What did He (Bernheim) Say?

Abstract

Bernheim was not the first to call attention to the fact that suggestions can be effective in the absence of hypnosis or to claim that hypnosis itself is a product of suggestion. However, he does appear to have been the first to state explicitly that all hypnotic phenomena can be produced by suggestion in the absence of hypnosis. This important discovery is thus at least a hundred years old.

Bernheim is perhaps best known for his dictum that, “There is no hypnosis, there is only suggestion.” This has often been misunderstood to mean that he denied the existence of a hypnotic state. That was not his intention. Bernheim expressly made the point that hypnosis was a specific condition of enhanced suggestibility brought about through the characteristic ideodynamic action of appropriate suggestions. He viewed the induction of hypnosis as setting into motion psychophysiological changes that lead to a decrease in ego participation and to increasingly complex automatisms. Thus, in addition to evidence that Bernheim viewed hypnosis as an altered state of awareness, one finds evidence of his anticipation of Janet’s dissociation theory of hypnosis. Bernheim, however, also held a “modern” view of suggestion as a manifestation of normal, healthy processes and, hence, as belonging to the domain of normal psychology. In doing so he anticipated features of some modern ego psychological theories of hypno-suggestive phenomena.

The non-voluntary character of responses to suggestions emphasized by Bernheim’s theory has essentially been ignored in modern research. The resulting failure to distinguish between individuals who respond voluntarily and non-voluntarily may have been an important source of confusion in recent research. This failure may also mean that hypnotism as defined by modern research methods is not the same entity originally studied and described by Bernheim and his contemporaries.