A scant 25 years ago, the history of mesmerism and its offshoots was a neglected field. The true significance of the work of Franz Anton Mesmer and the Marquis de Puységur was known to only to a few experts, and the considerable influence of mesmerism on the history of medicine, psychology, and psychotherapy had, for the most part, gone unrecognized. Even the greatest of the early pioneers of "hypnotism" (a sanitized and somewhat watered-down form of mesmerism), James Braid and Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, were cited only in obscure footnotes in the textbooks. Although a fairly sophisticated knowledge of these traditions was current at the end of the nineteenth century, it did not survive long into the twentieth, with the result that, for the English-speaking world in the decades following the Second World War, Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) stood alone as an authoritative and penetrating analysis of this chapter in the history of Western psychological thought. This situation began to change in the 1980s, and the publication of Alan Gauld's A History of Hypnotism (1992) and my From Mesmer to Freud (1993) helped to focus longoverdue attention on this neglected area.
Although some of the primary sources in this field appeared in German and English, the vast majority were written in French. This fact has had its part to play in the slow rate of absorption of the importance of the history of mesmerism and early hypnotism by the Englishspeaking world. I believe that the publication of the two books that are the subject of this review signals the growing awareness, on the part of students of psychology and related areas, of the significance of this tradition.
Despite their titles, which make them sound like biographies, the two books are translations. Both are edited and translated by Laurent Carrer, a French-born American who holds a PhD in clinical hypnotherapy. By his own description, Carrer has an interest in making important French works in psychology available to the English-speaking world. For his first two translations, he has chosen the principal books of two very different characters in the history of mesmerism and hypnotism. The Abbé Faria was a Roman Catholic priest, born in the Portuguese colony of Goa on the Indian subcontinent, who eventually settled in Paris and developed a markedly idiosyncratic form of mesmeric treatment, publishing an outline of his theory in 1819. The book, titled De la cause du sommeil lucide ou étude de la nature de l'homme (On the Cause of Lucid Sleep, or Study of the Nature of Man), was meant to be the first of a number of volumes on his new approach to healing based on suggestion, but the others were never published. Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was a physician of Nancy, who devoted his life to a medical practice that was unique in making hypnotism the healing method of choice. Liébeault wrote several books, the most important being his first: Du sommeil et des états analogues considérés surtout au point de vue de l'action du moral sur le physique (On Sleep and States Analogous to It, Considered Especially from the Point of View of Its Effects on the Mind and the Body) published in 1866. Carrer has chosen to make his translation of Liébeault's book