By Léon Chertok and Raymond de Saussure. Paris: Payot, 1973, 292 pp., F. 48.40.

This survey of the French therapeutic tradition in the late 18th and 19th century opens with the discovery of the importance of the patient-therapist relationship in the context of Mesmer's "animal magnetism." Mesmer, who arrived in Paris in 1778, was a dogmatic believer in a physical explanation of hypnotic phenomena. The erotic complications of his procedure led to his being repudiated by the scientific community and to an official investigation by a