Freud's 1895 abandonment of hypnosis has been considered a landmark in the history and development of psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalysis, the merits of Freud's decision to abandon hypnosis have seemed self-evident; there has been little interest in exploring his rationales. However, recent scholarship has questioned Freud's arguments, challenging some for their accuracy or logic, and noting that most of Freud's more serious criticisms of hypnosis were voiced ten to twenty-five years after his 1895 decision. This both raises concerns about the merits of the rationales Freud presented at the time of his decision, and invites exploration for possible historical revisionism. Further, a review of the nature of Freud's characterizations of hypnosis both raises doubts about their accuracy, and suggests that alternative understandings of his decision deserve consideration. One viable alternative argues that the incredible popularity of a work of fiction in which an evil Jewish hypnotist exerted dominant control over a young Christian woman forged a link between hypnosis and anti-Semitism in the imagination of the public. Perhaps this made continuing a career in hypnosis a dubious course of action for a rising young Jewish professional. Freud's abandonment of hypnosis may have been occasioned by his circumspect withdrawal from what may have been perceived to be an increasingly vulnerable and besieged position.
I will argue that anti-Semitism exerted a profound influence upon Sigmund Freud in a particular manner during a particular period of time. Anti-Semitism thereby influenced both the origins and the form of psychoanalysis as we know it. This line of thinking emerged unexpectedly after 50 years of my intermittent and often desultory pondering the interface of psychoanalysis and hypnosis. Over those five decades, I
asked dozens of respected analytic colleagues to share their understandings of Sigmund Freud's abandoning hypnosis in 1895. Many admitted that they had no ideas beyond what they had read. The explanations offered by the remainder were generally superficial and unhelpful. Similar inquiries made of senior colleagues in the field of hypnosis were equally unrevealing.
I reached the reluctant understanding that while this question vexed me, few others shared my concerns. Most analytic colleagues regarded Freud's abandoning hypnosis as a giant leap forward in the development of psychoanalysis, and left it at that. My question remained unanswered. It remained an unsolved mystery, a dusty and almost forgotten “cold case” in the history of our profession.
Then, two serendipitous events rekindled my curiosity. Steve Lankton, Editor of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, believed that the interface of hypnosis and psychoanalysis needed an updated review and re-exploration. He invited me to edit a special issue on the subject. While I was working on that project, and asking myself the same old questions once again, author Jane Kelly arranged for a number of mystery writers to participate in a book fair.
We didn't drum up much business. That left us a lot of time to sit around swapping ideas about our various projects. I said that my writing time was committed to a special journal issue on psychoanalysis and hypnosis, but the real mystery I wanted to solve was my historical “cold case” question: “Why did Freud dump hypnosis in 1895?” A history professor among us offered the standard psychoanalytic rationales. I agreed he'd summarized mainstream opinions, but said that that I was beginning to doubt these conventional explanations. I confessed to my mystery-writing colleagues that I was stuck. I had no new ideas left to explore.
Jane Kelly had done graduate studies in modern literature. “1895,” she said with a smile, “was a landmark year in the development of popular modern literature.” The meteoric success of du Maurier's (1895) Trilby, she explained, had inaugurated the era of the international best-seller. Of course, I was familiar with Trilby from studying hypnosis. I knew about the evil Svengali, who used hypnosis to dominate the beautiful young Trilby. But I don't believe I'd ever known that Trilby was published in 1895.
Come nightfall, I was at work following up the lead Jane had provided, hoping it was a hot clue, but fearing it was my latest dead end. du Maurier, Trilby's author, was a notorious anti-Semite. Trilby was saturated with his venomous prejudice. Svengali was not only a Jew, but a Jew from the area in which Freud's parents were born.
Serialized in 1894, Trilby received a sensational reception. By 1895, Trilby had become a popular play, performed in several nations. That fall, Trilby was published as a novel, and became an instant best-seller in Europe, North America, and throughout much of the British Empire. In one market, it sold 200,000 copies in two months. This hatred-filled story about an evil Jewish hypnotist became a world-wide phenomenon the same year Freud abandoned hypnosis. That seemed a haunting coincidence, indeed. Any presentation of an intriguing assemblage of facts as mere “coincidence” presents an irresistible challenge to any writer of mysteries, police investigator, or clinical scientist.
Developing the special issue left me no time to pursue my “cold case.” However, in doing my research, I found myself becoming immersed in yet another question: What did Freud really have to say about hypnosis? When I had asked analytic colleagues about Freud's abandoning hypnosis, those who referenced the literature referred to articles depreciating hypnosis, to the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893-5), and to a few places in which Freud had expressed gratitude to hypnosis for allowing the early insights that paved the way for psychoanalysis itself. The most common reference they cited was dated a quarter of a century after Freud abandoned hypnosis (Freud, 1921), one which offered menacing and destructive depictions of both hypnosis and the hypnotist. Interestingly, while it contained a more benign portrait as well, my colleagues and mentors recalled only the negative representations.
Could it be as simple as that? Hypnosis had helped in the explorations that led to the origins of psychoanalysis. Then, it was perceived to have certain negative qualities, such as a potential to distort the transference. Freud offered observations that indicated hypnosis had some limitations that he felt were not problems for his psychoanalysis. While he increasingly maintained that psychoanalysis was a superior approach, truly negative assessments of hypnosis were not in evidence. A quarter of a century later, however, the hypnotist would be depicted as a monster.
