The paths of some discoveries are winding. Animal magnetism, with which Mesmer successfully treated, and which was condemned by the scientific commission of the Royal Academy in Paris under the leadership of the then American ambassador Benjamin Franklin (the commission also included Lavoisiére, later deprived of his head by the invention of another commission member, Dr. Guillotin), was not entirely forgotten. It was not about magnetism, but about suggestion and hypnosis, with which some individuals had experience already in ancient times, but preferred not to make it public. Through the itinerant Swiss magnetizer Lafontaine, this entertaining attraction for amusing audiences arrived in 1841 in Manchester, where the local physician James Braid (1769 – 1860) also attended the performance.
He considered the magnetizer a charlatan and attributed the fact that his test subjects closed their eyes on command to fatigue of the eyelids. But his inquisitive spirit did not allow him to simply dismiss it, and he began to try it himself. Unlike the members of the royal commission, he found that it worked. His first test subject was his wife, then close friends, and then he launched into it full force. He is even the creator1 of the term hypnosis in honor of the Greek god of sleep, Hypnos. In 1842 he published the article "Neurypnology or The Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered In Relation With Animal Magnetism2". Later he found that many hypnotic phenomena could be induced even without sleep, and so he tried to change the scientifically incorrect term to "monoideism." But it was too late, because hypnosis had already triumphantly spread into the world.
Despite British-French rivalry, it was most successfully established in Paris, where it was popularized by Hippolyte Bernheim, Jean Martin Charcot3, and Pierre Janet. Janet's patient, who relived a psychotraumatic event in hypnotic regression and set back into motion a hand afflicted by hysterical (today dissociative) paralysis, became known throughout the medical world. Thus the doors were opened – in official medicine – for psychotherapy. Charcot also found hysteria in men (thus making it a mental disorder and removing its link to the uterus) and received an answer from Vienna: Perhaps in the French, but never in the Austrians! Sigmund Freud worked and studied with Charcot for some time, and at the end of the war, the Czech (later active in Slovakia) professor Jaroslav Stuchlík also established contact with him. Professor Haškovec, on the other hand, studied in Paris with Charcot. At that time, psychotherapy was divided into two streams: the passive hypnotic one and the seemingly more active one with a predominance of verbal expression (Freud's psychoanalysis), where the therapist still firmly controls the direction according to his intentions. Various procedures from the fields of spa treatment, physiotherapy, and slowly penetrating Eastern philosophies were also added.
Professor Stuchlík came from the family of a teacher in eastern Bohemia. After graduating from the secondary school in Kutná Hora (1909), he studied natural sciences and medicine at the University of Zurich. In 1912 he married in London a fellow student, the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Soňou Sirotovou, with whom he studied psychiatry under E. Kraepelin in Munich in 1912–13, subsequently. 1913–14 he continued under E. Bleuler in Zurich, where he worked as an assistant. He graduated in medicine from the University of Zurich in 1914. His return to Bohemia in July 1914 prevented him from continuing his assistantship at Bleuler's clinic. He worked as a general practitioner in the countryside. In 1916 he was conscripted, but as a suspicious person he was kept in the rear. After the nostrification of his Zurich diploma at Prague University, he was deployed in 1917 to serve at the neurological clinic in Vienna, where he established personal contacts with S. Freud, A. Adler, and the psychoanalytic society. After liberation, he worked for almost 20 years as head physician of the neurological and psychiatric department of the State Hospital in Košice.
Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist
1 I love the English word "coiner," which literally means someone who coins, both coins and paths. 2 Neurypnology or the rationale of nervous sleep considered in relation to animal magnetism. 3 Axel Munthe speaks very critically and unflatteringly about Charcot's public performances with hysterical patients, which smacked of a circus, as well as about Charcot's pseudotherapy, in his book The Book of Life and Death, and there is no reason to doubt his words.