hypnosis

Artificially induced state of relaxation or altered attention characterized by heightened suggestibility. There is evidence that, with susceptible persons, the sense of pain may be diminished, memory of past events enhanced, and illusions or hallucinations experienced. Posthypnotic amnesia (forgetting what happened during hypnosis) and posthypnotic suggestion (performing an action after hypnosis that had been suggested during it) have also been demonstrated.

Hypnosis has a number of uses in medicine. Hypnotically induced sleep, for example, may assist the healing process, and hypnotic suggestion (hypnotherapy) may help in dealing with the symptoms of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. The Austrian physician Friedrich Anton Mesmer is said to be the discoverer of hypnosis, but he called it ‘animal magnetism’, believing it to be a physical force or fluid. The term ‘hypnosis’ was coined by James Braid (1795–1860), a British physician and surgeon who was the first to regard it as a psychological phenomenon. The Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1805–1859), working in India, performed hundreds of operations in which he used hypnosis to induce analgesia (insensitivity to pain) or general anaesthesia (total insensitivity).