ABSTRACT
Freud describes the non-verbal identification between persons, initially between mother and child, as a mimetic principle. Crucial to Freud’s explorations of identification and mimesis is the idea that mimesis is not only cognitive, but also based on affect. This mimetic principle is present as the origins not just of psychoanalysis but of dynamic psychiatry and the beginnings of all psychotherapy, and is manifested as hypnosis, trauma and hysteria. Now, these terms have been differently contextualised at differing historical moments and do not represent any timeless meaning. However, the mimetic principle in psychotherapy overall can be traced back to hypnotism associated with Anton Mesmer in the 1700s, who was arguably the founder of modern psychiatry, and his disciple the Marquis de Puységur. Whereas Mesmer invented a physical theory of animal magnetism, a magnetic and electrical fluid that passed between hypnotist and patient, Puységur discovered magnetic sleep and artificial somnambulism, realising it could be controlled to explore the unconscious psychological world of the hypnotised patient. Crucial to both these early hypnotisers was the notion of clinical rapport between hypnotiser and patient, although it was Puységur who emphasised how hypnosis should be used only for therapeutic purposes, and not, as Mesmer had done, for experimentation and exhibition (Ellenberger 1970:92). We can see in Mesmer and Puységur the origins of two traditions in hypnosis: the fluidists who emphasised the physiological basis to hypnosis and the animists who concentrated on the psychological component of hypnotism. In the nineteenth century we can trace these two traditions of hypnosis in relation to not only the neurophysiological investigations of Charcot and his pupil Janet, but also the more psychological emphasis on suggestion elaborated through Bernheim and the Nancy School and developed by Freud and Breuer in their early psychoanalysis with hysterics. This duality is a crude distinction, for Freud’s work contains an early neuro-physiological narrative, in tune with Charcot, just as Janet pioneered the psychology of working with hysterical patients. However, this dual narrative of hypnosis is helpful in discussing how hysteria and indeed neurosis in general went on to have a contested career with its origins located in either suggestion/simulation or as traumatic aetiology.
