Pattern Interrupt: a radical history of hypnosis
Imagination as a force of disruption, liberation and autonomous self-regulation.
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary”
- Ursula Le Guin1
Hypnosis is a quiet threat to the status quo. It takes the willing individual into an altered state which heals by disrupting their response to social norms. It offers a path to self-regulation, and suddenly the rules imposed from outside start to look negotiable. Perhaps for that reason, it has attracted controversy since the late 1700s, when rumours of Franz Anton Mesmer manipulating some kind of universal life force and throwing women into fits escaped the perfumed boudoirs of Paris. This scandalous behaviour led Louis XVI, his former patron, to commission a panel of some of the greatest scientists of the time: Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry), and the now notorious Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
The blade of reason fell hard upon Mesmer, cutting his wrong-headed theory of “animal magnetism” from the body of results he produced — the thousands of testimonies of patients claiming benefits. This was the Age of the Enlightenment in the land of Voltaire, and an invisible fluid passing between humans was judged to be a superstition as pernicious as the Holy Spirit which had duped the Catholics through centuries of ignorance. The Franklin Commission Report concluded that:
“Imagination, without magnetism, produces convulsions… magnetism without imagination produces nothing at all”2
Mesmer fled Paris in disgrace, but the imagination is not so easily put to flight. Let us follow how its convulsions have shaken the body politic through the history of trance induction.
Trance as a moral disruptor
A secret report released by the commission deemed Mesmerism to be a threat to public morality, and there may have been something in the accusations: hypnosis is indeed disruptive, as is any pathway into trance. In trance we freeze the narratives that guide our behaviour, giving us time and distance to view our cycles of trigger and reaction from outside. Establishing a pathway towards self-regulation gives us a degree of internal calm that makes us less susceptible to manipulation. We may also become conscious of things that had slipped out of sight.
Just as stillness causes sediments in agitated water to settle, turning it from opaque to clear, stillness also settles the mind and reveals what lies beneath. What we find there may cause us to question our habits, to do what is not expected of us, and to entertain some extraordinary notions.
One of Mesmer’s most energetic successors was the Baron du Potet, a social reformer who integrated spiritualist concepts into mesmerism and claimed to induce clairvoyance and mediumship. These are strong claims, but they carried weight; one of his clairvoyant subjects supplied the name of the murderer in a court case, and the the evidence led to a conviction.3 Du Potet believed that hypnotism could be a force for social transformation, and he established a free school of magnetism in Paris for that purpose in 1826.
Mesmerism’s dance at the edge of intrigue and outrage continued through the 19th century. One of Du Potet’s students was John Elliotson, pioneer of the stethoscope in England and Professor of the Principles and Practice of Medicine at University College London. He reported miraculous results for conditions from paralysis and digestive issues to sleepwalking and psychogenic blindness. In 1837, amidst a wave of hype, he staged a demonstration with his star subject Elizabeth Oakey at University College Hospital. The great and the good of London’s medical establishment were shown a series of impressive feats: her, stiff as a board in full-body catalepsy, and he pushing pins into her without causing her to flinch.
The doctors were not impressed, however, when she started pointing at the trousers of the Victorian gentlemen, laughing at their trousers in a manner most unbecoming of a young working-class woman of the era. Deepening the insult, she refused to come out of trance at the gentleman doctor’s command, stubbornly insisting that Elliotson’s assistant bring her out of trance.
Publicly upending the hierarchy of the class system was more shocking to the assembled doctors than the physical feats they had witnessed. The Times described University College Hospital as “a seminary for mountebankery”, medical journal The Lancet published incredulous editorials, and University College Hospital banned hypnotism outright.4
Pain, power and the politics of anaesthesia
Elliotson soldiered on, presenting an account in 1843 of an amputation under mesmeric trance to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, of which he had once been president.5 The gentlemen were not impressed by ‘the strokings and clawings of the necromancer’, and concluded that the ‘poor ignorant peasant’ patient simply ‘betrayed no sensation of agony’ as saw passed through bone. “They will not try their mountebank tricks again before the profession,” concluded the report.6 Elliotson was relieved of his academic posts, but his correspondent Dr. James Esdaile went on to oversee over a thousand mesmeric operations at the Calcutta hospitals he managed.7 Again, the medical community was not moved. “You know what a Bengalee will do for a few pice [pennies],” quipped one detractor in response to stories of patients having an arm, cataract or penis removed without flinching.8
Conventional 19th-century surgery required strong men to subdue screaming amputees in the making, and mortality rates approached 50%.9 Esdaile reported much lower rates in his hospitals, perhaps because hypnosis not only reduces pain in a limb but also the flow of blood, by causing blood vessels to constrict and the heart rate to slow.10 Life and death aside, such amputations represented a threat to the medical profession; when ether anaesthesia was discovered later in the decade, it was welcomed as a weapon not against pain so much as against mesmerism. Unlike trance, which can be induced by anyone who appreciates the power of the imagination, chemical anaesthesia requires complex equipment and access to drugs, keeping the control of pain under the control of the profession. Although mesmeric surgery and dentistry occasionally appear in the popular press today, the medical press shows very little interest. This is a testament to the skilful machinations of mid-19th century physicians.
