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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Stefan's Zweig Mental Healers is a triple biography of Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy and Sigmund Freud, three influential thinkers who travelled very different paths in their search for the crucial link between mind and body. Stefan Zweig's brilliant study explores the lives and work of these important figures, raising provocative questions regarding the efficacy and even the morality of their methods. An insight into the minds of three key thinkers who shaped the philosophy of our age, Stefan Zweig'sMental Healers is a wonderfully intriguing and thought-provoking biographical work from a renowned master of the genre. Mental Healers is translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul and published by Pushkin Press
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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STEFAN ZWEIG
MENTAL HEALERS
MESMER, EDDY, FREUD
Translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul
CONTENTS
To Albert Einstein
In Homage
INTRODUCTION
Every natural affliction is a reminder of a more exalted home.
Novalis
HEALTH IS NATURAL; sickness is unnatural; at least so it seems to man. Health is taken as a matter of course, just as that the lungs breathe in air and the eyes react to light; it is the tranquil background which merges inconspicuously in the general well-being of life. Sickness, on the other hand, thrusts itself forward as an alien; hurls itself haphazard into the body, terrifying the soul, and arousing a multitude of problems and heart-searchings. Who can have sent this enemy into the camp of our lives? Has he come to stay, or can he be driven forth? Is he amenable to prayers or to commands? Having once got a firm grip, illness arouses many contradictory feelings in the mind: dread, faith, hope, despair, resentment, meekness, resignation, doubt. It teaches a man to think, to question, to pray, to raise his affrighted eyes heavenward and create there a being to whom he can confide his anxiety. Suffering first taught humanity to fashion a god, and thus engendered the religious sentiment.
Since good health is a natural attribute of man it is not to be explained, and demands no explanation. Yet the sufferer invariably tries to find a meaning for his suffering. Man has never had courage to face the fact that illness assails him quite senselessly, that there is no aim or purpose in the fever which consumes his body and causes every limb and muscle to ache and to burn. The absolute senselessness of pain, of an agony which for the nonce obliterates the whole of the moral world-order, is incomprehensible to humanity at large. Illness invariably appears to be sent by somebody, and the intangible being who sends it must, it would seem, have a reason for thrusting it upon the particular body in question. Some one must be angry with the afflicted man, must have a grudge to work off against him, must hate him. Some one must have a desire to punish him for committing a sin, a crime, for having transgressed a commandment. And this some one can be none other than he to whom all things are possible, he who sends his lightnings from, heaven, who scorches the fields with heat or devastates them with frost, who makes the stars to shine or blots out their effulgence, he who is almighty—God. From the dawn of human history, therefore, the occurrence of disease has been inseparably linked with religious thought and feeling.
The gods are responsible for illness; the gods alone have power to cure: this conviction is an invariable prelude to the rise of the art of healing. Primitive man was ignorant of his own powers; in face of sickness he was helpless, alone, weak; he knew of no other way than to turn to his gods for succour and beseech them not to forsake him in his need. The only curative art known to him was an appeal to magic, to prayer, to the sacrificial knife. He was defenceless against the all-powerful one who dwelt in the realm of the shades and against whom it was vain to struggle. It behoved a man, therefore, to be humble, to ask forgiveness, to pray, to beseech, in order that the pain might be removed. But how was the invisible deity to be reached? How was he to be addressed, seeing that none knew his abiding place? How prove to him one’s penitence, one’s subjection, one’s willingness to make the expected sacrifice, one’s desire to take a pledge of future good behaviour; how discover a means of communication? In its childhood days, humanity could give no answer to these questionings. God does not reveal himself to the ignorant, he does not note the everyday doings of poor, dumb mortals, does not deign to answer, does not incline his ear. Man in his distress had to seek a brother man to act as mediator between himself and god, a man wiser than himself, one with wider experience, who knew the words that would open the magic doors, that would conciliate the powers of darkness and would assuage the wrath of the unseen ruler. In primitive times the only mediator between man and god was the priest.
The fight against disease was, then, not a fight against a particular illness, but a hand-to-hand struggle to find god. All medical art, at the outset, takes a theological cast, becomes a cult, a ritual, a form of magic, a spiritual combat of man against divine chastening. Bodily suffering is not assuaged by technical manipulation, but through an act of faith. Illness is not analysed, one does not search out the causes of the affliction: on the contrary, one seeks god. One does not endeavour to treat disease, but to pray it out of existence; to repent that the ailment may be alleviated; to barter it away to god by vows, offerings, and ceremonies: for just as the sickness was sent by supernatural powers, so, too, it will be taken away by the same powers. Thus unity of sensation is contraposed to unity of phenomenon. There is a unit of disease and a unit of health, and for disease there is but one cause and one remedy: god. Between god and pain there is but one mediator: the priest, guardian of the body and of the soul. The world has not yet undergone division, it is not yet sundered; belief and knowledge form a unity in the sanctuary of the temple. Deliverance from suffering cannot be achieved without the intervention of spiritual powers, without rites and ceremonies, pledges and prayers. Thus the priests ply their medical art not in the spirit we now term scientific, but as a mystery. They study the strange movements of the stars, they interpret dreams, they master demons. Their magic cannot be learned by common mortals; it is handed on by tradition to the initiated from generation to generation; and although the priests have discovered much of medical science through experience, they never give purely practical advice. Invariably a cure is ascribed to miraculous intervention; hence the need for a sanctified enclosure wherein the miracle may be performed, to the accompaniment of prayer and in the very presence of the gods. When the patient’s mind and body have been thoroughly cleansed, then only is he in a fit condition to hear the holy words. The pilgrims who flocked to the temple at Epidaurus (where flourished the cult of Æsculapius), coming as they did from far and wide, bathed on the eve of the ceremonies, slew beasts for the sacrifice, and in the holy precincts slept the night upon the skins of the rams they had slaughtered. When morning came they told the priest their dreams, and awaited the sacerdotal interpretation: all these things being duly accomplished, the priest could bless them and administer medical aid. But the precondition of every cure was the uplifting of the heart to god as an act of faith; for he who desires the miracle of recovery must prepare himself in the appointed fashion. To the primitive mind, medical science is inseparable from divine doctrine; medical science and theology are one body and one soul.
