De la Suggestion et de ses applications à la Thérapeutique.
Paris: 1886.
Price: $400.00
About the item
428pp. 8vo. Printed wrappers. Crabtree 1127.
Item #316225
"Bernheim, a professor in the Faculté de médecine at Nancy, began studying hypnotism, suggestion and hysteria after observing Liébeault's method of treatment by induced sleep. After two years of working closely with Liébeault, Bernheim published the present work in which he stated that hypnosis was not a pathological state based on physiological processes, as Charcot claimed, but a purely psychological state closely connected with suggestion. Bernheim was the first to state that the stages of hypnosis posited by Charcot were actually artifacts produced by suggestion ; he also demonstrated that Charcot's "four-phase hysteria" was not an illness but a psychoneurotic reaction caused by suggestion, and curable by the same process. He believed that suggestibility was limited to hysterics but extended to the entire human race, and used the study of suggestibility to gain insight into human behavior. Historically this conception of Bernheim's should be considered the first known attempt to evolve a general understanding of human behavior and its motivation on the basis of the study of psychopathology rather than on the basis of philosophical systems". (Zilboorg p. 368).
