A quick question. Who is considered the founder of modern psychology?
The chances are you responded “Sigmund Freud” pretty much without thinking! Actually, if you did, you experienced hypnosis, even for that very brief moment.
You answered without using your conscious mind. The subconscious part of your brain did the work for you. That is, in a nutshell, hypnosis.
Of course, there is a little more to hypnotherapy than that. Using your subconscious though is where this particular therapeutic field operates.
Now another question (I promise it is the last!). Who is considered the founder of modern hypnotherapy?
Some of you may have answered Franz Mesmer. Whether you did or not, unless you have studied hypnotherapy to some degree, it’s likely you had to think about it for a moment. You used your conscious mind. You had to actively use your brain to find a response. Not hypnosis.
Out of interest, which felt easier, less stressful or less difficult? Almost certainly the first answer you had to give. This is because your subconscious mind is approximately 30,000 times more powerful than the conscious part of your brain.
This is where the work is done in a hypnotherapy session which will help you to discover the best version of you!
There is a strong chance you had already heard of Franz Mesmer.
The Swabian doctor and astronomer is frequently referred to as the inventor of modern hypnotherapy. However, this is historically inaccurate. What Mesmer created was mesmerism which, although a term used today as a synonym for hypnosis, is not the same thing as hypnotherapy.
Although mesmerism was used for therapeutic purposes by Mesmer during the 1700s, it was tied up in a mystical belief that there was an energy inherent in all objects, animate and inanimate, which could be transferred and that this energy could be used to cure ills.
James Braid was more practical and less concerned with mysticism and magic. He was a surgeon.
Braid became familiar with animal magnetism, a synonym for mesmerism, but was unconvinced by the idea that it was the result of transferable energy.
He was able to determine that sensory perception was heightened when a patient was hypnotised and that control over certain bodily functions, for example heart rate, was enhanced.
He was able to use these conditions successfully to resolve physical ills in his patients which conventional medicine of the time had failed to correct.
Of course, operating in the 1800s, Braid’s ideas and practices have been abandoned in many cases and adapted in others.
A statement which is true of all medical practices. Some of the techniques Braid used would be considered highly dubious today.
Milton Ericksen’s work in the 1900s is closer to what would be considered modern hypnotherapy.
However, hypnosis as a tool for helping people in a wide variety of areas of life started with James Braid. For that fact, he can be considered the father of modern hypnotherapy.
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