Quaking, shaking and breaking convention
If hypnosis can change something so intimate as how our bodies function, it can also change the body politic. The reason I’m so dedicated to it is that trance work — by breaking our collective trance — can change not only your life but all our lives. We are living in a historical moment of unprecedented disenfranchisement and disenchantment, and even “the psychedelic renaissance” has been co-opted to a great degree by the forces of capital and the military (watch this space for more on this).
Part of the beauty of trance is that the unconscious is in the driving seat, even if the hypnotist is holding the session. Of course, any fool or NLP pick-up artist can deploy linguistic techniques to increase the reach of their ego, but the lasting impact of an intervention depends on the integrity of the hypnotist in following the currents of the imagination. The unconscious is working, fundamentally, in service to the health and harmonious unfolding of the individual, and that often involves disrupting whatever disharmony brought them to the session. In my experience, this is where some of the deepest trauma healing with hypnosis begins.
The morality matrix in which we grow up is what Freud called the superego. In my culture, it includes the idea that success is measured in terms of how much cash you receive rather than how much happiness you create, and it features such collective monstrosities of thought as patriarchy and unreconstructed class dynamics. When the superiority of the superego is undermined, however, much becomes possible, and it can happen with a simple reframe. I was in a Zoom meeting once at a previous job, watching myself and everyone else bend over backwards to accommodate the whims and sluggishness of a girl of immaculate breeding and questionable competence who couldn’t be persuaded to do the basic reading that would answer her endless objections. I wondered if we would be so deferential if her accent was less posh, and texted a colleague suggesting we imagine the words being uttered in a Liverpudlian accent instead. The curtain fell immediately; we had found someone to replace her within the month.
Liberation through contemplation
History recalls various revolutionaries and reformists who emphasised the importance of solitude and contemplation. Martin Luther, who sparked the Reformation and split the Christian communion in the early 16th century, spent so much time in contemplation that his superior ordered him to do more work.11 Later the same century, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross both emphasised the importance of contemplation and solitude, and co-founded the Discalced (barefoot) Carmelite Reform.12 Their critique of the decadence that had set in incurred the wrath of church authorities. John wrote his fantastic Dark Night of the Soul while incarcerated, after being kidnapped, flogged and half-starved by the unreformed Carmelite order. Both would be canonised in later centuries and declared Doctors of the Church.
By the 17th century, Luther’s Reformation had released Christians in various European countries from the dogmas and power structures of the Roman Catholic church, but many were not satisfied by the new order. The late 17th century Quietists, who are named for their dedication to stillness, also came to such radical conclusions that they were condemned by Pope Innocent XI.13 The Quakers decided they would only say what was true in their meetings and gradually said less and less until they were saying nothing, except occasionally when someone felt moved by the Holy Spirit. They emerged from their worshipful silences to pioneer some of history’s greatest campaigns against government, refusing to pay war taxes as “it was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another”.14 They also engaged in naked acts of civil disobedience. Several women were punished with public floggings, naked from the waist up — which highlights the incoherence of the system administering the whip.15
Similar practices from various spiritual traditions are at the root of some of the great radical movements of the twentieth century. The renunciant Gandhi successfully rallied India against the Raj, and one of the catalysts of the American black civil rights movement was Christian Minister Martin Luther King. Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in South Vietnam in 1963 produced one of the most iconic pieces of photo-journalism in history, and eventually led to the collapse of the government he opposed. William Godwin, founder of philosophical anarchism, renounced Christianity but maintained a respect for silence; he wrote that “truth dwells in contemplation” and “can scarcely be acquired in crowded halls and amidst noisy debates.”16
Perhaps the disruptive behaviour of those drawn to techniques of trance explains why the God-struck were often whisked away to monasteries up mountains, out of sight and out of mind, far away from any right-thinking folk they might corrupt with their heavenly infinities. In Europe they swore solemn vows to remain at the monastery, in poverty, to be obedient and well-mannered; in some traditions they took a vow of total silence. A merchant looking for something sublime might climb the mountain to pray before the Lord and His serene and taciturn friars, before heading back down to town to salute the Crown and the officers of the watch.
Staying open-minded: reclaiming the unconscious
In 1858, the UK Parliament passed the Medical Health Act dividing the medical marketplace. On one side were placed traditional practitioners such as herbalists, bone-setters and female midwives. On the other were those trained in allopathy, that would later become conventional state medicine. Approved medics were placed on a list of sanctioned practitioners; when a negligent doctor is “struck off the list” today, that’s the list we’re talking about. Medicine became sanitised, and has become more so ever since. In this environment, hypnotists sought respectability by distancing themselves from Mesmer, Elliotson and the more flamboyant claims of cures, and by leaving behind their murky roots entwined with the Spiritualist movement and programs of radical political reform. Hypnotists prefer the authority of a proverbial white coat. Schools of hypnosis often teach a rather formulaic approach today, and some practitioners can be a little cold and sterile.