But this primitive unity soon came to be broken up. If science is to become independent, if practical assistance is to be given to the patient and his symptoms are to be relieved, illness must be divested of its divine origin, and the religious formulas—sacrificial offering, ritual, prayer—must be proved to be entirely superfluous. At first the same individual combined the functions of doctor and priest; later, the two became rivals. This was the tragedy of Empedocles, who was both high priest and physician. The doctor, as a secular practitioner, tore away the supernatural trappings with which suffering had primitively been invested, and referred all pain to natural causation; he endeavoured by natural means, by simples, juices, solutions of mineral ores, and so forth, to calm the disorders within. The priest learned by degrees to limit his activities to the service of god, leaving the treatment of disease to the physician, who in his turn confined his energies to this field, renouncing spiritual exhortation, ritual, and magic. Once the two functions had been divorced, they developed along lines of their own. This tremendous severance of a sometime unity gave an entirely new turn to all the elements of the art of healing, and endowed them with fresh significance. First of all, the aggregate known as “illness” became broken up into innumerable separate ailments capable of classification. The process of disintegration resulted in a partial detachment of the disease from the spiritual personality of man. Henceforth, illness no longer encompassed the entire body but affected merely one of the bodily organs. Virchow said, in the course of a congress held at Rome: “There are no general diseases. From now on, we shall recognize only diseases of organs and cells.”
Thus the physician’s role was gradually modified. Whereas formerly it was his mission to fight disease as an aggregate entity, he was now reduced to the smaller task of localizing the ailment and ascribing it to an already specified group of diseases. By the time the modern doctor has correctly diagnosed the complaint and given it a name, his task is almost at an end, for thereafter he has merely to set in motion the prescribed treatment. Therapeutics having been entirely separated from religious dogma and from magic, having indeed become a science, can in modern times be practised with a fair amount of security from the grosser blunders which individual divination entails. Even if, with a rhetorical flourish, we still choose to speak of “the medical art,” this must only be interpreted in the very restricted sense in which it can be applied to any well-executed handicraft. No longer does therapeutics demand from its practitioners that they be chosen from the elect, no longer are the mysterious gifts of the seer looked for among them, no longer are they expected to be peculiarly attuned to the universal rhythms of nature. What was once a vocation is now a career, what was once magic has been systematized; the secret arts of treatment and cure have become pharmaceutical science and organotherapy. A cure is no longer looked upon as a miracle or as an act of faith, but as an affair of calculated and rational achievement on the part of a physician. Acquired knowledge has replaced the spontaneity of guesswork; the medical treatise has ousted the “logos,” the creative word of the priest, which in bygone days was pregnant with mystery. Whereas of old the priest-doctor was expected to be filled with the divine afflatus, the clinical and diagnostic methods of the contemporary physician demand a nerveless clarity of mind and complete tranquillity of soul.
It was impossible to avoid that in the course of the nineteenth century such a process of conversion to practical and specialist ends should lead physicians into excesses, for a third entity inevitably slipped itself in between patient and practitioner, an entity which was absolutely devoid of spirituality, an entity we may call “the apparatus.” More and more superfluous for diagnostic purposes had now become the penetrative insight and imaginative comprehension of symptoms, which are the gifts of the born healer. Through the microscope, these gifts were made available to every medical man, for by its means bacteria and other micro-organisms were discovered. Then instruments were invented to measure the tension and rhythm of the blood as it pulsed through the arteries. Röntgen rays came to aid the doctor in seeing the deeper layers of the body, so that he had no longer to rely on his “intuition” to inform him of what was amiss. More and more has diagnosis become a matter of laboratory research, thus relieving him of a greater part of the need for personal experience and observation. The chemical factory, in its turn, supplies readymade articles for use in treatment, so that no longer, as in the Middle Ages, does the physician have to dispense his own prescriptions.
Technical accuracy, although introduced later into the realm of medicine than into any other field of science, has nevertheless invaded this domain successfully in modern times, and has reduced the process of healing the sick to a finely differentiated, a minutely shaded, system. Instead of being an extraordinary intrusion from the outer world into the private life of the individual, sickness has become something very different indeed, something which is the complete opposite of what it was in the days of primitive man. It has become an ordinary and typical “case” whose duration can be calculated in advance, whose course can be mechanically reckoned, a mere sample of a rational and accountable phenomenon.
