You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

before moving magnets over their bodies to direct and balance this magnetic fluid. Later, he found that he could wave his hands (without the magnets) to produce the same effect. Soon after each session began, his patients would start trembling and twitching before going into convulsions that Mesmer considered therapeutic. Mesmer would continue the fluid balancing until they were calm again. He used this technique to heal a variety of maladies, from serious conditions like paralysis and convulsive disorders to more minor difficulties, such as menstrual problems and hemorrhoids.
In what became his most famous case, Mesmer partially cured teenage concert pianist Maria-Theresia von Paradis of hysterical blindness a psychosomatic condition she’d had since about the age of three. She stayed in Mesmer’s home for weeks as he worked with her and finally helped her to be able to perceive motion and even distinguish color. But her parents were less than overjoyed by her progress, because they stood to lose a royal pension if their daughter was cured. In addition, as her sight returned, her piano playing deteriorated because she now was able to watch her fingers on the keyboard. Rumors, never substantiated, began circulating that Mesmer’s relationship to the pianist was improper. Her parents forcibly removed her from Mesmer’s house, her blindness returned, and Mesmer’s reputation diminished considerably.
Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, a French aristocrat known as the
Marquis de Puységur, observed Mesmer and took his ideas to the next level. Puységur would induce a deep state that he called magnetic somnambulism (similar to sleepwalking, in which his subjects had access to deep thoughts and even intuitions about their health and that of others. In this state, they were extremely suggestible and would follow instructions, although they had no memory of what happened once they came out of it. Whereas Mesmer thought that the power was in the practitioner over the subject, Puységur believed that the power was in the thought of the subject (directed by the practitioner) over his or her own body this was perhaps one of the first therapeutic attempts to explore the mind-body relationship.
In the s, Scottish surgeon James Braid took the idea of mesmerism still further, developing a concept he called “neurypnotism” (what we now know as hypnotism. Braid became intrigued by the idea when one day he arrived late for an appointment only to find his waiting patient calmly staring in intense fascination at the flickering flame of an oil lamp.
Braid found the patient to be in an extremely suggestible state as long as his attention remained so locked, thereby fatiguing certain parts of his brain.
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After many experiments, Braid learned to get his subjects to concentrate on a single idea while staring at an object, which put them into a similar trance that he felt he could use to cure their disorders,
including chronic rheumatoid arthritis, sensory impairment, and the various complications of spinal injuries and stroke. Braid’s book
Neurypnology details many of his successes, including the story of how he cured both a 33-year-old woman whose legs were paralyzed and a 54- year-old woman with a skin disorder and severe headaches.
Then esteemed French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot weighed in on
Braid’s work, claiming that the ability to go into such a trance was possible only in those suffering from the condition of hysteria, which he considered an inherited neurological disorder that was irreversible. He used hypnosis not to cure patients, but to study their symptoms. Finally, a rival of Charcot’s, a doctor named Hippolyte Bernheim at the University of Nancy, insisted that the suggestibility so central to hypnotism was not confined to hysterics but was a natural condition for all humans. He implanted ideas in subjects, telling them that when they awoke from their trance, they would feel better and their symptoms would disappear;
thus he used the power of suggestion as a therapeutic tool. Bernheim’s work continued into the early 1900s.
Although each of these early explorers of suggestibility had a slightly different focus and technique, they were all able to help hundreds and hundreds of people heal a wide variety of physical and mental problems by changing their minds about their maladies and about how those illnesses were expressed in their bodies.
During the first two world wars, military doctors, most notably Army psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, used the concept of hypnotic suggestibility
(which I’ll discuss further later) to help returning soldiers who suffered from the trauma that was first labeled shell shock but is now known as

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