ABSTRACT
The period between about 1915 and 1945 saw flat years for hypnotism, both in the popular domain and in the groves of academe. There was little knowledge or practice of hypnosis, and even less research into it. Janet lived long enough to see this decline, and he remarked in a book published in 1919 that hypnotism was almost defunct, but would rise again. Once more, it was up to the stage hypnotists to fill the breach – to act as a kind of underground stream until hypnosis should be revived and put to more constructive uses. An index of the decline is that when Robert Lindner wrote his famous 1944 book Rebel Without a Cause (on which the 1955 film of the same name starring James Dean and Natalie Wood was loosely based) he felt the need to write an introductory chapter defending hypnoanalysis both in itself and as a tool in the particular case he was writing about – the treatment of a young psychopath.