To this rationalization of disease from within outward there is now superadded another force: that of organization. In the hospitals, those huge warehouses of human suffering, the sick are put into separate departments, just as in a business undertaking the various sections are differentiated one from another. The doctors, too, are highly specialized; they go from bed to bed examining the diseased organ and hardly ever find time to look into the eyes of the human being whose suffering needs relief. The mammoth organization of sick-benefits and insurance likewise plays its part in the despiritualization of ill health, and more and more tends to rob disease of individuality, so that a large-scale industry arises, in the running of which there is never a moment’s leisure for personal contact between physician and patient, and wherein there is no longer a trace of magnetic rapport between the soul of the healer and the soul of the healed. The family doctor is dying out, a relic from the infant years of man’s life; and yet he was the sole remaining person to recognize the human being in his patient, to be acquainted not only with the sick man’s present ailing condition and the prospect of alleviating the morbid symptoms, but, furthermore, to be well informed concerning the sufferer’s family and his biological peculiarities. He is also the sole survivor from those primitive days to combine some of the functions of priest and healer. But time gives him the go-by; he is being elbowed out of existence; he outrages the laws of specialization and systematization; he has to suffer the fate of the horse superseded by the motor car. He is too human a thing to fit into the framework of the advanced mechanization of medicine.
The vast masses of the people have, unconsciously perhaps but with an intuitive foreshadowing of the consequences, ever striven against this despiritualization and depersonalization of the healing art. Just as of old, so now, the more primitive, the less highly cultured among mankind still look upon illness as something supernatural, still look upon it with awe; now, as of yore, the simple-minded attempt to cure disease by spiritual acts of hope and fear, by prayer, and by vows; always the first thought of the uneducated man when he sees himself laid low by ill health is not whether his malady is infectious, whether it may be arteriosclerosis or what not, but—god. No amount of argument will ever convince him that disease arises “naturally” and “irrationally,” and that therefore the sufferer is in no way to blame for its attack. He is suspicious of every practitioner who endeavours to counteract the disease by simple, technical, cool-headed means, and looks upon such methods as unutterably soulless. The thoroughly qualified medical man is cold-shouldered by the common people because of the need—an inherited instinct, as it were—for the primitive “nature doctor,” the healer who shares in the brotherhood of beast and plant, who is intimately related to the universal scheme of things, who is gifted with mysterious powers, who is a born healer and not merely a person who has passed examinations and thereby has acquired authority to ladle out medicines and prescribe treatment. The people does not want the expert who has a scientific knowledge of disease; what it desires is the medicine man who has power to oust the ailment. Witches and devils may indeed have fled before the glare of the electric light, yet nevertheless a belief in these magic beings is far more widespread than we are wont to imagine, and has remained alive all along. The same awesome reverence the educated classes are accustomed to pay to genius wherever it manifests itself, whether in a Beethoven, a Balzac, or a Van Gogh, is paid by the common people to those who seem to possess the power of healing, or who appear to be endowed with this power in a higher degree than is normal or customary. The folk invariably craves as mediator the warm-blooded, vital man from whom “power goes forth,” rather than the cold, impersonal instrument of cure. Women wise in the lore of plants, persons gifted with second sight, and the like (precisely because they practise healing, not as a science, but as an art—and forsooth a black art long since forbidden by law), exercise a greater attraction upon the simple village mind than does the most accomplished of regular doctors. To the extent that medicine becomes more technical, more rational, more specialized, does the instinct of the masses rise up against it. This popular tendency to fight shy of academic medicine has been working darkly and subterraneously in the folk soul for centuries, in spite of the ever-growing facilities for elementary education.
Scientific men have been aware of this opposition, and have endeavoured unavailingly to combat it. Nor did they help their own cause when they allied themselves with the powers of the State to make “nature healing” and cure-mongering illegal. For these popular methods, underlaid as they are by religious superstition, cannot be annihilated by a mere paragraph in a legal code. Today, as in the Middle Ages, numberless unqualified persons are practising the healer’s art; they are unqualified, and are therefore defying the law, but they persist despite the guerrilla warfare which rages between nature healers and religious healers, on the one hand, and scientifically trained medical practitioners, on the other. Nevertheless the most dangerous opponents of academic science have not arisen from the cottages of the peasants or the tents of the gipsies, but from the ranks of the medical men themselves. Just as the French revolution, and subsequent revolutions, did not draw leaders from among the broad masses of the people but overthrew the aristocracy with the aid of the sons of aristocrats who took up arms against aristocratic domination, so in the struggle against the excessive specialization of academic medicine it is the individual practitioner who becomes a leader of revolt. Paracelsus was the first to declaim against the lifting of the veils from the miracle of cure and against the despiritualization of disease. With great obstinacy and arrogance he inveighed against the “doctores” of the day, accusing them of mere book-learning, of looking upon the microcosm hidden away in man as a clockwork machine which could be taken to pieces and put together again. He attacked the dogmatic assurance of a science which had lost contact with the higher magic of “natura naturans,” which neither knew of nor even suspected the existence of the elemental forces of nature, nor recognized the sympathetic current passing from the world-soul through the individual soul and thence to all those who come in contact with the individual. Although many of his recipes now seem to us of dubious efficacy, yet the spiritual influence of this man grew inconspicuously until at the opening of the nineteenth century it was one of the factors that gave rise to the “Romantic school of medicine.” This was a late offshoot of the philosophical and literary movement known by the name of Romanticism, and its adepts proclaimed anew the higher unity of body and soul. Believing unconditionally in the universal soul of nature, they were convinced that Dame Nature was the wisest healer and needed man at most as an assistant. Just as the blood, knowing naught of chemistry, itself manufactures antitoxins in case of need, so the organism, which is able under ordinary circumstances to maintain itself, to look after itself adequately, and so forth, can usually overcome sickness unaided. The essential aim of the healing art as applied to man must be, therefore, not to interfere with the course of nature, but merely to strengthen the will-to-health which is ever ready to our hand. The trend towards health can be fostered as effectively by spiritual, mental, and religious means, as by the coarser methods of mechanics or chemistry. Actual achievement in the way of cure comes in truth from within and never from without. Nature itself is this “inner” doctor whom we all bear inside us from the day of our birth, and who, therefore, knows a great deal more about us than can any specialist observing exterior symptoms. The Romantic school of medicine once again brought harmony into the threefold problem of sickness, the organism, and cure.
A whole series of systems was erected in the course of the nineteenth century upon the basic idea of the natural resistance of the organism to disease. Mesmer founded his doctrine of animal magnetism upon the will-to-health latent in mankind; the Christian Scientists base their ideas upon faith manifesting itself as the productive energy of self-knowledge; and just as these make use of the inner forces of nature, so do other masters of the healing art make use of such external adjuvants as homoeopathy (the curative principle or method announced by Hahnemann), or water, sunshine (Kneipp), etc. All possess one thing in common—a refusal to have recourse to any sort of chemical medication, to any sort of apparatus, and, consequently, to all the most conspicuous achievements of modern science. The hostility of these nature healers, these wonder workers, these mental curers, to expert academic pathology and the doctrine of disease localization may be expressed in a single formula: scientific medicine looks upon the sick man and his disease objectively, ascribing to the patient an absolutely passive role. The patient has nothing to say in the matter, he has no questions to ask, has merely to obey the doctor’s orders, to follow a regimen blindly, to refrain as much as possible from taking any active part in the process of cure. The key to the whole affair lies in the “treatment”; for whereas academic and scientific medicine “treats” the patient as an “object,” mental healing demands that he shall “treat” himself, shall look upon himself as the subject, as the person mainly responsible for bringing about a cure, as an active participator in the fight against disease. The special and indeed only medication used in psychical doctoring is precisely this appeal to the patient himself, this summoning of his own spiritual forces to the rescue, this concentration of the entirety of his being to vanquish the entirety of the disease. The master’s role as helper is mainly confined to the utterance of the appropriate word. He who knows the miracle of the logos, the marvels a creative word is capable of performing, he who knows the magic influence the lips may have as they mutter in the void, building untold worlds or destroying them, he who knows these things will not be surprised when he learns that in the sphere of healing, as in other spheres, a single utterance can have stupendous effects, that a look accompanying the word, this visual message travelling from one personality to the other, has been able to restore a completely broken-down organism to radiant health by means of the spirit or, if you will, the mind. Yet, amazing though they are, such cures are not miracles, nor are they rare occurrences; they indicate merely the close relationship which exists between body and mind, a relationship which in the future may be made clearer to us and more understandable. Enough for us in our day to recognize that the body may be cured of its afflictions through the mind, and to pay due heed to certain phenomena in this realm which cannot (as yet, at any rate) be explained on purely scientific lines.
For my part, I am inclined to look upon this expulsion of certain masters of healing from the ranks of academic medicine as one of the most interesting episodes in the history of our civilization. Nothing is to be compared to the dramatic power of spiritual achievement which is to be witnessed when one puny and isolated human being sets himself in opposition to a world-embracing organization. It matters not whether he be a slave like Spartacus, a slave who has often winced under the lash, who musters his band of rebels against the legions and cohorts of the Roman empire; or a Pugachoff, a poverty-stricken Cossack, who raises an army to oppose the Russian colossus; or a Luther, a learned Augustinian monk, who attacks the all-powerful Fides Catholica—always when one man, relying upon his inner conviction, sets himself in opposition to the allied forces of an entire world and marches forth to a battle which to all appearance must end in personal disaster, precisely at such a moment does his spirit come into communion with his fellow mortals, inspiring them creatively, and producing, out of nothing, immeasurable powers. Each of the great fanatics of mental healing has gathered myriads of disciples around him, each has astounded his contemporaries by his cures, each has shaken the qualified medical world by the prowess of his deeds, and from each a mighty stream of influence has overflowed into the scientific sphere. It is strange to reflect that in an epoch when medical knowledge has been so enlarged by the fabulous development of its technique as literally to perform miracles; when by means of this perfected technique it is able to dissect the tiniest atom and molecule of the living substance, to examine it, photograph it, measure it, influence it, and change it; when all other exact sciences dance attendance on it; and when there is no further mystery to solve in regard to organic matter—that just at such a time a number of independent observers should arise to point out how superfluous in many cases is the whole apparatus of science. They show openly and incontestably that today, as of old, cures can be effected by no more intricate means than by setting the mind of the patient to work, and they bring healing even to those who have previously been the despair of the qualified physician and his huge machinery of precision.
Looked at dispassionately, the system of these irregular practitioners is hard to grasp and often appears ludicrously simple. The healer and the patient sit peacefully side by side, and seem to be talking pleasantly one to the other. There is no Röntgen photography, there are no measuring instruments, no electrical apparatus, no ultra-violet rays, not even is there a clinical thermometer to be seen; there is no sign of the vast technical armamentarium which is the legitimate pride of our era. And yet the age-old methods of these interlopers are often more satisfactory in their results than the whole of advanced therapeutics put together. The fact that trains run regularly has not changed mankind’s spiritual constitution; do not they bring thousands upon thousands of pilgrims every year to the grotto at Lourdes, where the ailing look to miracle alone for a cure? We know all about high-frequency currents, and yet this does not modify our attitude towards the mysterious. Nothing has gone further to prove the existence of a very energetic faith still residing in the heart of modern man than the widespread success of suggestion and miraculous healing as late as the twentieth century; and the fact that the bacteriological and cellular trend of medical treatment has for many years been deliberately ignored by the bulk of humanity is largely due to the stubborn denial by physicians of the power of the irrational and the spiritual to effect a cure, and to the determined exclusion of these forces from the field of exact medical science.
