Mesmer and the unconscious

Franz Anton Mesmer did not discover the unconscious — he stumbled into it while believing he had discovered something else entirely. That gap between what he thought he was doing and what he was actually touching is precisely what makes him significant for depth psychology.

Mesmer's claim was physiological: a "magnetic fluid" streamed from the magnetist into the patient, destroying diseased tissue, animating tables, explaining the divining rod. Jung describes the phenomenon with characteristic precision in The Symbolic Life:

It was Mesmer who discovered the art of putting people to sleep by light passes of the hand. In some people this sleep was like the natural one, in others it was a "waking sleep"; that is, they were like sleepwalkers, only part of them was asleep, while some senses remained awake.

The "magnetic sleep" — somnambulism — turned out to be the first systematic induction of altered states in which a secondary personality could emerge, speak, and act independently of the waking ego. The daimon that possessed the somnambulist was not a spirit from outside; it was, as Kalsched notes in The Inner World of Trauma, a "daimonic" secondary ego-state with "a whole life of its own" that could "take over the subject's customary personality during altered states of consciousness." Mesmer had no framework for this. He was looking at a magnetic fluid; he was actually producing dissociation.

What followed from Mesmerism is the direct genealogy of depth psychology. Jung traces the line explicitly in The Practice of Psychotherapy: Mesmer's animal magnetism led, via Charcot, Liébeault, and Bernheim, to Pierre Janet's systematic study of somnambulism and hysteria, and from Janet to Freud's discovery that "affectively toned memory images which are lost to consciousness lay at the root of the hysterical symptom" — which immediately demanded the hypothesis of an unconscious layer of psychic life. The same line runs through Jung's own association experiments, where the complex announced itself as an autonomous intruder in reaction times, measurable and undeniable.

Jung returns to Mesmer repeatedly, and always with a specific historical argument: the eruption of Mesmerism around 1800 was not accidental. In Civilization in Transition he connects it to the French Revolution — "less a political revolution than a revolution of minds" — and to the official dechristianization of European culture. When the symbolic container of Christianity began to crack, the unconscious pagan reasserted itself. Animal magnetism was one of the first forms that reassertion took: a rediscovery, Jung writes, of "the primitive concept of soul-force or soul-stuff, awakened out of the unconscious by a reactivation of archaic forms of thought." The table-turning epidemic, spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy — all of it is the same current, the unconscious forcing its way back into a culture that had tried to rationalize it away.

The Papadopoulos volume on Jungian psychology traces the same arc through the German Romantics: Schelling's "philosophy of nature," Schopenhauer's blind Will, Eduard von Hartmann's explicit naming of the unconscious — all of it swelling in the fifty years between Mesmer and Freud, driven by the same compensatory pressure. What Mesmer released with his passes of the hand, the Romantics were theorizing in their studies, and Charcot was systematizing in the Salpêtrière clinic.

The irony Jung savors is institutional. The "elite" — his word, deployed with dry contempt in The Symbolic Life — protected mankind from Mesmer's discoveries for eighty years, declaring animal magnetism fraudulent, then dangerous, then merely physiological and therefore not psychology's concern. Meanwhile, a handful of "German crackpots and obscurantists of the Romantic Age kept Mesmer's teachings alive, quietly collecting observations." When the spiral turned again and hypnosis became respectable, the same phenomena were rediscovered and hailed as new. The unconscious had been there the whole time, speaking through somnambulists and hysterics, waiting for a conceptual vocabulary adequate to receive it.

What Mesmer actually found, then, was the dissociability of the psyche — the fact that a secondary center of organization could exist alongside, and temporarily displace, the waking ego. That finding, stripped of its magnetic-fluid mythology, is the empirical foundation on which Janet, Freud, and Jung all built. The fluid was a projection. The phenomenon was real.

  • projection — the mechanism by which unconscious contents appear as external realities, operative in Mesmer's own misreading of what he was producing
  • autonomous complex — the psychological structure that somnambulism first made visible: a secondary personality capable of displacing the ego
  • Pierre Janet — the clinician who systematized Mesmer's legacy into the first rigorous account of dissociation and hysteria
  • Donald Kalsched — depth psychologist whose work on trauma traces the daimonic secondary personality from Janet through Jung

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life
  • Jung, C.G., 1954, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy
  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 1964, Civilization in Transition
  • Kalsched, Donald, 1996, The Inner World of Trauma
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology