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As with so many of the traditional approaches, hypnosis went through its own challenges in its early days. Most historians consider eighteenth-century physician Franz Anton Mesmer to be the individual who laid the foundation for modern hypnosis. (There are also discussions, without a huge amount of proof, that hypnotic states might have been used in ancient sleep temples.) Mesmer used no talking whatsoever to induce a trance-like state in his clients. Essentially, classic mesmerism was a state of significant trance in which the therapist essentially stared at the patient while making very slow movements in front of the patient or near the patient with the therapist’s hands moving slowly over the top of the head, down the shoulders and body to the hips and below. The induction process could take twenty or thirty minutes or longer. Mesmer introduced mesmerism in a most flamboyant way. Interestingly, although mesmerism was rejected by the Establishment, Benjamin Franklin felt that mesmerism was the result of “suggestion.”

Scottish-born physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnosis in 1841, some twenty-five years after Mesmer’s death, considered hypnosis to be “a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye on one object, not of an exciting nature.” I would disagree somewhat with that, as I believe that people can be hypnotized by extreme fear and extreme anxiety, as well as by various aspects of sexuality. My own definition of hypnosis is “the focus of attention on one object to the relative exclusion of all others.” In contrast to that, I consider relaxation to be the focus of one pleasurable thought to the relative exclusion of all others.

A variety of tools have been used for inducing hypnosis, including talking in a rather monotone voice, staring at some particular object, such as a lighted candle, and photostimulation with flashing lights at a relatively low frequency. Almost unlimited variations on both induction and the entire process of hypnotherapy exist. It was James Esdaile, another Scottish physician, who used the mesmeric form of induction to perform many hundreds of operations, some of them quite major, in India. Of course, Mesmer himself was ultimately discredited and ignored by his contemporaries, but Braid seems to have avoided such controversy.

Throughout the nineteenth century, many individuals experimented extensively with hypnosis, especially to do major surgical approaches. It should be noted that only about 25 percent of individuals appear to be capable of entering a hypnotic trance deep enough to allow major surgery, although essentially everyone can go into at least a light hypnotic trance. Hypnotherapy has been credited by many people as being capable of curing virtually every disease from allergies to cancer.