Of course none of these neo-ancient methods of cure have ever really shaken the magnificent organization of modern medical science, incomparably perfect in its thoroughness and its many-sidedness. The success of certain mental and spiritual systems of healing in no way goes to prove that scientific medicine is wrong; all that it shows up is the dogmatism which maintains that the only sound treatment of disease is the latest invention and that anything anterior to this derniercri is old-fashioned, wrong-headed, and utterly useless. It is the arrogant assumption of impeccability which has been undermined. Not only have the psychical methods of treatment which I propose to discuss in this book been undeniably successful, but they have given doctors pause, have forced them to reconsider many foregone conclusions, so that even we laymen are aware of a doubt creeping into the minds of such notable physicians as Sauerbruch, who has publicly conceded that “perhaps the purely bacteriological and serological conception of disease may have led medical science into a blind alley.” We cannot help wondering whether specialization on the one hand and on the other the predominance of quantitative calculation instead of personal diagnosis have not insidiously diverted medicine from its proper sphere, its service to mankind, and transformed it into a thing existing for its own sake, antagonistic to man, so that, to quote a famous epigram, “the doctor has become too much the medical expert.” What today goes by the name of “queasiness of conscience in the medical world” certainly does not refer to doubts as to the efficacy of expertise. It is merely part of the general feeling of uncertainty now prevalent in Europe, part of that universal relativism which, after decades of arbitrary assertion and unmitigated rejection in every branch of science, is teaching experts at long last to cry a halt and to ask themselves a few questions. Broad-mindedness, which has, alas, never been the foible of the academically trained, is beginning to come into its own—and this is certainly a matter for rejoicing.
As a token of the change of heart we have Aschner’s admirable book Die Krise in der Medizin, a volume packed with surprises, showing how methods of treatment which yesterday were laughed out of court as medieval, such as bloodletting and cauterization, have today returned to favour and are considered the very latest mode. Medical men are seriously considering the question of mental healing, inquisitively searching out the laws which govern the process, and endeavouring to correlate the outward manifestations of a psychical phenomenon with their exact clinical knowledge. These psychical phenomena are no longer despised as they were in the nineteenth century; no longer are they looked upon by the learned as trickery, lies, and humbug. Unobtrusively there is, creeping into the medical man’s attitude, a hankering after the old universalism; a desire to bring purely local pathology more into line with constitutional therapy; an endeavour, not merely to know the diseases from which mankind suffers, but to know the personality of the patient as well. Curiosity led men to study the body with its cells and molecules; such detailed investigation was undoubtedly necessary; but now the medical eye is turning to contemplate the whole individual whose organism is invaded by disease, and, behind the local manifestations of sickness, to seek out the higher causes. New sciences are arising—typology, physiognomy, heredity, psychoanalysis, individual psychology (I mention but a few)—to prove that every man is an entity in himself and not merely a member of a species. The unity of each human personality has once again come to play a predominant role. The successes achieved by extra-academic psychology, the phenomena of suggestion, of autosuggestion, the teachings of Freud and Adler—all these things are coming more and more to arouse the attention of all intelligent physicians.
Separated for centuries, the two streams of organic and of mental therapy are once again flowing towards one another, for all development is forced to return, on a higher level, to the point whence it set forth. Here we have a repetition of Goethe’s symbol of the spiral. Mechanics in the end questions the ultimate law of motion; separated entities strive to recapture their lost unity; the rational reverts to the irrational; and when for centuries one-sided and rigid scientific investigation has searched out to the ultimate foundation the form and substance of the human body, the question of “the mind which builds the body” once more pushes itself to the forefront of our problem.
I do not propose here to undertake a systematic history of every kind of mental healing. My only desire is to portray ideas as embodied in certain human lives. A thought grows in a man’s brain, and then leaps from this man to invade the whole world. It seems to me that such a spiritual happening makes the idea more concretely intelligible than could any formal or detailed history of its origin and spread. I have, therefore, chosen three persons who, going their several ways, have worked upon the same principle and brought healing to hundreds of thousands: Mesmer, by means of suggestion, strengthening the will-to-health; Mary Baker Eddy, by the anaesthetic ecstasy of faith, conjuring pain and sickness out of the world; Freud, by rendering the patient aware of the conflict that burdens the unconscious and thus enabling him to escape its spell. I have neither practised these methods myself, nor had them applied to me; I am not fanatically convinced of the efficacy of any of them, nor am I moved to write about them out of gratitude. Hence I hope that, since I have made my selection purely on the ground of the psychological interest all of these three figures and their teaching manifest, I shall not be accused of being a mesmerist or a Christian Scientist or a devotee of psychoanalysis. I am well aware that these doctrines could only become effective by an exaggeration of their fundamental principle, that each of them represents a further whetting of what has already been whetted to an extreme. Still, I may exclaim with the worthy Hans Sachs, “I do not say that this is a fault!” Just as a wave is always striving to a point beyond its own undulation, so does the developmental energy of thought seek its widest fulfilment. The value of an idea cannot depend upon how it is realized in fact, but upon what of reality it contains; not upon what it is, but upon what it does. As Paul Valéry profoundly remarks: “The world becomes of value only through extremes, but it exists only thanks to mediocrity.”
—Salzburg, 1930
FRANZ ANTON MESMER
(1733–1815)
You must know that the will is a powerful adjuvant in medicine.
Paracelsus
THE PRECURSOR
Nothing is so prone to have frivolous judgments passed upon it as the character of a man, and yet in this very matter the greatest caution should be observed. Seldom does one stop to consider the man as a whole, though it is the entirety of the human being which makes up his character. I have found that those who are deemed bad invariably succeed, whereas the good folk lose in the game of life.
