ABSTRACT
For much of the nineteenth century, way before Freud, there was a kind of psychotherapy called 'moral treatment'. Moral treatment grew out of the need to treat disturbed or 'insane' individuals with more care and understanding. Moral treatment was seen as a more humane way of dealing with these sufferers. Jean-Martin Charcot was a neurologist and chief physician at the women's Salpetriere Hospital in the later nineteenth century. Charcot believed there was a neurological basis for insanity and set out to prove that it was possible to successfully treat the 'incurable'. He was interested in hysteria and in hypnosis, the latter of which he was prestigious enough to make medically respectable. Hypnosis is a collaboration between two people in which one person (the subject) willingly and temporarily delegates conscious control of his mind to the other (the hypnotist), allowing his own usual consciousness to be left aside as though in sleep.