That the most devastating condemnations of hypnosis and the most potent reasons for abandoning its use were offered only a quarter of a century after Freud's rejection of hypnosis raises profound concerns about what was actually the case in 1895, and provokes suspicions of historical revisionism. Sigmund Freud as an opponent of methodologies that oppress, dominate, and control is a far more pleasing and heroic vision of the founder of psychoanalysis than Sigmund Freud as a man who decided to go his own way, and offered rationales for doing so that now appear more suitable for preaching to the choir than for convincing readers not already in his camp.
In the account below I will share a journey of discovery which is far more in accord with my avocation as a writer of mystery-thrillers than my “day job” of professional practice and conventional scholarship. Fellow mystery afficionados will recognize that this essay's title is derived from a conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in “The Silver Blaze,” an 1894 mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes comments on the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Watson observes that the dog did nothing in the night-time. To that, Holmes replies that that this, the dog's doing nothing, was the curious incident. Many potentially relevant events transpired in 1894–5. About these events, Sigmund Freud said nothing. He remained silent.
This said, exploration of these accounts proceeded more in the manner of Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie than that of a Conan Doyle story. Early in almost every Hercule Poirot narrative, Poirot enunciates his two principles of investigation: “order and method.” However, as order and method lead to one theory after another that crashes as new evidence undermines them, and as Poirot's “little gray cells” are called upon to rise again and again from the ashes of their own earlier formulations, Poirot reveals a third principle. He states that a mystery is only understood when the explanation acknowledges and accounts for every bit of evidence. Psychoanalysts rarely look for evidence beyond the realm of the psychoanalytic literature.
When we speak of Freud's abandoning hypnosis, we risk starting at a profound disadvantage. What was this hypnosis that Freud abandoned? If we don't know what it was, how can we understand whether he
abandoned it, or what his abandoning it might mean?
In the nineteenth century hypnosis was a major force in both culture and the healing arts. Further, many saw hypnosis as a doorway to the spirit world. Major authors and individuals from diverse background became students and practitioners of hypnosis. Charles Dickens became interested in hypnosis. He gave public demonstrations, undertook some treatments, and became entangled in transference/countertransference difficulties. Robert Louis Stevenson studied hypnosis. Conan Doyle was conversant with hypnosis, but considered it most useful for contacting departed souls in the spirit realm.
The hypnosis capital of the world was France. Charcot had convinced the French Academy to accept hypnosis as a legitimate field of study. Many French gentlemen and scholars dabbled in hypnosis, as did rogues and ne'er-do-wells. Affluent and cultured French women held hypnosis salons, to which gifted subjects were invited, and where their hypnotic talents were demonstrated by skilled practitioners.
Returning to Christie's Hercule Poirot, a French-Belgian (Walloon): Poirot was a young man when hypnosis was at its peak of popularity and was aware of the rise of psychoanalysis during his mature years. Christie builds this sophistication into some of her novels. Many years after his “retirement,” Poirot effects the dénouement of A Peril at End House (1937) by conducting a fraudulent séance to unmask a killer. His up-tight companion, Captain Hastings, conventional as he was, nonetheless knew how to play his part as a hypnotic medium, and may have slipped into trance. Hypnosis, with its many uses, medical, psychological, spiritual, and recreational, was ubiquitous.
When Sigmund Freud became the German translator for both Charcot and Bernheim, he acquired a place of respect in the hypnosis community. With Bernheim, he was schooled in both self-hypnosis and the hypnosis of others. Further, Bernheim pioneered and taught suggestion without formal trance induction. This is a crucial historical point. Freud knew he could make use of hypnosis without the formal prelude of ceremonies of induction.
The Paris-based Salpetriere school of hypnosis, led by Charcot, included the brothers Pierre and Jules Janet among its luminaries. Charcot's vision
of hypnosis involved elaborate inductions that took the patient through a series of behaviors and altered states that were considered characteristic of true hypnosis. These would later be discredited. Charcot himself was involved in a major revision of his thinking when he passed away. The Nancy school, led by Bernheim and his teacher, Liébeault, held that the crucial element of hypnosis was suggestion. Some members maintained that under hypnosis, the subject surrendered his or her will to the hypnotist, and was virtually under the hypnotist's domination and control. To oversimplify: the emphasis of the Paris school was on what we now would classify as dissociation and trance, using suggestion to promote them; while the emphases of the Nancy school marginalized dissociation, prioritized suggestion, and accorded importance to trance as well.
Summarizing, hypnosis was understood by both schools to be a process by which one individual influenced another to render the other receptive to suggestion, but both the mechanisms involved, and the powers attributed to hypnosis, were in dispute.
The modern history of hypnosis has been marked by ongoing disputes over whether hypnosis should be described and defined by the actions antecedent to it, or by the phenomena of the state that is created (see Elkins, Barabasz, Council, & Spiegel, 2015). This has been complicated by the facts that many individuals can induce trance in themselves, and that individuals may drift into trance by revery or fantasy or imagination, or be triggered into trance by what Janet would call “vehement emotions.” Various individuals and schools of thought have devised definitions that best suit their models and/or their purposes.
Researchers often have advocated for a procedure-based definition that focuses on defining hypnosis as what happens after a procedure (induction). They believe this will promote uniform understandings, and approaches that will facilitate research. Clinicians and researchers approaching from the perspectives of different sets of phenomena prefer a focus on what the state of hypnosis is like. Both groups, but primarily the researchers, have often confused the terms, “description” and “definition.” The former permits linking the phenomenon to particular situations, while the latter focuses on what is thought to be the essence of the phenomenon per se.
Psychoanalytic commentaries on hypnosis have generally followed Freud's practice of assuming both author and reader understand the meaning of the term “hypnosis,” notwithstanding that the practice of hypnosis has continued to evolve, and that the history of psychoanalysis has been marked by the ongoing redefinition of many of its core terms and concepts.
In Freud's day, inductions were often so complex and directive that it was difficult to discern between phenomena essential to hypnosis, and phenomena suggested or introduced by antecedent procedures and conveyed expectations. On the one hand, it is understandable that Freud would define hypnosis in terms of what followed an induction, and thereby proceed as if he could draw a firm boundary between when hypnosis was used, and when it was not. On the other, his mentors had taught Freud a more nuanced understanding of hypnosis and that its existence did not depend upon formal induction. Nonetheless, in offering his reasons for abandoning hypnosis, Freud left these more sophisticated matters unexamined.
It may be useful to share a widely accepted current definition of hypnosis in order to distinguish the phenomena of hypnosis from the more obvious and easily described phenomena of induction. Recently, a task force of Division 30 of the American Psychological Association has endeavored to develop a modern definition of hypnosis, moving from a procedure-oriented definition most useful in experimental hypnosis to a thoughtful generally applicable effort to define its essence:
Hypnosis: “A state of consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion.”
(Elkins, Barabasz, Council, & Spiegel, 2015)
Kluft (2015) suggested this definition be accompanied by an acknowledgement that hypnosis as thus defined could be produced by suggestions from others (i.e., inductions for heterohypnosis); suggestions made to oneself by oneself (i.e., autohypnosis, self-hypnosis); and could occur spontaneously (i.e., produced in response to external stimuli or inner processes). Hypnosis tends to focus and catalyze whatever mental processes are ongoing or suggested.
Therefore, from one perspective, if Freud simply discontinued using formal inductions, he could claim that he had abandoned the use of hypnosis. Any trance that occurred in session that was not induced by induction would fall outside the realm of formal hypnosis. It might be described as hypnosis because it was like the consequences of formal hypnosis, but it would not be hypnosis done by Freud. That the essence of hypnosis was not encompassed or addressed by Freud's observations and reasoning has not been appreciated by mainstream psychoanalysis.
From another perspective, however, Freud bypassed addressing how he dealt what is currently understood to constitute the essence of hypnosis. We may wonder whether he may be continuing to utilize it, absent inductions.
So, while Freud's decision would free him from accusations of “using hypnosis,” it leaves a number of problems unresolved. Freud already knew that hypnosis did not require formal induction. Bernheim's work on waking hypnosis and suggestion were well-known to him (see Freud, 1888). He also knew that people might drift into trance, and that patients with many forms of psychopathology, forms we now would link with dissociative disorders, slipped in and out of altered states as a symptomatic manifestation of their disorders.
I reviewed Freud's work on hypnosis to see if he not only abjured the induction of trance, but also avoided the use of trance in any way. Space does not allow a segue into Freud's use of an intermediate technique between hypnosis and free association, forehead pressure. However, it is a profoundly suggestive approach that replaces one technique of distraction and enhanced focus with another. It may even have had the effect of providing a variant form of induction.
We need look no further than Freud's 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams to appreciate that Freud was keenly aware that when patients drifted into trance or hypnosis on the couch, he might elicit further and deeper associations. He clearly was continuing to make opportunistic use of trance. As we consider Freud's (1917) instructions to the patient for beginning a psychoanalysis, we might ponder the results of a little research study I can never publish. Here are some of Freud's words to the patient:
“So, say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance,
you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railroad carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views that you see outside…” (Freud, 1917, p.235).
The research? I presented this verbalization to over a dozen members of the workshop faculty at a hypnosis meeting, and asked for their reactions. 100% immediately identified it as an imagery or visualization induction. None understood it as a psychoanalytic intervention.
Again, the point of these illustrations is that Freud's abandonment of hypnosis appears to have been limited to his discontinuing the use of contemporary formal inductions. He continued to note and to make opportunistic use of trance phenomena as they occurred, and did not refrain from the imagery and suggestions associated with current mainstream hypnosis. In his era, the show of abandoning hypnosis could be achieved by no longer engaging in overt procedures of induction. He could proclaim that he was not utilizing the authoritarian methods he attributed to “the hypnotist.” However, what remained unsaid about this matter was that only a tiny minority of legitimate practitioners, if any, used the type of approaches from which he distanced himself in his writing. Liébeault and Bernheim were gentle in their approaches. While Charcot was often authoritarian, Freud's anecdotes about him indicate that he could be whimsically humorous. When he pressured patients, he did so mostly to promote the manifestations of symptoms he thought were related to diagnostic and treatment concerns, and he usually did so under observed medical conditions.
The type of hypnosis against which Freud railed was not being practiced by the legitimate healers of the day. He launched his attacks against a straw man. The identity of that straw man will be discussed later in this article.
Freud worked in an era during which much was poorly understood and ill-defined. We can accord him considerable latitude on these accounts. However, his main mentor was Bernheim. Notwithstanding Bernheim's emphasis on suggestion as used benignly, he was very modern in his understanding and exposition of many matters that Freud (1888) knew about, but overlooked and/or bypassed for the occasion. That is unfortunate, because studying Freud's work demonstrates that Freud, perhaps
inadvertently, retained elements of hypnosis. For example, most forget that the iconic analytic couch was once the iconic hypnotist's couch.
After investing years establishing a career in hypnosis, Freud endeavored to rationalize, create, and perpetuate a schismatic rift between the hypnosis of his era and his emerging psychoanalysis (see Kluft, 2018b, 2018c). As a rule, his contributions commonly assigned to those taking analytic training express his unchallenged negative opinions (e.g., “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” [121]; “The Ego and the Id” [1923]: and “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable” ). Others have demonstrated an unquestioning acceptance of Freud's unexamined positions. Consequently, these negative opinions continue to pass for wisdom in the analytic literature.
