From a Physician Expelled to a Lab at Stanford — The History of Hypnosis No One Tells

People often ask how long hypnosis has been with us. The question sounds simple; the answer reaches further than you might expect. The history of hypnosis is not really a history of technique. It is the record of a centuries-long attempt to understand how the human mind works, and whether it can be changed.

That road was anything but smooth.

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Franz Mesmer, and an idea rejected but never quite gone

It begins in the late eighteenth century in the treatment rooms of Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician convinced that an invisible force he called “animal magnetism” flowed through every human body, and that illness followed when it fell out of balance. His methods struck his contemporaries as very strange: magnets, his hands, a fixed gaze, all to send this energy into a patient. And many of his patients genuinely improved.

In the end a scientific commission appointed by Louis XVI judged his theory to have no scientific basis, and he was expelled from the medical profession.

What is worth pausing on is that his patients did recover. Mesmer’s explanation was wrong, but something real was happening in their brains — something no one could yet describe.

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James Braid, and the renaming that changed everything

Around the middle of the nineteenth century James Braid, a Scottish surgeon with no time at all for animal magnetism, studied the phenomenon in earnest. He concluded that what happened owed nothing to a mysterious force, and everything to attention being drawn to a single point until the mind entered a particular state.

He named it “hypnotism”, from the Greek hypnos, sleep, and published his work as Neurypnology in 1843 — the first time hypnosis had been described within psychology rather than the occult.

Braid is the man who turned hypnosis from a performance into something that could be studied.

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Milton Erickson, and hypnosis that sounds like conversation

If one name transformed hypnotherapy in the twentieth century, it is Milton H. Erickson, an American psychiatrist who grew up with a body that failed him early, and who used those years of observing himself to build an unusually deep understanding of the mind.

What set Erickson apart was that he gave no direct commands. He used language, metaphor and story to speak with a patient’s subconscious indirectly. He held that everyone already possesses the inner resources change requires, and that the practitioner’s task is to help them reach those resources — never to instruct or compel.

His approach became the foundation of Ericksonian hypnosis, and went on to shape the development of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming.

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From the treatment room to the fMRI scanner

Neuroscience over the past two decades has carried hypnosis fully into a new era, above all through the work of Dr David Spiegel at Stanford University, who used fMRI to image the brain during genuine hypnosis and found measurable change across several regions. For the first time we could see that what happens in the brain during hypnosis is not pretence but a biological process.

Both the British Medical Association and the American Medical Association now recognize hypnotherapy as an evidence-supported approach, widely used in pain management, anxiety, and the work of changing unhelpful patterns of response.

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The road from Mesmer to neuroscience took more than two hundred years, and the question at its center has never changed: why is change so difficult for human beings, and what allows the automatic machinery of the brain to take in something new?

Where science is pointing agrees with what practitioners have observed for centuries — that when the brain is in the right state, a blueprint for behavior that once seemed fixed can begin to change. That is the foundation of what we at NBRH call Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy.

Not a new idea, but one science is describing more clearly every year.

For the science of what happens in the brain during hypnosis, see “How Hypnotherapy Works in the Brain”. And for what contemporary research says about its effectiveness, “From Belief to Evidence: The Research on Hypnotherapy” sets out the figures.