Lichtenberg
FOR A CENTURY OR MORE, Franz Anton Mesmer, this Winkelried of the modern art of mental healing, has suffered disgrace along with swindlers and charlatans; he has shared the fate of Cagliostro, of the Comte de Saint-Germain, of John Law, and of other adventurers. Vainly did Schopenhauer protest against this dishonouring verdict of the universities, declaring that mesmerism was “from the philosophical standpoint the most pregnant of all discoveries, even though for the moment it propounded more riddles than it solved.” But what judgment is more difficult to reverse than one which is highly coloured with prejudice? Evil communications pass quickly from one person to another, spreading far and wide. Thus it has come to pass that one of the most upright of German investigators, one of the boldest trail-breakers, one who was guided and misguided by a mysterious urge into the discovery of a new science, has been looked upon as a fanciful dreamer, a cloudy enthusiast. And yet no one went to the trouble of looking for the truth among the exaggerations of Mesmer’s earlier theories, truths weighty with consequences for the whole of mankind.
The tragedy of Mesmer’s life was that he was born too late and lived too soon. He grew to manhood in an “ultrawise” (to use Schopenhauer’s expression) era, the era of the Enlightenment, an era that prided itself upon the development of the rational faculties to the exclusion of intuition. The darkness and ignorance of the Middle Ages, with its awed and muddle-headed respect for what it surmised but did not know, were followed by the superficiality of the encyclopaedists, who knew all there was to know, so that the world of thought came under the crudely materialistic dictatorship of Holbach, Lamettrie, and Condillac, who looked upon the universe as an interesting mechanism capable of improvement, and upon man as a curious kind of thinking automaton. Puffed out with pride because the burning of witches was no longer in fashion, because they had shown to their own satisfaction that the Bible was no more than a collection of fairy-tales, and because Franklin with the lightning conductor had deprived God of his thunderbolts—these sons of the Enlightenment (and their puny German imitators) declared that anything which could not be held in a pair of dissecting forceps or proved by rule of three was preposterous delusion, and believed that in this way they had swept, not only superstition, but likewise the last traces of mystery or mysticism out of their universe of Le dictionnairephilosophique, which was luminous as glass, clear as glass—and no less fragile! In their brazen arrogance they decreed that whatever was not mathematically demonstrable could only be a phantom; and that what the senses could not perceive was not merely incomprehensible, but simply non-existent.
Into an epoch which deified itself, which was fatuously self-complacent, and which lacked both humility and reverence, there now entered a man who affirmed that our universe was by no means an empty, soulless place, an inert, unspiritual void, indifferent to the lives of those who inhabited it. Quite otherwise. The universe, he contended, was permeated by invisible, intangible waves which could be sensed only by the inner faculties; it was full of mysterious streams and tensions which for ever touched and vivified one another, soul to soul, sense to sense. So far these forces had never been grasped, had never been named; maybe they were identical with those which flash from star to star, which cause sleepwalkers to wander in the moonlight. Might not this fluid, this universal substance, travel from man to man, might it not bring about changes in mental and bodily ailments and thereby reinstate that sublimest of harmonies, the harmony we call health? Franz Anton Mesmer was not so bold as to invent a name for this primal force, whose source and nature were still unknown. Enough, for the time being to christen it, by analogy, “magnetism.” He begged the learned professors and academicians to put the discovery to the test, to see for themselves how marvellous were the effects of mere manipulation with the finger-tips. Let these gentlemen examine with unbiased minds the enigmatical morbid crises from which certain patients suffered; let them note the quasi-magical recovery induced by magnetic passes (or by what we should now term suggestive treatment). But the professorial enlightenment of the academicians made it impossible for them to consider without prejudice the phenomena demonstrated by Mesmer, although he repeated his tests a hundred times. This “fluid,” this “sympathetic” power of transmission, whose essence no one could explain (a suspicious fact in itself!), did not find mention in that compendium of all oracular utterances, Le dictionnaire philosophique. Consequently, there could be nothing of the sort in the universe. The phenomena called into being by Mesmer could not be explained on purely rationalistic grounds. Consequently, they did not exist.
Let me stress my point. Franz Anton Mesmer was born a century too soon, and he flourished a couple of centuries too late. In earlier days the medical world would have followed his experiments with keen interest, for the broad-mindedness of the Middle Ages had a place for things that were incomprehensible. In the Middle Ages, men were still capable of astonishment, and they had more faith in what stirred them than in any outward semblance. They were ready, perhaps over-ready, to believe; and the philosophers of the epoch, whether theologically trained or lay, would not have considered Mesmer’s doctrines absurd; they would have accepted the idea of macrocosm responding to microcosm, of world-soul communicating with individual soul, of planets exercising an influence upon the human body; they would even have taken for granted Mesmer’s contention that one person acts in some mysterious way upon another by the magic of a will competent to set the “fluid of animal magnetism” in motion. In the medieval mind, Mesmer’s experiments would have aroused no misgiving, but merely curiosity and interest. Nor did Mesmer’s contemporaries, though already inspired with the spirit of modern science, incline at first to regard the psychotechnic activities of this first of the magnetizers as partaking of the nature of either humbug or miracle.