Working on the special issue project, Brenner (2018), O'Neil (2018), and I (Kluft, 2018b, 2018c, 2018d) came upon numerous instances of Freud's illogic, self-contradiction, and predictable selections from among alternative stances of those most favorable to and supportive of his own ideas.
I set about discovering and reviewing the entirety of Freud's writings about hypnosis. A PEP-Web search for Freud's mentions of or allusions to hypnosis yields 73 items, of which 71 are both unduplicated and accessible. They were written over a 54-year period. Further searches discovered no previous efforts to assemble Freud's full range of observations on hypnosis and subject them to a scrutiny of both their scientific merits and their meanings in historical context. The examples offered above are a few of many that were noted and explored (Kluft, 2018b, 2018c). I was particularly impressed to find that in his later years, Freud would level against psychoanalysis many of the same charges that he made against hypnosis early in his career .
One criticism that Freud made of hypnosis commands respect in terms of the circumstances that prevailed in 1895, and continues to have a degree of currency in the present. Freud expressed concern that hypnosis might exert a distorting impact upon the transference and hamper free association. In Freud's era the power and authority of the physician was much more pronounced than in modern doctor-patient relationships. The expression in stance and technique of the imbalance normative in
that era would not be welcomed in modern settings. That said, modern hypnosis works very hard to promote permissiveness and to avoid controlling or dominating relationships. Current uses for power stances remain commonplace in stage hypnosis, but are quite limited in therapeutic settings, where they are restricted largely to emergencies and to strong suggestions made to extricate patients from pathological trances in which they are “stuck” (Kluft, 2012).
Freud's caution is useful to keep in mind, but given the permissive nature of modern hypnosis, it does not retain the relevance it may have held in the 1890s. The major risk of suppression of free association by hypnosis today is not the hypnosis per se, but therapists' failures to accurately assess and address relevant relational and object-relational concerns.
On many occasions, Freud makes strong statements that he contradicts elsewhere, whether inadvertently or in following some agenda (Kluft, 2018b, 2018c). Here, I offer only a handful of observations illustrating the nature of the problems that are encountered.
In 1938 Freud looks back to how hypnosis offered proof of the unconscious and of repression. He cites the importance of suggested amnesia for post-hypnotic suggestions as evidence. Freud had spent a career emphasizing the importance of conflict in generating repression, and its undoing by interpretation. Yet this illustration of repression is in conflict with his definition, and is much more congruent with dissociation.
In Freud (1925) offered protests against hypnosis, apparently referring to matters he took into consideration in the 1890s. He complained that he could not succeed in hypnotizing all subjects and could not get all of his subjects to enter as deep a state of hypnosis as he would like. He spoke as if he “discovered” such limitations, and lists them as objections to hypnosis. He suggests that that perhaps he is a mediocre hypnotist.
It is difficult, but not impossible, for an outstanding person to train with the best of the best, and still be less than fully competent, if not exceptional/inspired/etc. But suppose we put aside for the moment our reverence for Freud, and put aside his expression of modesty as well, to look at the historical record. Freud's (1888) preface to his translation of Bernheim's work is a masterful summary of the work of a master. Freud wrote that Bernheim was quite aware that individuals differed widely in
the hypnotizability. He knew he could not hypnotize everyone, and did not disguise this fact.
Further, Bernheim understood the importance of the social psychology of the setting in which hypnosis is applied. After Freud returned to Vienna, he encountered a very refractory patient. He travelled with her to Nancy to have her evaluated and treated by Bernheim. Bernheim worked with the patient and failed to achieve the desired results. He remarked to Freud that such patients did better when treated in his special unit. In contemporary terms, we might add, where setting and expectation were likely to enhance the impact of his efforts.
What Freud has done in his later writing is to speak of discovering the differences Bernheim had described, and Freud had translated, and that the two had observed and discussed together, as if these were new observations that offered a rationale for abandoning hypnosis. It remains unclear whether Freud's demurral of his talents as a hypnotist were accurate. But it is clear that Freud has distorted his narrative to make it appear that he abandoned hypnosis due to his modest skills when the basis for that assertion is contradicted by the distribution of varying degrees of hypnotizability in the general population. Instead of stating that hypnosis may be more useful in some patients than others, Freud attacks hypnosis.
There is another curious aspect to Freud's argument. When he attacks hypnosis most ferociously, he attributes great power to the hypnotist, reverting to the Mesmeric notion of animal magnetism. Although Mesmeric theories were invalidated by the French Royal Commission over a century before 1895, they did persist in common belief and lore, and Mesmerism did itself continued to persist to some degree.
Let us examine Freud's most famous pronunciamento against hypnosis:
Let us recall that hypnosis has something positively uncanny about it; but the characteristic of uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone repression. Let us consider how hypnosis is induced. The hypnotist asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him. This mysterious power (which is even now often described popularly as “animal magnetism”) must be the same power that
is looked upon by primitive people as the source of taboo, the same that emanates from kings and chieftains and makes it dangerous to approach them (mana). The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power … (Freud, 1921, p. 125).
When Freud attacks hypnosis, he appears to countenance these completely disproven ideas, perhaps because they attribute the power of hypnosis to the hypnotist, and “justify” cautions against the dark power of this modality. Surely, Freud knew he was dabbling in unscientific popular mythology, engaging in the provocative and dishonest depreciation of a modality he still saw as in opposition to his own.
