Animal Magnetism

Animal magnetism was a system of healing theorized by the Austrian physician and astrologist Franz Mesmer in the late 18th century. While discredited as a medical technique even within Mesmer's lifetime, Mesmer's students used the practice to explore the psychosymptomatic relationship between mind and body, eventually giving rise to practices of somnambulitic sleep, hypnosis, and psychotherapy.

Animal Magnetism: A System of Healing

Mesmer began generalizing a salutatory relationship between celestial bodies and human wellness in his 1766 Dissertation upon the Influence of the Stars on the Human Body. In this text, Mesmer used Newtonian physics to argue that the gravity of the planets influenced the human body and illness (Tinterow 31). Mesmer took up work as a physician, only to be dismayed by standard--and often painful--medical practices such as bleeding and blistering (Pintar and Lynn 13). Seeking gentler forms of treatment, Mesmer began experimenting with magnets, hoping to bring about an “artificial tide” in his patients.

Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism

Mesmer's elaborated upon these ideas in his 1779 dissertation, Mémoire sur la Découverte du Magnétisme Animal or Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism, in which he asserts a fully formed concept of animal magnetism:

I maintained that just as the alternate effects, in respect of gravity, produce in the sea the appreciable phenomenon which we term ebb and flow, so the INTENSIFICATION AND REMISSION of the said properties, being subject to the action of the same principle, cause in animate bodies alternate effects similar to those sustained by the sea. By these considerations I established that the animal body, being subjected to the same action, likewise underwent a kind of ebb and flow. I supported this theory with different examples of periodic revolutions. I named the property of the animal body that renders it liable to the action of heavenly bodies and of the earth ANIMAL MAGNETISM. I explained by this magnetism the periodical changes which we observe in sex, and in a general way those which physicians of all ages and in all countries have observed during illnesses (qtd. in Tinterow 35)

According the Mesmer, the healing system of animal magnetism is founded on one essential truth: "that nature affords a universal means of healing and preserving men" (Mesmer/Tinterow 33). Mesmer details the mutual influence between the Heavenly Bodies, the Earth and Animate Bodies, suggesting a circuit of "universally distributed and continuous fluid" motivating organic life itself. This universal fluid was a fundamental apparatus of animal magnetism, and Mesmer theorized it as "quite without vacuum and of an incomparably rarefied nature, and which by its nature is capable of receiving, propagating and communicating all the impressions of movement" (Mesmer 54). Ebb and flow direct this movement, with different and opposite poles. Bodies possess both negative and positive poles, which may be "communicated, propagated, stored, concentrated and transported, reflected by mirrors and propagated by sound" (Mesmer 55). Given these properties, it seems the “fluid” of animal magnetism not only operates like a liquid fluid but also maintains some elements of light, air and electricity, all of which were being more formally theorized in the late 18th century.

Cartesian "Animal Spirits"

This curious intermingling of elements recalls some aspects of Descartes’ concept of “animal spirits” which he elaborates in his 1662 text “Treatise on Man.” Here, the “animal spirit” is a “certain very fine wind, or rather a very lively and very pure flame” which emanates from the pineal gland, circulates in the body through arteries and drives movement through this circulation. (Descartes, 105) It should be noted that Descartes distinguishes the “animal spirit” from blood, and “animal spirits” specifically have an animating capacity. Similarly, Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” moves the body through circulation and flow, and is an activating force. It seems Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” has a denser quality, however, especially in its ability to be stored and transported. In making reference to the tides, he is clearly operating under the idea that there is a liquid element at play in “animal magnetism.” Both seem to attempt to situate classical elements, such as air, water, and fire, as operative within the human body.

Animal Magnetism as Mediation

As a force theorized as both naturally abundant and uninhibitedly available, Mesmer's "all-penetrating fluid" was as mechanism of transfer in the macro-mediation of universal harmony dubbed "animal magnetism". Mesmer himself played no small role in this process of mediation; he functioned as its human operator, bestowed with the unique (but not sole) capacity to direct universal fluid into others through his own immensely potent animal magnetism. Illness, for Mesmer, was a disruption of an individual's inner harmony and fluid flow, and he believed that he could, mentally and physiologically, channel enough magnetic force to artificially imitate celestial forces and reset the magnetic direction of a patient.

In many ways, Mesmer's process of healing patients through the application of animal magnetism was a mediation based in the equilateral harmonization of all organic nodes in the network of existence. Mesmer's theorization of the fluid as universal and equally present in all places at all times suggests a physiological refutation of the classical model of the Great Chain of Being. Rather than understanding animal magnetism as a force from above spreading downward (like the natural ladder--scala naturae--of the Medieval period), Mesmer envisions a wetware of biopower, a constellation of forces in which any two subjects may operate or manipulate the influence of animal magnetism. Animal magnetism, in this sense, is a decentralized--rather than hierarchical--network, although this should not suggest a level field of access to Mesmer's universal fluid (Mesmer guarded his secrets religiously for fear that those untrained would pollute his theories). In animal magnetism, the harmonization of the body becomes the balanced universe writ small, even as it operates as a physiological foreshadowing the unconcentrated theories of power to be proposed by Foucault and Deleuze.

The analogy of the ocean could not be more apropos: Mesmer's universal fluid lacked streams, routes or channels--it was diffuse rather than vectoral, indiscriminate rather than intentional. Thus, while universal fluid itself may reflect a decentralized wetwork, the harmonization of the universal fluid via the practice of animal magnetism still required a secondary apparatus to secure the direct application said harmonization: Mesmer himself. Mesmer functioned as the operator of a unique process of protocols that opened the human gateways for freely moving universal fluid. His first step was to locate the "blockage", then apply correct measures of magnet force to the patient. Later in Mesmer's practice, this resulted in complex circuits of harmonization in which Mesmer would offer treatment to large groups utilizing his self-invented baquet. Finally, a blockage had to be pushed out through the "crisis", which often mirrored a seizure, hysterical fit, or orgasmic interlude.

The Blockage

Mesmer's medical patients and their cases were well-documented at the time, but out of all of them, two patients reappear in multiple accounts for the implications their treatments arose in Mesmer's practice of animal magnetism, the first is Francisca 'Franzl' Oesterlin in 1773, and soon to follow, Maria Theresa Paradis in 1776.

While treating Oesterlin, Mesmer shifted the focus on the perceptual aspects of animal magnetism as a mode of mediation. The perceptual shift in animal magnetism arose from the extremes to which Mesmer brought his patients while undergoing treatment, introducing a threshold of the senses that seems to foreshadow Jan Purkinje’s interests in the same perceptual threshold of stimulation and fatigue in the eye. Instead of centering the dialogue on work and optimal performativity (Crary, 85); however, Mesmer concentrated his focus on a repetitive barrage of magnetic fluid against the received blockage in the patient’s body, thus attacking the patient’s senses until the blockage yielded to the magnetic pass. The resultant effect led to perceived restoration in bodily health (magnetic balance) to various health problems: “despite the apparent brutality of the treatment, Mesmer was able to produce seemingly miraculous cures for a wide range of conditions” (Lanska & Lanska, 303). It was almost as if the greatest impediment to the recovery and restoration of the patient was not each individual malady or health problem, but rather the fact that there was a perceived magnetic blockage within the body.It is intriguing to note the ease in which animal magnetism is used to cover a wide arena of health problems not isolated to particular, conceived compartments of medical focus such as the distinction between physiological and psychological effects—vomiting and convulsions on one hand, ‘melancholia’ and madness on the other. The flexibility of animal magnetism as applied means to multiple health issues reflects Mesmer’s thoughts of magnetic fluid as a medium at both literal and symbolic levels.

Maria Theresa Paradis' case was the first highly publicized account in which Mesmer treated his patient only with the laying of his hands and a ‘magnetic wand’ (Walmsey, 83; Goldsmith, 90). The development of animal magnetism had moved beyond Hell’s magnets onto a direct manipulation of the magnetic fluid itself. The account of Paradis’ symptoms point to a blockage of the eyes that becomes gradually removed: on the first day, the patient had a high fever, and her eyes and body convulsed. On the second day, she ‘followed the movements of Mesmer’s wand reflected in a mirror, by turning her head back and forth’ (Goldsmith, 83). By the fourth day, the movements became regular, and the previously bulging eyeballs resumed their normal position. After the initial state of crisis and heightened symptoms that was much like Oesterlin’s case, Paradis began to show signs of improvement. For the first time in years, she began to use the motor muscles of her eyes, and even acquired the ability to discern light and objects shortly afterward (Crabtree 11).

Both Oesterlin and Paradis’ cases bring to mind the tendency that disabilities would bring to the forefront new modes of mediation: “Handicaps isolate and thematize sensory data streams” (Kittler, 23). Just as Edison’s hearing impairment brought along the invention of the gramophone, media “await inventors like Edison whom chance has equipped with a similar dissolution” (23). In Mesmer’s case, the foci of the dissolution were also the recipients of his practice—Oesterlin and Paradis, both patients and muses simultaneously. They set the backdrop of Nietzsche’s ‘ghastly night’ as an attempt to “christen sensory deprivation as the background to and other of all technological media” (120), so too by defect and disability, new modes of mediation rise to the surface. They stand with their health grievances on display as symbols, to showcase disability in an attempt to legitimize Mesmer’s practice by overcoming said disabilities with the power of animal magnetism. In doing so, they overwrite aspects of the mode of mediation themselves, by bringing to attention the blockages necessary for removal, the impediment introduces its own inscriptive power as ‘signatures of the real, or raw material’ (Kittler, 118). Thus, Oesterlin and Paradis inscribe themselves into the very fabric of Mesmer’s methodology as meta-blockage that stands in the way of legitimizing the practice when the very physical blockages within their bodies refuse to yield entirely to his hands.

The Magnetic Poles and the Magnetic Pass

Mesmer made ample use of magnets in his early practice. Case studies from his earliest major patient, Franzl Oesterline, detail the use of magnets as mechanisms for conducting or tuning his practice of animal magnetism. Oesterline, who was subject to a “convulsive malady” that induced rushes of blood to the head, toothaches, and earaches, followed by delirium, rage, vomiting, and swooning (Mesmer 36). He put three magnets on her body: one on her stomach and on each leg (the fact that this centralizes the uterus of his female patient should not be overlooked). The reaction to the magnets “caused severe pain” but the treatment “resulted in an improvement in her condition that lasted for several hours” (Crabtree 6).

For Mesmer, the body functioned like a compass, replete with all the magnetic properties therein. Thus, it is reasonable that he would have incorporated physical magnets into his practice, so as to imitate the magnetic properties of cosmic bodies. As he writes in his 1779 Dissertation: A non-magnetized needle, when set in motion, will only take a determined direction by chance, whereas a magnetized needle, having been given the same impulse, after various oscillations proportional to the impulse and magnetism received, will regain its initial position and stay there (Mesmer 36). Unmagnetized, the body could fall prey to the direction of "chance", failing to find its true and harmonious direction. Properly magnetized, however, the body had the capacity to not only be restored to its true direction, but to retain its direction.

As his practice advanced, Mesmer dispensed with magnets; this transition was historically simultaneous with extensive accusations of fraud from Mesmer's colleagues, who claimed that it was the magnets, not Mesmer, that were healing the body. To assert the primacy of animal magnetism rather than mineral magnetism, Mesmer chose to give up magnets as a way to purify his own practice from accusations of deception. Mesmer believed he could wield animal magnetism through other objects, even his own body. He thus positioned the power of using this mode of mediation amongst those who had conditions favorable enough to wield animal magnetism themselves, granting a formal allowance to those who could wield the magnetic fluid. Mesmer indeed made note in his accounts of certain people who could wield animal magnetism and others who seemed to have directly averse effects on it: “all animate bodies are not equally susceptible; there are some, although very few, whose properties are so opposed that their very presence destroys all the effects of magnetism in other bodies” (Tinterow, 55).

