Alexandre Bertrand and James Braid. Bertrand (T raite du somnambulisme, Paris, 1823; Du magnetisme animal en France, Paris, 1826) insisted especially upon the psychological determinants of the phenomena in question. He maintained that what we now call the hypnotic state was brought about through the influence of the imagination of the patients acting upon themselves. Herein we have the germ of Coue stheory of autosuggestion as expounded in the following pages. Braid, on the other hand (various writings, from 1841 to his death in 1860), inclined at the outset rather to the physiological explanation of what he was the first to term hypnotism. It is interesting to note that Braid was a pioneer in the therapeutic use of reflective autosuggestion. He describes his own sufferings, in September, 1844, from a severe attack of muscular rheumatism, which had made it impossible for him to sleep for three successive nights. He then hypnotized himself in the presence of two friends. At the expiration of nine minutes they aroused me, and, to my agreeable surprise, I was quite free from pain, being able to move in any way with perfect ease. … I had seen like results with many patients; but it is one thing to hear of pain, and another to feel it.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don’t occur in the book.)
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