We must wonder why generations of analysts have accepted without protest Freud's fraudulent mischaracterizations of hypnosis and the hypnotist and accepted the intellectually dishonest portraits he promoted. I speculate that is so attractive to the psychoanalytic reader to encounter Freud as a defender of freedom and a warrior against tyranny, oppression, and domination that it is aversive to challenge the accuracy of his representations.
Jane Kelly opened my eyes to a whole new perspective. I studied du Maurier and Trilby. I reacquainted myself with Svengali. But my understanding, although increased, remained tantalizingly incomplete. I probed the usual psychoanalytic resources to see if either du Maurier or Trilby made an appearance, and came up empty. I knew that there had to be a connection, but the complete absence of attention to what I thought would be significant stopped me in my tracks. Something was missing. Even if Trilby undermined public confidence in hypnosis, it was just a book … Wasn't it? I bumbled along, grasping for a connection I thought must be there, that I could allude to, but that I just couldn't prove was there. I shared my frustration with a group of colleagues who met for lunch monthly, smart people whose company I really enjoyed.
At lunch a few months after that conversation, forensic child psychiatrist Laurentine “Laurie” Fromm, M.D., handed me a copy of Steven Levingston's Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris. My first response was bland. But within a few pages, I realized that while the case of Gabrielle
Bompard was well-known in the literature of forensic hypnosis , the story and person of Gabrielle Bompard herself was not.
Gabrielle Bompard, a young French woman, claimed she had been hypnotized by the dastardly Michel Eyraud and commanded to participate in the murder of Toussaint-Augustine Gouffé. Steven Levingston is a former investigative reporter, now an Editor at The Washington Post. He had become fascinated by L'Affaire Eyraud/Bompard, the story of a gruesome murder in Paris. He and his wife had researched the murder and the trial that followed for many years.
As I read, I realized that I was in a whole new world of depth and dedicated pursuit of comprehensive understanding. Laurence and Perry had explored key issues in the trials of Gouffé's killers. They had applied thoughtful expertise to topics associated with forensic hypnosis. Levingston approached the same material informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of the era, and by his astonishingly vigorous pursuit of the detailed backgrounds of everyone and everything associated with L'Affaire Eyraud/Bompard.
Reading Little Demon … is no chore of obsessive drudgery. Levingston was able to recreate Belle Epoque Paris in my mind's eye. He helped me follow the uncovering of the crime and the criminals through the eyes of Goron, one of the greatest detectives of that or any era. Levingston's love of Paris imparted a lyrical grace to those sections that embraced the city. His insightful knowledge of France and the French gave the book a warm texture. Levingston's diligence had both crafted an incredibly well-done police procedural and provided me with the most useful insights into the place of hypnosis in continental European society that I had ever encountered.
For all these reasons and more, I was enthralled. My hopes that Levingston had solved my problem were dashed quickly, but I had a sense familiar to analysts, detectives, scientists … I'm getting closer! I did not know to what I was coming closer, but I knew that precious insights were imminent.
In the summer of 1889, Paris was welcoming the world. L'Exposition Universelle, the Paris World Fair, was in full swing. Its centerpiece was
The Eiffel Tower, erected to honor the occasion. The First International Congress of Hypnosis would be held in conjunction with the Exposition, with Charcot, Bernheim, Leibault, and the still-unheralded Sigmund Freud in attendance. A major issue being discussed and debated was whether or not hypnosis could be used to suggest that a subject carry out serious criminal acts, such as murder.
Reading about the First International Congress of Hypnosis, a landmark in the history of hypnosis, had a special meaning to me. My colleagues in hypnosis had honored me and my contributions by naming me overall International Chair of the !4th International Congress of Hypnosis, held in 1997. I experienced Levingston's account as humbling. It allowed me to “walk” among legendary greats, giants who provided the foundations for what would become both psychoanalysis and modern hypnosis.
The central focus of Levingston's opus is the murder of Toussaint-Augustine Gouffé by Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard, and the subsequent pursuit and trials of the malefactors. Michel Eyraud was a con-man and rogue who ran a small business that was probably a front for criminal activities. Eyraud presented himself as a boulevardier, which allowed him to meet and associate with affluent men about town, whom he tried to involve in various schemes. Like many in that era, he had acquired some knowledge of hypnosis. Gabrielle Bompard was a willful young woman, estranged from a conservative family that had tried without success to rein in her less than decorous behavior. She had run off to make a life in Paris. Bompard was an experienced hypnotic subject who could demonstrate major hypnotic phenomena with ease, but who defied any suggestions she did not like. She appears to have supported herself through questionable activities until she obtained a job with Eyraud. In short order, she became his mistress and partner in crime.
Toussaint-Augustine Gouffé was an affluent minor official and major man-about-town. He had a mistress, but according to his diary, he also bedded another twenty-plus women every month. Eyraud indicated to Gouffé that his attractive young mistress had tired of him, and had noticed Gouffé. He arranged for them to meet. When Gouffé arrived at Bompard's apartment, she behaved seductively until Eyraud, concealed behind some drapes, slipped a noose over Gouffé's neck. The pair robbed Gouffé, concealed his body in a burlap bag in a trunk, and left the trunk
far out in the country, where it remained undiscovered for a period of time.
The crucial information that ultimately played a valuable role in my quest to understand Freud's abandoning hypnosis began to emerge from Levingston's detailing of the attention the media accorded Bompard and Eyraud while they were on the run, and after their capture. Their flight across Europe and thence to the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean was followed by the newspapers and magazines of the day, elevating them to celebrity status. They parted ways in America. Bompard returned to France with a new lover. She insisted that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Eyraud had put her under hypnosis, she claimed, and forced her to comply with his evil schemes. Eyraud was arrested in the Caribbean when he was recognized by a man he had tried to fleece.