Precisely because today we are almost hourly confronted with fresh miracles in the world of physics and biology, we are loath to cast a slur of doubt upon anything which yesterday appeared improbable. In actual fact, many of Mesmer’s theories are now coming into line with more recent discoveries. Who would venture to deny that our nerves and senses are in some strange way influenced by external forces; that they are the plaything, the sport, of atmospheric pressure; that innumerable external and internal influences act suggestively upon us? We, whose lightest word may be transmitted in a second of time across oceans and continents, are being taught day by day afresh that our ether is full of vibrations and other subtle influences. Mesmer’s ideas no longer frighten us. We know that our personality is the wellspring of an energy which radiates far beyond the limits of our bodily nerves in mysterious waves that modify other wills than our own. But Mesmer came at an epoch which, if I may be allowed the expression, possessed no organs of premonition, no organs for vaguely, darkly, and awesomely foreseeing what might be possible. It was an epoch which was incapable of creating a chiaroscuro for spiritual and mental happenings. What it demanded before all was order and light. It had no place for that twilit realm where the creative transition from unconscious to conscious has its beginnings. And because it did not recognize the constructive and individual powers proper to the mind, the medical science of the period could only perceive the clockwork machinery of homo sapiens; and could only discern, in one whose mental working was disordered, that something had gone wrong with the organs, with the body which set the machinery in motion. The over-rationalized mind could not perceive the devastations going on in the soul of the patient. No wonder that the approved remedies in such cases were purgatives, cold water, and bloodletting. The unfortunates who suffered from mental ailments were bound to a wheel and spun round and round until they foamed at the mouth, or they were flogged into insensibility; the epileptic was drenched with medicaments supposed to be “anti-convulsant,” and nervous affections were declared to be non-existent, simply because the doctors of the day did not know how to cure them. When, therefore, an outsider like Mesmer was able to relieve such maladies from the start by his magnetic method with its unfashionable aroma of magic, the faculty of medicine looked on askance, declaring the whole thing to be hocus-pocus.
Mesmer stood absolutely alone, he had to fight for his principles single-handed. His disciples, even today, lag a whole century behind the master. What made his solitary position yet more tragical, was that he himself was not entirely convinced of the soundness of his views. For Mesmer was only able to premise the trend of his theories; he was not able to see the trail they would break. He felt he was on the right path, he felt that a happy chance had led him very nearly to discover a formidable secret; but to strip off all the veils, to pluck the heart out of this mystery, was a task too great for his unaided powers. It is soul-stirring to reflect that for a century he was looked upon as a charlatan precisely by those who should have been the first to appreciate his efforts, by the physicians who should have marched shoulder to shoulder with him, who should have done everything in their power to further the understanding of his theories. Just as Columbus wandered from one princely court to another in search of a wealthy patron to finance his bold scheme for the discovery of a western sea-route to the Indies, so did Mesmer, after applying to the Academy, turn for aid and support to his comrades in the medical world, begging them to interest themselves in his ideas. Columbus at the outset of his career as explorer committed a serious blunder, it is true. So, too, Mesmer, believing implicitly in the fantastic idea of an arcanum (an idea which was a relic of the Middle Ages), imagined that his theory of animal magnetism would prove to be a cure-all, the “Indies” of the medical world. The upshot was that, building better than he knew, he achieved far more than the discovery of one new route; like Columbus, he discovered a new continent, with innumerable archipelagos and unexplored regions; it was he who discovered psychotherapy. For all the recently opened domains of psychology—hypnosis, suggestion, Christian Science, psychoanalysis, and even spiritualism and telepathy—are to be found in that new continent which this tragically neglected man discovered unwittingly. Others have reaped where he sowed; others have achieved fame where he won nothing but disdain and contumely. His contemporaries passed judgment upon him and sentenced him. Now the time has come for us to reconsider their verdict, and perhaps to arraign his accusers.
LIKENESS
IN THE YEAR 1773, Leopold Mozart, writing to his wife in Salzburg, says: “I did not send a line by the last post for there was a big musical rout at our friend Mesmer’s house… Our host plays Miss Dewis’s glass harmonica vastly well. He is the only person in Vienna who has learned to perform upon this instrument, and he possesses a far more handsome glass machine than was Miss Dewis’s own. Wolfgang, too, has played it.” From this we learn that the Viennese doctor and the Salzburg musician and his famous son were good friends. A few years earlier, the emperor had commanded the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus’s first opera (the composer was fourteen years old at the time) but the director of the imperial opera house, Afligio, who was to end his days as a convict, refused to produce the work. Franz Anton Mesmer, more resourceful than emperor or court, stepped into the breach, and placed a little theatre he had in his garden at the service of his brother musicians. It was here that Bastien und Bastienne was produced. If for no other reason, Mesmer deserves our gratitude for having thus been instrumental in bringing forward one of young Mozart’s earliest operatic works. The composer never forgot his old friend’s kindly deed. As a boy he frequently alluded to Franz Anton in his letters, and never felt happier than when he was paying a visit to his “dear Mesmer.” When, in 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus took up his permanent residence in Vienna, his first act was to engage a postchaise and drive over to Mesmer’s house. “I am writing this in Mesmer’s garden” is the opening sentence in a letter to his father telling of his safe arrival in the capital. In Cosi fan’tutte he introduced a humorous reference to his learned friend, which even today has a whimsical charm accompanied as it is by Mozart’s cheerful music.
This magnetic stone
Should give the traveller pause.
Once it was used by Mesmer,
Who was born
In Germany’s green fields,
And who won great fame
In France.
