---
title: "Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism"
chunk: 17/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_on_Animal_Magnetism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:17:13.409273+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The noted neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud not only studied and wrote about "hypnosis" (e.g., Freud, 1891, and 1966), but he also actively used "hypnosis" in his clinical practice for some time.
However the (à la Salpêtrière) "hypnosis" that Freud employed – quite unlike the conventional "hypnotism" of James Braid (that was induced by Braid's standard "upwards and inwards squint") – relied upon an induction process that often involved rubbing the top of a patient's head. This requirement, of course, demanded that Freud sat at the end of the therapeutic couch – in order to gain easy access to his subject's head – a practice that Freud continued to follow for his entire (post-"hypnosis") professional career.
Another vestige of phreno-magnetism that demanded that Freud position himself at the patient's head was Freud's application of the "head pressure" technique that he had, in person, observed Hippolyte Bernheim use, on one of his visits to Bernheim's clinic at Nancy in 1899.
Freud had discontinued this "head pressure" practice by, at least, 1904 – and, possibly, by 1900.

=== Mistaken identification of Esdaile's Jhar-Phoonk with d’Eslon's magnetization-by-contact ===

Due, to a large extent, to the (mistaken) enthusiastic promotion of Esdaile's (otherwise) valuable work in India as "mesmerism" by John Elliotson (1791–1868), and William Collins Engledue (1813–1858) – especially by Elliotson – in their influential journal, The Zoist, over its fifteen years of existence (March 1843 to January 1856), the entirely mistaken, generally held, and (at the time) widely published view that (the otherwise highly significant) James Esdaile used "mesmerism" to produce the condition under which he conducted completely pain-free surgery is still being repeated in many of the modern accounts of the history of mesmerism, anaesthesia, and hypnotism.
It is clear, however, that – having noticed a vague, and superficial similarity between Esdaile's (Islamic/exorcism derived) Jhar-Phoonk procedures and the (secular/healing derived) "magnetization-by-contact" procedures of d’Eslon – in Esdaile's Jhar-Phoonk, Elliotson and his associates had, to use a biological analogy, (mis)identified in "mesmerism à la d'Eslon" what was a clear case of "homoplasy" (i.e., similar entities descended from an entirely separate lineage) as if it were, instead,  a case of "homology" (i.e., similar entities descended from a common ancestor).

== See also ==

Animal magnetism – Pseudoscientific theory about force in living things
Blinded experiment – Experiment in which information about the test is masked to reduce bias
Causality – How one process influences another
Clinical study design – Plan for research in clinical medicine
Concept – Fundamental unit of cognition
Construct (philosophy) – Object whose existence depends upon a subject's mind
Controlled trial – Form of scientific experiment
Correlation does not imply causation – A refutation of one logical fallacy
Design of experiments – Design of tasks
Élan vital – Hypothetical explanation for evolution and development of organisms
Emotional contagion – Spontaneous spread of emotions among a group
Exorcism – Evicting spiritual entities from a person or area
Experimentum crucis – Critical experiment
Glass harmonica – Type of musical instrument
Iatrophysics – Medical application of physics
Medicus curat, natura sanat – Medical aphorism ("the physician treats, nature heals")
Mill's Methods – Methods of induction by John Stuart MillPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Natural history of disease – Progression of a person's medical condition
Necessity and sufficiency – Terms to describe a conditional relationship between two statements
Positioning (marketing) – Mental perception of product or brand
Primum non nocere – Principal precept of bioethics meaning "first, do no harm"
Protocol (science) – Procedural method for the design and implementation of an experimentPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Protoscience – Research field that may become a science
Reification (fallacy) – Fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing
Scientific control – Methods employed to reduce error in science tests
Sham surgery – Faked surgical intervention
Signs and symptoms – Indications of a specific illness, including psychiatric
Spurious relationship – Apparent, but false, correlation between causally-independent variables
Therapeutic effect – Beneficial change in medical condition, often caused by a drug
Vis medicatrix naturae – Latin phrase affirming the body's self-healing nature
Vitalism – Belief about living organisms

== Footnotes ==

== References ==
Note that "many pamphlets on magnetism bear false imprints; they purport to have been printed in London, The Hague, Philadelphia, Peking, etc. In this way they evaded French censorship" (Pattie, 1994, p. 179).

== External links ==

Museum of the History of Medicine and Pharmacy, at Lyon
Museum of the History of Medicine and Pharmacy, at Lyon: Mesmer's Baquet
Glass Armonica by Benjamin Franklin, The Bakken Museum Artifact Collection, (catalog no. 81.064): The Bakken. "Glass Armonica". Archived from the original on 5 April 2007. Retrieved 8 September 2021.