Young, attractive, petite, and vulnerable in appearance, Bompard presented herself as the helpless tool of Eyraud's evil designs. Artists' impressions of the murder of Gouffé appeared in print. Bompard appeared on the covers of magazines, looking youthful and innocent. Her representation of her plight was congruent with the beliefs of the Nancy School of Hypnosis, which were very prominent in the minds of the scientific community and the public.
Eyraud attracted attention as well. His ability to remain ahead of the police by seducing a series of women who allowed him to live with them and hide out to evade capture led an admiring French press to describe him as a “legend,” a man with tremendous power over women.
Early in 1891, Eyraud met his fate at the guillotine. While the French courts demonstrated a keen interest in understanding of Bompard's “hypnosis” defense, she, too was found guilty. However, while the public image of Eyraud was that of a rogue with hypnotic skills and tremendous power over women, there was sufficient sympathy for this attractive young woman and her tale of being used by that rogue that she evaded execution and received a lenient prison sentence.
Throughout much of 1890 Eyraud and Bompard had been front page news across Europe and all English-Speaking nations. Some modern commentators have offered rather hyperbolic statements to the effect that they were the “Bonnie and Clyde” of their era. From the time
Bompard turned herself in, the media had presented the public with a narrative in which she was a naïve young woman who had been made the unwilling tool of an evil hypnotist.
At last, it was possible to put together some pieces of the “Cold Case” puzzle on a preliminary basis. Trilby had not suddenly emerged from nowhere to become a smash literary success. du Maurier capitalized masterfully upon world-wide fascination with the Bompard-Eyraud relationship as told by Bompard and her supporters to a sympathetic media. The character of Trilby was clearly derived from a sanitized version of Gabrielle Bompard, and the character of Svengali constructed from an unsanitized version of Michel Eyraud.
The first serialized chapters of Trilby were published early in 1894. They became a world-wide sensation. Trilby was rewritten as a play by Paul Potter, and first performed in America in the spring of 1895. British impresarios saw the play in the United States and obtained rights to present it abroad. Trilby debuted in England in the fall of 1895, performed in several cities by several theatrical troupes. Also, that fall the previously serialized chapters of Trilby were published as a complete novel, illustrated by du Maurier himself.
No precise date has been linked with Freud's 1895 abandonment of hypnosis. Nor can we discern with precision the dates during which Freud experimented with forehead pressure.
What we do know is that since approximately 1890, hypnosis was frequently and increasingly placed before the public in a negative light. The Nancy school's emphasis on the power of suggestion and the helplessness of the hypnotized subject fed into public and professional mistrust of hypnosis. Although representatives of the Paris school were frequently able to embarrass representatives of the Nancy school, and did so at Bompard's trial, a belief in the malign power of hypnosis became firmly entrenched in popular thought and urban legend.
The fictional Svengali exerted a powerful deleterious impact upon the public image of the hypnotist. From the moment of his debut, the hypnotist became an iconic figure of evil, and hypnosis became suspect rather than welcomed. After studying the representation of hypnosis in popular culture, Barrett observed that whenever the presence of a
hypnotist is announced, the audience or reader should suspect evil.
It is difficult for today's readers to recreate the emotional world of the Eastern European Jew. In an era rife with anti-Semitism, Svengali linked hypnosis and evil with being Jewish, specifically, with being an Eastern European Jew. Associated with his life in Vienna, Freud is often seen as an assimilated German Jew. However, his parents had relocated from an Eastern European home, from the same area which was the home of the fictional Svengali.
Jack the Ripper was active in 1888. Three of the men suspected of being the Ripper were thought to be Jews. Armed with neither data nor mercy, the British press treated them with extreme malice. Some sources refer to incidents of violence against Jews.
In 1894, the Dreyfus Affair was a notorious major news story that would polarize French opinion over a period of many years. Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish ancestry, was court-martialed on fraudulent charges and sent to Devil's Island. His crime appears to have been performing admirably on tests that allowed him to rise to ranks and positions from which many superiors and peers had wished to exclude Jews. Although exonerated years later, polarized opinions about the Dreyfus Affair played acrimonious roles in French discourse for years. At the time of Freud's abandoning hypnosis, Dreyfus was wrongly imprisoned on Devil's Island, and his defenders were under attack. Freud's mentor Bernheim, a man with Jewish ancestry, was among them. But it is not clear whether Bernheim was involved in the Dreyfus affair in the years germane to my argument.
Sigmund Freud lived in fear that his ideas and accomplishments would be diminished or neglected because he was a Jew. He abandoned hypnosis at a moment when public anti-Semitism was rampant, and when the reputation of his chosen field of study was under attack in the court of public opinion. Although Freud offered many superficially plausible arguments for his decision, much about them is suspect. Those offered close to the time of his decision do not fare well when subjected to close scrutiny. While Freud speaks of learning about certain shortcomings of
hypnosis in the process of his own work, most of what he speaks of learning were put forward by Bernheim, and had been referred to by Freud (1888) in his preface to his German translation of a Bernheim text. Many of Freud's complaints about hypnosis were put forward only many years after he had abandoned its use. It would be 1905 before he would first postulate a sadomasochistic basis for the patient's relationship with the hypnotist, and 1921, three years after the death of Bernheim, before he put forth his most damning and dramatic denunciations of hypnosis and the hypnotist.
