Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Charcot found that there were women suffering from hysteria,
often with accompanying paralysis, who were not insane but
experienced episodes that were disruptive and troubling.
He posited that this sort of hysteria was the result of a
traumatic event.
This was a radical proposition. Instead of seeing brain
injury as the cause of mental illness, Charcot suggested that
mind injury—a lived experience of a certain sort—caused
mental problems.
He also contended that there was an anatomical aspect,
that certain women had brain-based issues that made them
susceptible to hysteria, but the problem was in part experiential.
Once suffering, these women were capable of being hypnotized,
and the result of the hypnosis could be helpful.
Hypnosis was not, according to Charcot, something that
could happen to anyone, but rather, susceptibility to hypnosis
was itself a symptom of hysteria, albeit one that could have
curative powers. In this way, it was much like Breuer’s talkinduced
catharsis.
Freud went to Paris to learn from Charcot. He returned to Vienna and
found that hypnosis yielded mixed results. He became disillusioned
with hypnosis as the basis for therapy, but it was highly suggestive
in terms of a picture of the human mind.
Freud was fascinated with the fact that hypnotized subjects
sometimes recalled events they did not remember when awake
and fully conscious. This meant that there is a repository of
memories in the mind to which we do not usually have access,
and hypnotism was one route to tapping into them. Other methods,
such as free association or dream analysis, might be more reliable
than hypnotism but do essentially the same thing. Hypnosis is not
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