Nancy School

The Nancy School was a French hypnosis-centered school of psychotherapy. The origins of the thoughts were brought about by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in 1866, in Nancy, France. Through his publications and therapy sessions he was able to gain the attention/support from Hippolyte Bernheim: another Nancy physician that further evolved Liébeault's thoughts and practices to form what is known as the Nancy School.

It is referred to as the Nancy School to distinguish it from the antagonistic "Paris School" that was centred on the hysteria-centred hypnotic research of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

alt=Le docteur Liébeault|thumb|Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault.

thumb|240px|Hippolyte Bernheim.

thumb|Liébeault (standing, at left) in his clinique in Nancy in 1873.

Origins

;Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904)

Liébeault was born to a peasant family in Farrières France. While expected to become a priest, he rather started his medical studies at Strasbourg, where he obtained his medical degree in 1850. that focused on the similarities between induced sleep (or trance) and natural sleep, the features of the hypnotic state, how the induction of sleep relates to the nervous system, and the phenomena of hallucinations. This book was largely ignored by the medical profession From hearing of the reputation Liébeault was establishing with his work in hypnosis and from reading his first publication, Bernheim skeptically visited the "hypnotic clinic" to see for himself if all of the stories he had been hearing were true. The Nancy school believed the state of mind of hypnosis was a "nonpathological psychological state of mind". Bernheim discovered that if he gave a subject a suggestion to return to him at ten o'clock in 13 days while under hypnosis, the subject would show up at the exact time Bernheim had suggested. The subject showed no recollection of receiving a suggestion, and stated that the "idea presented itself to his mind only at the moment at which he was required to execute it." In Bernheim's Latent Memories and Long-Term Suggestions, he proposed that post-hypnotic suggestions were a result of his subjects periodically falling into a hypnotic state and remembering the suggestions they received from him while previously under hypnosis. Below is a description of one of his experiments on post-hypnotic suggestion.

"To one, I tell her during her sleep:—"Next Thursday (in five days) you will take the glass that is on the night table and put it in the suitcase that is at the foot of your bed." Three days later, having put her back to sleep, I say to her: "Do you remember what I ordered you to do?" She answers: "Yes, I must put the glass in my suitcase Thursday morning, at eight o'clock."—"Have you thought about it since I told you?"—"No"—"Think hard."—"I thought about it the following morning at eleven o'clock."—"Were you awake or asleep?"—"I was in a drowsy state." (Bernheim, 1886a, pp. 109–110)" Therefore, he doubted the view of the Nancy school: that hypnotic susceptibility was a normal characteristic. Instead, "Charcot speculated that the root cause of hysteria lay in a hereditary, progressive, and generalized degeneracy of the nervous system that interferes with the ability to integrate and interconnect memories and ideas in the normal way." The theory of grand hypnotism was presented by Charcot to the French scientific establishment and was accepted as a legitimate study.

Bernheim countered Charcot, by stating that provoked sleep was simply a consequence of suggestion. This was the exact opposite of the belief held by Charcot that suggestion was due to provoked sleep from the disorder of hypnotic neurosis. Bernheim believed that the "..automatic execution of suggested acts could happen while awake and without somnambulism." He noticed that "the staring paralyzed the eye muscles, he concluded, and the fixed attention weakened the mind, resulting in an unusual state of the nervous system, halfway between sleep and wakefulness."

Bernheim was a great asset to Liébeault's studies and research on hypnotism. Unlike Liébeault, Bernheim was proficient at writing effectively and communicating all of their elaborate ideas. In the book Pioneers of Psychology, Raymond E. Fancher and Alexandra Rutherford state that "Bernheim was effective at elaborating these ideas in several books and articles that came to be identified as the main statements of the Nancy school."

Impact

The research and theories produced by the Nancy School have had a great impact on our society today. Multiple research studies have shown that these techniques are safe and effective in certain situations. In 2001, Diedre Barrett stated that it is also "becoming clear that the skills one needs to respond to hypnosis are similar to those necessary to experience trance-like states in daily life." According to Kendra Cherry, "the technique has also been clinically proven to provide medical and therapeutic benefits, most notably in the reduction of pain and anxiety. It has even been suggested that hypnosis can reduce the symptoms of dementia." Various articles and research indicate that hypnosis can affect people differently depending on their state of mind. Experiments today have given us enough information to show that hypnosis and the power of suggestion can help with certain problems in daily life; whether it be trying to quit smoking or to relieve the pain of consistent headaches.

There were many influential people in the history of psychology that have been themselves influenced by the Nancy School and the concept that it believed in. With this influence many of these psychology figures have been able to accomplish great things for psychology. These figures include, but are not limited to:

Morton Prince who has become known for his work with dissociative disorders, or multiple personality disorders.
Auguste Forel was a Swiss myrmecologist, neuroanatomist, and psychiatrist who is most known for his "investigations into the structure of the human brain and that of ants."
Josef Breuer who was an Austrian physician who made crucial discoveries in neurophysiology, and also helped to lay the foundation for Freud's theory of psychoanalysis with his work with Bertha Pappenheim, more commonly known as Anna O.
Sigmund Freud who was an Austrian neurologist, and studied with Bernheim, has become to be known as "the founding father of psychoanalysis." Freud was able to translate Bernheim's first two books on hypnotism and suggestion, arguing in his preface to the first (1888) that hypnotism linked up with "familiar phenomena of normal psychological life and sleep". His visit to Nancy to see what he called "Bernheim's astonishing experiments" gave him "the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of man". Freud read about the ideas of both Charcot and Bernheim and used hypnosis as a therapeutic method in his and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1895). and is sometimes considered to have represented a second Nancy School.

Origins

Impact

See also

References

Further reading

Works by members of the Nancy School

Contemporary studies