Earlier, I observed that the hypnotist as described by Freud in 1921 bore little or no resemblance to those with whom Freud had studied. However, this depiction of the hypnotist would be quite meaningful and familiar to contemporary readers. In 1921 Freud presented his reader with the portrait of a hypnotist whom no one had encountered in the legitimate healing professions, but whom culturally aware individuals could recognize at once. Freud portrayed the hypnotist with a sketch of Svengali! This is a remarkable moment. Freud, who never acknowledged awareness of any aspect of the highly anti-Semitic Trilby, now advanced the specter of Svengali as the centerpiece of his attack on hypnosis! The image of hypnosis most frequently referenced by psychoanalysts to express their misgivings about hypnosis had been drawn from a fictional character. Svengali did not create a school of hypnosis, but he did inspire the creation of some of the most memorable villains in modern fiction and motion pictures. The first and greatest, of course, was Count Dracula. Bram Stoker, author of the 1897 best-seller, Dracula, acknowledged that he has based his vampire, a skilled hypnotist with some Semitic features, on Svengali.
Had Sigmund Freud published his most negative critiques of hypnosis as the reasons for his 1895 abandonment of hypnosis at the time of his decision, there would have been no reason to engage in a long-term effort to understand why he acted as he did. He would have been seen as making a series of strong statements that offered cogent explanations for his turning away from an approach so clearly fraught with potential for misadventure. But that is not what he did. Instead, he offered a series of rationales that were left unchallenged long enough to be accorded
unquestioned validity. Freud's thinking in these matters lacks the incisive brilliance of his usual arguments. Instead, it demonstrated an unconvincing quality suggestive of a quick excuse for running out the door. Freud did not make his most dire accusations until a quarter of a century later, after most of the major figures of hypnosis in the 1890s had left the scene. The gratuitous denigrations of hypnosis in his 1921 article seem more like efforts to drive a final nail into the coffin of the hypnosis he hoped his psychoanalysis would supplant than an exercise of reasonable scholarship.
Again, Freud did not take his strongest stances until he the major figures of an earlier hypnosis were not there to contradict him. And, when he did, he called upon the qualities of Svengali, a fictional character from a book he failed to acknowledge at the time of his abandoning hypnosis. It is worthwhile considering the possibilities that Freud's depreciation of his own abilities as hypnotist, a curious statement in a man not known for modesty, a statement called into question in the arguments above, may represent a defensive posture. It is as if Sigmund Freud is saying, indirectly, to an often anti-Semitic world sensitized to the image of a dangerous Jewish hypnotist, “You see… I, Sigmund Freud, am not like Svengali. I lack the power to dominate others and to make others do my bidding. I do not possess the magical Mesmeric potency of animal magnetism that would make me a dangerous and predatory Jewish monster like Svengali.”
These are among the reasons that lead me to suggest that Freud's fear of anti-Semitism was a major factor in his abandoning hypnosis when he did, and as abruptly as he did, shortly after having published major hypnosis-related contributions. Both the retroactive nature of his most trenchant critiques of hypnosis and his failure to mention the contemporary issues with which he had to contend suggest in the one case, a need to avoid a major confrontation with others in the world of hypnosis, and in the other, a flagrant apparent dissociation from the anti-Semitic forces that surrounded him, and from which he feared disfavor and attack.
Although it would be preposterous to assert that Freud was oblivious to the Dreyfus affair or the impact of Trilby, that point could be argued were it not for the fact that Freud's 1921 portrait of the hypnotist is a clear “tribute” to Svengali. The enormity of this portrait may not be
apparent to contemporary readers unfamiliar with the lingering impact of Svengali and unable to appreciate Trilby in its historical context. Perhaps it would be easier to appreciate for contemporary readers to imagine instead being offered a word picture of the typical psychiatrist, and that finding that this “typical” word picture describes the behavior of a psychiatrist who is a major presence in The Silence of the Lambs (Harris, 1988), Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, M.D.
Whether by design, defensive style, or both, Sigmund Freud experienced an era replete with landmark events of an anti-Semitic nature that threatened to impact him and his career, but he did not leave an account of how he experienced them. It is as if he had developed a dissociative shield against what threatened the safety of his personhood. More specifically, the societal rather than intimate form of relational trauma experienced and feared in connection with anti-Semitism may have inspired a protective wish not to see and not to be affected by toxic events in his world, and to distance himself from them as best he could.
It would appear that Freud's abandonment of major aspects of hypnosis may have been more defensive than truly scientific. If so, psychoanalysis owes a cringe-worthy debt of gratitude to Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard, George du Maurier, and to the anti-Semitism through which their impacts were transmitted. Plainly put, in 1895, hypnosis was no place for an ambitious Jewish professional fearful that hatred of who and what he was would undermine his career and his contributions. Freud appears to have made a rapid and superficially plausible exit from an imperiled position. Anti-Semitism and cautious regard for his own safety and career offered powerful incentives to turn his attention elsewhere. Years later, with his psychoanalysis firmly established and likely opponents gone from the scene, Freud felt secure enough to look back and try to hammer a final nail into the coffin of the hypnosis that had nurtured his own discoveries.
Again, had Freud leveled against hypnosis in 1895 the charges he would later voice, there would be no reason to raise the question of what was on Freud's mind when he abandoned hypnosis. But his reasoning was not powerful, and his departure was rapid. Further, had Freud addressed the impacts of Trilby, the Dreyfus Affair and anti-Semitism openly at the time, or even in private correspondence, their omissions from his
consideration would not be so flagrant and striking.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that with regard to these matters, Freud avoided either acknowledging them or becoming involved in them. As noted above, he appears to have worked assiduously to keep them at a distance. As in a vertical split, they existed, but for Freud's predominant self-state, they were not handled in a normal manner.