But Franz Anton Mesmer was not only a learned gentleman who combined a love of art with a love of his fellows; he was also a wealthy man. Few indeed were the burghers of Vienna who owned so charming a residence as No. 261 Landstrasse. It was a veritable miniature Versailles on the banks of the Danube. The garden was laid out on a princely scale in the rococo style, with little shrubberies, shady paths punctuated with statues, an aviary, a dovecot, a charming little theatre (unfortunately long since fallen into ruins), a round marble basin where a fountain played and which was later to be the scene of strange magnetic cures; further, on a slight elevation, his guests might mount to a gazebo whence they could enjoy a fine view over the river and the Prater. No wonder that Viennese society, so fond of sprightly talk, so vivacious and pleasure-loving, should delight in assembling at such a house. Dr Franz Anton Mesmer himself belonged to the most distinguished circle, since his marriage to the wealthy widow of Privy Councillor von Bosch. He kept open house, young Mozart informs us, and his table and cellar were renowned. He was a genial host, very learned, so that spiritual enjoyment, too, was not lacking. Here were to be heard, long before there was any thought of publishing them, not only the quartets, trios, arias, or sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and Gluck, who were intimates of the house, but also the new compositions of Piccini and Righini. Those who preferred conversation to music found a ready listener and fertile talker in their host.
For Mesmer was a thoroughly well-informed man. Born 23rd May 1733, at Iznang on the Lake of Constance, son of an episcopal gamekeeper, he studied divinity at Dillingen and Ingolstadt for a time, and became doctor of philosophy. But this did not suffice his eager spirit. Like Dr Faustus of old, he craved for light upon all branches of science. Removing to Vienna, therefore, he studied law for a time, but at length applied himself to the fourth faculty, that of medicine; and we find in the records that on 27th May 1766, Franz Anton Mesmer, already a doctor twice over, was formally admitted to the degree of doctor medicinæ “autoritate et consensu illustrissimorum, perillustrium, magnificorum, spectabilium, clarissimorum professorum”. The celebrated Professor Van Swieten, physician to the imperial court, signed the diploma. Yet Mesmer, who had by his marriage become a man of independent means, had no intention of coining more ducats by practising immediately as a doctor. He preferred to follow the latest discoveries in the realms of geology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics; to keep pace with the developments of abstract philosophy; and, above all, to cultivate the art of music. He played both pianoforte and violoncello, and introduced the glass harmonica to his compatriots—an instrument for which Mozart composed a special quintet. It was not long before Mesmer’s musical parties became the vogue among the cultured society of Vienna, so that No. 261 Landstrasse soon took its place alongside the little music-room on the Tiefen Graben where Van Swieten junior entertained his friends every Sunday, and where, in turn, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven played their works. Both places acquired renown as the most select of refuges for the arts and sciences.
This much-maligned man, who was later to be looked upon as a black sheep in the medical flock, and who was stigmatized as a quack, was no ignoramus. His physical appearance alone made an impression at the first encounter, for he was tall and of noble presence, with his broad forehead and dignified bearing. In Paris, when he and his friend Christoph Willibald Gluck entered a drawing-room, all eyes turned to contemplate these two German sons of Anak. Unfortunately there exists no adequate portrait of Mesmer; still, from those that have come down to us we can see that the face is well moulded and harmonious in outline, that the lips are full and the chin strong, that the brow is superbly fashioned, and that the eyes are clear and must have been light in colour. The man’s whole personality conveys an impression of justifiable self-confidence. He radiates health, and looks as if he were destined to achieve a patriarchal old age. There are no indications that this great “magnetizer” harboured any of the characteristics of the wizard; that he had flashing eyes and a diabolic mien; that he conjured up the image of a Svengali. All those who came in contact with him agreed that his main characteristic was his complacent and unshakable patience. Slow and steady rather than hot-blooded and vivacious, this worthy Swabian took quiet note of the phenomena occurring around him. Just as he strode across a room with strong and measured steps, so did he move from one scientific observation to the next, slowly, ponderously, but unconquerably. He did not wait upon dazzling inspirations, but strove with all due caution to establish incontrovertible conclusions against which neither contradiction nor acerbity of disagreement could prevail. His thick-skinned placidity was unassailable. Calmness, toughness of mind, indefatigable and stubborn patience, these were his most salient traits. It was thanks to his unusual modesty and reserve, to his total lack of false ambition, and to his artless simplicity of demeanour, that so notable and so wealthy a man numbered among his innumerable acquaintances in Viennese society no enemies but only friends. Every one lauded his intellectual acquirements, his sympathetic disposition, his generosity, his open mind. “Son âme est comme sa découverte, simple, bienfaisante et sublime.” His colleagues regarded him as a thoroughly competent physician—until he had the effrontery to break a fresh trail for himself, and without the approval of the faculty to make a world-shaking discovery. Then, of a sudden, the pleasant relations were ruptured, and a life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of his ideas began.
THE SPARK
IN THE SUMMER OF 1774, a distinguished foreigner and his wife were visiting Vienna. The lady was taken ill, and the husband asked the astronomer Maximilian Hell, of the Society of Jesus, to prepare a magnet suitable for application to the ailing part—for in those days it was an accepted fact that the magnet possessed special curative powers. Paracelsus named it “the monarch of secrets,” and the ancients had been interested in the peculiar behaviour of the magnet, since among all mineral substances it displayed the strangest peculiarities. While lead, copper, silver, gold, tin, and ordinary iron have no notable attributes save that of weight, this magnetic substance possesses a soul of its own and independent activity. The magnet attracts iron; it seems to be animated with will power; and one is inevitably led to believe that it obeys other than terrestrial laws. May it not, perhaps, be subject to planetary influence? Reduced to the size of a needle, it points towards the pole, being the mariner’s guide and the signpost of all who have gone astray. It must surely be endowed with memory, so that despite its present earthly surroundings it recollects its sometime stellar habitat!
