avoit oubliées pendant la veille… ces deux états sont aussi étrangers l’un à l’autre, que si le somnambule et l’homme éveillé étaient deux êtres différens.» — Deleuze, Histoire critique du magnétisme animal, vol. I, pp. 186-187.
One example he gives: a young man had lived for two years on Crete and, when awake, no longer remembered the language; in somnambulism he said it would come back to him if he had someone in front of him who spoke it, and meanwhile he recited from memory a long English poem “exactly as if he were reading it”. Deleuze’s explanation is a single sentence: “all the sensations we have felt in the course of our life have left traces”.
Ten years later the physician Alexandre Bertrand adds a case that shows how to read these phenomena. A somnambulist “prescribed” medicinal plants that she did not know when awake, and it looked like a marvel. Then it came out that as a child she was the daughter of a herbalist and used to go with her mother to gather them. It was not a mysterious gift: it was a childhood memory resurfacing. This is the second piece: in that state old memories resurface, even those believed lost.
1819-1843Third step: there is no fluid, what counts is the sleeper
A Portuguese abbé working in Paris, José Custódio de Faria, does away with Mesmer’s theory. For him the tub, the fluid and the magnetizer’s will have nothing to do with it: everything happens in the person. To put someone to sleep it is enough to tell them forcefully “sleep!”, or to have them stare at an open hand. And he discovers that the wall of memory can be opened on command: if, during the sleep, the person is ordered to remember on waking, on waking they remember.
“[They] keep the memory of everything one wishes, as soon as they are enjoined in their sleep to turn their attention to it so as to remember it on waking.”
«…gardent la mémoire de tout ce qu’on désire, dès qu’on leur enjoint dans le sommeil d’y replier leur attention pour s’en rappeler au réveil.» — Faria, De la cause du sommeil lucide, 1819, pp. 226-227.
In 1843 a Manchester surgeon, James Braid, gives the state the name that has stuck, hypnotism, from the Greek for “sleep”. He produces it by having the patient stare at an object, and writes that “the whole depended on the physical and psychical condition of the patient… and not at all on the volition, or passes of the operator”. This is the third piece: the state belongs to the person, and what resurfaces in it can be carried over into waking.
1898-1904Fourth step: going back to the first memory
Up to this point hypnosis brings memories back, but without an order and without a precise medical purpose. The decisive step is taken by Pierre Janet, physician and psychologist at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Janet treats patients with symptoms that have no physical cause: paralyses, blindness, fits, anguish. He becomes convinced that behind every symptom there is a memory that has remained “detached”, which he calls a fixed idea. And in 1898 he describes what happens when, under hypnosis, he removes one:
“When a fixed idea has been removed, one is quite astonished to see another emerge… It is an old idea, earlier than the one just treated… and one is obliged to go back over, in reverse order, the principal fixed ideas that have tormented the patient’s life.”
«Quand on a enlevé une idée fixe, on est tout étonné d’en voir surgir une autre… C’est une idée ancienne, antérieure à celle que l’on vient de traiter… et on est obligé de repasser en ordre inverse, les principales idées fixes qui ont tourmenté la vie du malade.» — Janet, Névroses et idées fixes, 1898.
Here is “regression” in today’s sense: the memories that make people ill lie in layers, and one goes down from the most recent to the oldest. Janet also notes that the oldest are the most resistant.
In 1904 Janet publishes the case of Irène, a young woman who after her mother’s death had lost the memory of those months, and there one sees how he really works. Three things, briefly:
- Hypnosis alone is not enough. In the first attempts Irène, hypnotized, remembers nothing more than when awake. Hypnosis only serves to keep her focused; it is the physician who guides her, memory by memory.
- The most painful memories do not come back in their place. The others resurface in order of time; those tied to the most violent emotions are skipped, and can be faced only at the end, when the rest has already come back.
- There is a point at which one must stop. When Irène gets close to the day of her mother’s death, she freezes and falls into convulsions. If Janet insists, the work is lost. What he asks of her is to tell those moments “in moderation, keeping her awareness of herself and of the outside world”.
In the end, the memories found again under hypnosis still have to be brought back into waking, with separate work. This is the fourth piece: a working state, a guide, an order, a stop signal. Regression hypnosis, in essence, is already all here.
1919-1950Fifth step: it works only sometimes
Fifteen years later, in 1919, Janet takes stock with rare frankness:
“In a great many instances which appear to me perfectly identical with those in which I was successful, I operated, or believed myself to be operating, in the same manner, with no result worth mentioning… there are probably to be found the germ of a therapeutic method; but we do not adequately know the rules that will make of it a method that is readily applicable.”
— Janet, Psychological Healing, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, London 1925, vol. II, pp. 856-857 (Les médications psychologiques, 1919).
There are two problems, and they had been known since Puységur: not everyone goes into hypnosis, and what is found often stays on the other side of the wall, in the hypnotic state, instead of becoming an ordinary memory.
In 1950 L. Ron Hubbard starts exactly from here. In his article of May 1950 he writes that hypno-analysis, that is, analysis carried out under hypnosis, “sounds good in the texts but it doesn’t work”: “you can’t hypnotize everybody. Further it works only occasionally”. The book of the same month recounts that hypno-analysis and narco-synthesis, the same thing done with a drug, were studied and used as a starting point, and then abandoned: the technique it proposes is declared to be “independent of hypnotism or narco-synthesis”. The idea of going back towards the oldest memory stays; hypnosis is removed. It should be read in the light of what was known at the time, that is, of the two limits Janet had already put in writing. How that proposal was built is the subject of the article on the five threads that lead to 1950.
In a table
| Piece of the idea | Who | When |
|---|---|---|
| A state different from waking, with a wall of memory on waking | Puységur | 1784 |
| In that state forgotten memories come back; “all sensations leave traces” | Deleuze | 1813 |
| What looks like a marvel is a childhood memory | Bertrand | 1823 |
| No fluid; the memory can be carried into waking on command | Faria | 1819 |
| The name “hypnotism”; everything depends on the patient | Braid | 1843 |
| Going back from the recent memory to the oldest | Janet | 1898 |
| The physician’s guidance, painful memories out of order, a stop signal | Janet | 1904 |
| Stocktaking: “the germ of a therapeutic method”, but no rules | Janet | 1919 |
| The going back is kept, the hypnosis is removed | Hubbard | 1950 |
Sources. Puységur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal, 1786 ed. · Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal, Paris 1784 · Deleuze, Histoire critique du magnétisme animal, vol. I (1st ed. 1813), pp. 186-191, 235-236 · Faria, De la cause du sommeil lucide, vol. I, Paris 1819 · Bertrand, Traité du somnambulisme, Paris 1823, pp. 99-106 · Braid, Neurypnology, London 1843, pp. 19-20 · Janet, Névroses et idées fixes, 1898; “L’amnésie et la dissociation des souvenirs par l’émotion”, Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 1904, pp. 417-453; Les médications psychologiques, 1919, vol. III; English translation Psychological Healing, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, London, Allen & Unwin, 1925, 2 vols · Hubbard, “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science”, Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950; Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, 1950.
The page numbers for Puységur and Faria come from period scans and may be off by one or two. Quotations from French are translated; Janet 1919 is quoted from the 1925 English translation.