Although I am sure that there is much more to be learned about these matters, for a number of pragmatic considerations I feel that I have reached an imperfect, but “good enough” closure. The solution to “The Mysterious Case of the Suspiciously Silent Psychoanalyst” appears to reside in Sigmund Freud's adopting a self-protective stance that functioned on the basis of the belief that acknowledging and/or addressing the traumatic and hurtful forces by which he was surrounded would create unacceptable risks. He appears to have hoped that by holding on and avoiding trouble, these problems might pass.
It was only as I looked over the last draft of this paper that I realized that Freud's reaction to anti-Semitism in the early and mid-1890s was reminiscent of my findings in a study of revictimization . I found that what abused individuals learn from their mistreatment is not how to avoid it, but how to better accommodate to it and improve damage control. Freud kept on trying to figure out how to live more safely in the traumatic environment of an anti-Semitic land rather than to escape it. My mind reviewed how that adaptation would express itself in a CCRT, or Core Conflictual Relationship Theme as per the work of Lester Luborsky (Luborsky & Crits-Cristoph, 1998). Would this pattern prove repetitive, and pop up elsewhere?
I often sensed a “ghost” by my side me as I worked on some parts of this paper. No some ethereal entity… Just the memory of a conversation over half a century ago with an elderly analyst who had practiced in Vienna before World War II. I remember the conversation and the man quite well, but I do not recall his name.
Here is an excerpt from a memoire in progress:
Some readers whose stance toward Freud tends toward uncritical admiration may consider the entirety of my research and thinking about Freud's abandonment of hypnosis profoundly disrespectful of a great man whose contributions are heroic landmarks in man's efforts to understand the human mind. With that in mind, I will offer two replies, neither a defense.
The first? My admiration of Sigmund Freud and his work survives my findings.
The second is that I actually knew a European analyst who had known Sigmund Freud in Vienna. He had participated in some of the earliest efforts to encourage him to escape the looming menace of the Holocaust, and remained involved in offers to assist him and his family to relocate. He was among my parents' circle of medical refugee friends, all frequent visitors to our home when I was young, and before they “got on their feet” in the USA. To his misfortune, he was most famous among both his peers and my friends for his terrible, ill-fitting toupee.
I had not seen him for many years. Then, we were reintroduced at the Shivah for another physician who had just passed away. He had heard I was considering going into psychiatry. He reminded me that he was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He wondered whether I was considering psychoanalytic training. At that time, I had no idea of what psychoanalytic training really meant. Rather than reveal my ignorance, I switched the subject … “What kind of a man was Sigmund Freud?” I asked.
He sighed. He had known Freud for several years. He had participated in a number of efforts fellow analysts made to encourage Freud to leave Vienna. He made it clear that he was not a person of prominence in psychoanalysis. He mentioned some more prestigious analysts who were involved, but at the time, their names meant nothing to me. As a young man, he loved psychoanalysis. He venerated Freud. He wanted Freud to be safe, both because he cared about him, and because he wanted him to be able to continue his work and his contributions. He had been included in these efforts because he had useful personal connections abroad. He had helped many escape the growing horror of the Holocaust. He had already decided to leave continental Europe once the last members of his family had reached safety. As he spoke, old feelings came alive in his face
and voice. He wiped his eyes.
Freud, he said, was brilliant … But Freud was a man of ideas, with great ambitions for those ideas. He could be incredibly stubborn, even out of touch with mundane reality. Freud would not believe what he did not want to be true, even as evidence amassed to the contrary. He would become defensive. He did not want to change his mind.
“It was not just about the Nazis,” he said. Outside of his consulting room, Freud often misjudged people, sometimes to his detriment. “A Menschenkenner, he was not,” he said. “Smart people … are not smart about everything.” He was already in America by the time Freud finally left Vienna. “We celebrated that wonderful news!” his face glowing with a broad smile. At this point, our conversation was interrupted by the rabbi beginning the service portion the Shivah. It was never resumed.
The Sigmund Freud described by a man who had known him for eight years was the Sigmund Freud I found in my own research: brilliant, driven, stubborn, determined to prevail, and valuing ideas and defensive of ideas to the point of dismissing relevant facts and practical concerns. That is the Sigmund Freud who could let an anti-Semitic world swirl around him, and take dramatic intrapsychic defensive measures that allowed him to dismiss what he chose not to deal with for as long as he could.
That is the Sigmund Freud to be found in my writing.
(Kluft, Mostly Uphill, in preparation)
Today, we understand that mistreated individuals and beleaguered minorities often rely upon dissociative defenses to survive under difficult and threatening circumstances. Dissociation in its many protective forms is preeminently a defense against relational and PTSD Criterion A trauma (Kluft, 2022). It may be difficult to appreciate that the founder of our profession, notwithstanding his brilliance, his world-wide fame, and his living in one of the most advanced, cultured, and sophisticated societies in the world, nonetheless lived his life as a member of an ill-treated minority, under siege by forces of darkness and hatred long before the Holocaust. He drew upon psychological defenses characteristic
of the oppressed, the very forms of defense toward which, on a conscious level, he had held such a dismissive attitude for the majority of his career. What protected him and his functioning in some ways in the face of ongoing strain trauma created profound vulnerabilities in others, leaving him with such a profound difficulty in perceiving the imminence of potentially lethal stress trauma, the malignant exacerbation of dangers he long tried to keep at a distance. Holding fast to his belief that he could continue not needing to attend to what he did not think he should need to face nearly cost him his life.