A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

inverted form) along which the understanding of hypnotism was to move in its passage from the
nineteenth century to the twentieth. As we shall see, hypnotism places a key role in the
discourse of alien abduction. As late as the nineteenth century, the power invested in the
invocation of a somnambulant state was decidedly skewed toward the hypnotist. It was an
exertion of will that put the subject into a “magnetic” trance. Over the course of the nineteenth
and into the twentieth century, the understanding shifted toward the other end of the continuum.
James Braid (1795-1860), a Manchester surgeon who used mesmerism in his practice, and who
coined the now more common term “hypnotism,” held that the successful induction of trance
state depended solely upon the subject’s belief. It was through the work of Braid and the
elaboration of that work in France by the Nancy School that the foundations of modern
hypnotism emerged.
A second way that Puységur’s work departed from that of his Viennese teacher was in the
somnambulant state itself. The cures provided by Mesmer were consistently preceded by the
patient entering into a convulsive fit or crise. Mesmer considered the crise an integral part of his
curative process, but Puységur was appalled by such “hellish convulsions” and pursued a method
purged of this distasteful element. 32
Replacing the crise, whether through design or accident,
was the taciturn and utterly plastic state of “magnetic” trance. The opposition between the
uncontrollable fit of muscular spasm that characterized the crise and the pliant, restful state of
Puységur’s trance could not be more pronounced. In part, the shift away from the crise is notable
because of the ways in which it rendered Mesmerism more palatable to an American sensibility.
The mechanisms of crise and release strongly suggest sexual parallels and Mesmer “freely
admitted employing a corps of young men to apply ‘subtle pressures upon the breasts with the
fingertips’ and to place their hands ‘in the neighborhood of the most sensitive parts of the body’”
when treating his predominantly upper-middle class female clients. “Mesmer epitomized
32 Brown, 2.
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