For my part, I am open to the magic of the unconscious, and I’ve seen too many weird and wonderful things in my life and in my practice to say anything definitive about how the mind interacts with other intelligences around it. When I’m with a client I follow the trance where it leads, because something magical happens between the lines. I was surprised once when the journey lead us across a wheat field and into a story about finding a crystal hanging in a tree there, but I was even more surprised when the client came out of trance to tell me he had indeed found a crystal pendant hanging from a tree in a wheat field some years earlier. My supervisor commented simply that telepathy was part of the job.
I have some ideas about what it all means or what is possible, but that’s because conscious minds tend to do that kind of thing. I try not to impose my frameworks of understanding on clients, and I’m not sure it’s very useful for healing trauma or rewriting stories. My job is to keep my mind open and allow miracles to happen where they will. For example, I don’t tend to go into past-life regressions (I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, so it seems optimistic to remember how I commanded troops at the Battle of Rivoli). That said, when it happens I’m there for it. I do sometimes take clients back along the timeline, to find a time before the trauma response had begun, and occasionally we scan all the way back through adolescence, childhood and the womb — sometimes even beyond. This has happened organically a few times, and when it does the story emerging from a previous life has provided a key to resolving an issue in this life; one woman with migraines, for example, came out of trance and explained how her previous life had ended with a blow to the head. Whether it happened or not, I have no idea, but I’m delighted that it helped her out.
Nor do I know what to think about the results Mesmer achieved when he was too busy to see patients, by magnetising the tree outside his clinic and them having them touch it for a dose of… whatever he’d put there. It is not for me, nor for anyone, to subdue the unconscious when it is producing material that is healing and creative. The unconscious moves relentlessly, driving our fate by emerging in our fantasies and compulsions, in synchronicity, in the gaps between our ideas. The forces of control are more bound by time, and when they tire and their vigilance lapses, Freudian slips and acts of self-sabotage are the result. Trying to maintain an unhealthy or disharmonious status quo is doomed to fail, whether in the mind or in the culture, and the more repressive the measures, the more painful the corrective.
Some aspects of the self must be contained in order for us to live together. Our fantasies and compulsions can get pretty horrific, and every social animal and every tribe has developed means by which the collective may limit the behaviours of violently disruptive individuals. But when the balance of the collective is upset, it can no longer contain the drives from the depths. It is much wiser to engage with the rejected or suppressed parts of ourselves directly, in the quiet space of contemplation, than to ignore them.
By opening up communication between different parts of ourselves, trance allows these corrective forces to emerge — not through repression or rebellion, but through reintegration. They will still be disruptive, and often funny if you can keep your sense of humour, but they are rarely violent. Often they are problematic precisely because they reject violence so uncompromisingly, even at the cost of being subjected to it.
Our problems either begin in the mind or are made worse by some element of our thinking. Maybe it is all in the mind. And maybe Mind is larger, more porous and far more powerful than it is usually given credit for. Let’s learn what we can do with it.
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And finally, one of the most radical things you can do is…
Le Guin, U. K. (2004). The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala Publication
Franklin, B., Lavoisier, A. L., Guillotin, J.-I., & Others. (1784). Report of the Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism. Translated by I. M. L. Donaldson. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Retrieved from https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/the_royal_commission_on_animal_-_translated_by_iml_donaldson_1.pdf
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/marginalia/2025/03/childe-helens-pilgrimage-revue-spirite/?#_ftn3
Animal Magnetism at the North London Hospital. Times, 20 September 1837. In London Medical and Surgical Journal, 11-12 p. 763
Elliotson, J. (1843). Numerous Cases of Surgical Operations without Pain in the Mesmeric State, London, p. 5
Johnson, J. (ed.) (1843). The Medico-chirurgical Review, 42, Fleet Street. p. 282
Esdaile, J. (1846/1977). Mesmerism in India, and its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine
Ernst, W. (1995). 'Under the influence' in British India: James Esdaile's Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta, and its critics. Psychological Medicine, 25(6), 1113–1123. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291700033092
Richardson, R. (2006). Death, dissection and the destitute. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99(9), 456–461. https://doi.org/10.1177/014107680609900918
Esdaile, J. (1846). Mesmerism in India, and its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, p. xix Retrieved from https://www.woodlibrarymuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/rare-books/AJFM.pdf
Peters, A. (2023). Luther's theology of contemplation revisited. Journal of Reformation Studies, 45(2), 113–131
Bilinkoff, J. (1992). The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious reform in a sixteenth-century city. Cornell University Press.
Odescalchi, B. Pope Innocent XI in in New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08021a.htm
https://www.warresisters.org/history-war-tax-resistance/?
Cavaillé, J.-P. (2021). Naked as a sign: How the Quakers invented nudity as a protest (S. Reynolds, Trans.). Clio. Women, Gender, History, (54), 75–100. https://doi.org/10.4000/cliowgh.6556
Critchley, P. William Godwin and Political Simplicity from Critchley, P. 2004., The City of Reason vol 4 The Rationalisation of the City