trol of attention: the essence of self-control and selflaunching. It must be established by its own right on a basis of accurate diagnosis, careful records, and scientifically describable methods of cure.

HISTORY OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

The history of psychotherapeutics is another instance of a reputable science springing from sources of marked credulity, superstition, and sophistry. Chemistry may be traced back to alchemy; astronomy to astrology. The facts of psychotherapeutics have been known by man in all ages and stages of his life upon this globe, but in a crude way and often more in a way to curse his life than to bless it. All nations possess some lines of its knowledge and features of its art. Anthropologists recognize such knowledge in a large way. Psychologists have traced its history. Robert Means Lawrence, M.D., in his Primitive Psychotherapy and Quackery, Boston, 1910, and George Barton Cutten, Ph.D., in Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing, New York, 1911, treat such facts in some detail. For other works on the history of psychotherapy, the reader is referred to our Bibliography. We can give only a brief sketch of this history, our purpose being to mark transition points in its development.

A starting point, from which time we may see an increasingly intelligent attitude toward the subject is the life and work of Friedrich Antony Mesmer (1733– 1815), a Viennese doctor. Mesmer had been preceded by Paracelsus (1490-1541), a physician who accepted astrology with its theory of the influence of the stars on men and who believed also in the influence of the mag

netism of the magnet and of men on men; and by others, including Von Helmont, the chemist (1577-1644), who believed that the magnet represented the universal principle by which all natural phenomena might be explained. This principle being in the human body also was an important factor in health and disease. The subject of magnetic influence residing in the human body was further discussed in pretentious treatises and exploited publicly. The Scotchman Maxwell (15811640) was a firm believer in sympathetic cures and assumed a vital spirit of the universe which related all bodies. It appears, however, that he was aware of the great influence of imagination and suggestion. Santanelli in Italy asserted that everything material possesses a radiating atmosphere which operates magnetically. He, too, recognized the great influence of imagination. About the year 1771 Father Hell, a Jesuit and professor of astronomy at the University of Vienna, became famous through his magnetic cures and invented steel plates of a peculiar form which he applied to the naked body as a cure for several diseases. In 1774 he communicated his system to Mesmer.

It was due to Mesmer, however, that the subject was pressed upon the attention of the public and was forced to investigation by sober scientific thought. Mesmer read freely the books that had been written upon the subject. He took his medical degree in 1766. He studied in his dissertation the influence of the planets upon human bodies. In this he maintained that the sun, moon, and fixed stars, through the medium of a subtile and mobile fluid which pervades the universe and associates all things together in mental intercourse and harmony, cause and direct in our earth a flux and reflux

in the sea, atmosphere, and all organized bodies. This influence was particularly exercised on the nervous system and produced two states which he called intension and remission, which seemed to him to account for the different periodical revolutions observable in several maladies. Eight years later he met Father Hell and was astonished at the success of some experiments with his metallic plates. Soon after this he stumbled upon his theory of animal magnetism. After this he no longer used the magnet in healing. He came to the conclusion that the magnetic is almost the same as the electric fluid and that it may be propagated in the same manner by means of intermediate bodies. Not only steel, but paper and a great many other materials, also men and dogs, in short everything he touched, he claimed to have rendered magnetic to such a degree that these substances produced the same effects as the loadstone on diseased persons; also to have charged jars with magnetic matter in the same way as is done with electricity. About this time he was nominated a member of the Academy of Bavaria.

He went to Paris in 1778 and constructed the baquet, an oak chest or tub, with appendages of iron, which was magnetized by him and which was supposed to transmit the magnetism for healing. This is vividly described together with the scenes which occurred in connection with it in Le Collier de la Reine by Dumas père; also briefly, by Cutten in his Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing. Patients now flocked to him. He had many pupils. He was violently opposed. Such a sensation did he create that it has been said no theological controversy in the earlier ages of the Catholic Church was ever conducted with greater bitterness.

He was called a quack, a fool, and a demon, while his friends were as extravagant in his praise as his foes in their censure. At various periods the French Academy appointed carefully chosen commissions to examine the theories and practice of Mesmer, and finally refused to have anything to do with "Mesmerism," as the treatment was now called. "But," as Dr. Hamilton Osgood states, "through good and evil report, by means of an occasional scientific man and shoals of charlatans, animal magnetism lived and refused to die." After the commission which investigated Mesmer's immediate claims had reported, he left Paris and returned to his own country, where he was little heard of during the remainder of his life.

After Mesmer came the Marquis de Puységur, who, by means of passes, in strictest faith, magnetized a large tree and rods of glass. To this tree and these rods his clients had recourse for relief for their ailments. The concourse of his patients was so large as to be unmanageable. He recognized the likeness between the magnetized state and that of somnambulism, so that he designated this state "artificial somnambulism." He also modified the conditions of inducing this state, and simple contact or spoken orders were substituted for the use of the baquet. The effect was therefore milder, and instead of hysteria and violent crises accompanied by sobs, cries, and contractions, there was peaceful slumber. He recognized the rapport between operator and subject and amnesia on awakening and other phenomena now well known, but he still held to the mesmeric theory of a universal fluid which saturated all bodies, especially the human body.

Puységur used the elm tree, but the Chevalier de

Barbarin successfully magnetized people without paraphernalia. He sat by the bedside of the sick and prayed that they might be magnetized; his efforts were successful. He maintained that the effect of animal magnetism was produced by the mere effort of one human soul acting upon another, and when the connection had once been established, the magnetizer could communicate his influence to the subject regardless of the distance which separated them.

About this time numerous magnetic societies were founded in the principal cities of France. In Germany animal magnetism was recognized on the upper Rhine and in Bremen. In 1796 Lavater exhibited the magnetizing processes to several doctors in Bremen and it became a somewhat noted center.

Moll in his Hypnotism calls attention to two different tendencies which can be distinguished at this period: one critical and scientific, the other mystical. While the first had the preponderance in the beginning, later on the latter came to the fore and led to the downfall of magnetism. There was early dislike of magnetism in Germany, but in spite of this, it maintained itself for the first twenty years of the nineteenth century.

In England magnetism seems to have arrived in 1788. In that year public lectures were given by Dr. Mainandus, a pupil of Mesmer. Other lectures were given which attracted considerable attention.

After the death of Mesmer there was an abandonment of the "universal fluid" theory for a more subjective standpoint. In 1814-1815 Abbé Faria came from India to Paris and gave public exhibitions, publishing the results of some of his experiments. He seated his subjects in an armchair, with eyes closed, and then cried