ese studies with mystic speculations and
with clairvoyance. But especially in Germany animal magnetism in
Mesmer's form and in the form of artificial somnambulism grew in
influence through the first decades of the nineteenth century and
succeeded in entering the medical schools. The reaction came through
popular misuse. At about the third decade of the century, interest
ceased everywhere.

The Portuguese Faria insisted in 1819, practically as the first, that
all those so-called magnetic influences, including the delusions, the
amnesias after awaking, and the actions at a command, did not result
from a magnetic power but from the imagination of the subject himself.
He believed that the effect depended upon a disposition of the
individual which resulted from a special thinness of blood. He abstained
therefore from the magnetic manipulations and produced the somnambulic
state by making the patients simply fixate his hands and by ordering
them to sleep. Thus he is the first who understood these changes as
results of mental suggestion. The next great step was due to the English
surgeon, Braid, who in the forties studied the magnetic phenomena and
like Faria insisted on the merely mental origin of the abnormal state.
He proved that a person can bring himself into such an artificial state
and that it is therefore entirely independent of energies from without.
He examined especially the influence of staring at a shining object, a
method which not seldom was called Braidism. He also introduced the
word hypnotism. In America mesmerism was generally known under the
name of electrobiology; and Grimes in particular came to results
similar to those of Braid. Yet the influence of these movements on
the medical world remained insignificant until a new great wave of
psychotherapeutics by means of suggestion began in France in the
sixties.

Of course this development from astrology to magnetism and from
magnetism to hypnotism represented only one side of psychotherapy.
Parallel to it goes the progress in the treatment of the insane. In the
first half of the eighteenth century, they are still on the whole thrown
together with the criminals but the more the disease character of the
disturbance is acknowledged, and the more special hospitals for the
insane are created, and finally the more the humane treatment in them
supersedes the brutal, the more psychotherapy enters into the work.
England showed the way. Especially Arnold, Crichton, a