It was clear that Mesmer meant for animal magnetism to be practiced as a one-way method of mediation, while with the methodology (magnets, hands or other paraphernalia) the physician utilized permitted some formal allowances, the formal prohibition came in the form of the physician or practitioner’s own body. The assumption that Mesmer operated on that only those who already possessed the ‘proper balance and harmony of magnetic fluid’ in their bodies were those who were indeed healthy, but this was never clarified in his accounts (Crabtree, 10). Another way of disproving Mesmer’s accounts which had not been found in other sources would have been to find records of Mesmer’s own health history to see if there was indeed any medical way of proving that the wielder of animal magnetism himself had experienced ‘blockage’ of his own while he was practicing it on his patients. Conversely, Mesmer never addressed questions regarding whether there was a feedback response effect. Could the patient undergoing treatment relay back negative effects to the practitioner himself, thus imposing adverse effects upon the health of the person who would heal the patient? It was clear that formally, the structure of animal magnetism as a mode of mediation was meant to be one-way, a hierarchically linear relationship of the physician to the patient, only. In this conceptual perception of his own methodology, Mesmer placed formal inhibitions not on who wielded the magnetic fluid but the trajectory and effect of it to a strict physician to patient direction of flow.

3) Magnetic Pass section: Mesmer’ “working from a markedly mechanistic model of the human organism” emphasized the physical action needed and involved in magnetic healing” (Crabtree, x), with the techniques he used, ‘magnetic passes’ or “sweeping movements of the hands to direct magnetic fluid to diseased parts of the patient’s body” (Crabtree, viii). From: Crabtree, Adam. Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766-1925. NY: Kraus International Publications, 1988.

The Circuit

the simple circuit we see with mesmer and Franzl, and the more complex social circuit that emerges when his work in france becomes group-based a. the baquet

The Crisis

the attack the removes the blockage, re-aligning one's magnetic balance

What differentiated a case like Paradis’ from Oesterlin’s was the drastic adjustment stage needed during crisis and post-crisis in her treatment; the steps necessary to re-align her body to a perceived magnetic balance were arguably as large a task as the initial healing process itself. This can be accorded to her blindness, as one of the most, if not the greatest case Mesmer took in conditions of medical severity. She had indeed regained some modicum of sight, “although with some reported distortion and limited understanding of what she saw” (Lanska & Lanska, 304). Her treatment afterwards developed into sensory faculty restoration through a combination of animal magnetism and rehabilitation by learning how to adjust to her surroundings. In exercising this newly gained sight, Paradis found great difficulty in learning to touch what she saw and combine the two faculties, and to conceptualize depth and distance so that “everything seemed to her to be within reach, however far away, and objects appeared to grow larger as she drew near to them” (Mesmer, 1779, 1980, p. 75). Paradis’ partial restoration to sight upset her; “light bothered her, yet when her eyes were covered she became unable to take a step without guidance, whereas before, she was able to walk about her house in complete confidence” (Crabtree, 304). Her musical performance suffered, and her parents feared that they would lose the royal pension. After providing a solution for a drastic case such as blindness, Mesmer’s mode of mediation failed to bring about the production of what Foucault calls “a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering a group of men docile and useful” (Crary, 15). One of the perceived shortcomings of animal magnetism was that it did not in fact restore the balance that Mesmer had perceived of, and this is one of the many criticisms he faced with the Paradis case. Mesmer noted that there was a critical distinction between the fact that Paradis’ eyes were working and the ability to cognitively and perceptually see as knowledge of one’s surroundings(Tinterow, 48).

After the treatment, therefore, there was still a lingering sense that there was something sub-par about Paradis’ restoration of sight. Although animal magnetism restored her sight, Paradis was untrained in how to use her visual faculty in order to see and perceive the world in the way others have been indoctrinated to perceive things since infancy. This points to an interesting crossroads that held lingering assumptions of the classical model of sight as a passive, receptive faculty and the modern model where “both the viewer’s sensory organs and their activity are now inextricably mixed with whatever object they behold” (Crary, 72). To superimpose such notions of classical vs. modern sensory apparatuses, animal magnetism as a mode of mediation itself presented a junction between these two concepts of sensory experience. As seen before with Oesterlin, there was a veritable fascination with pushing the threshold between the physiological and the mental mentioned in Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, without which concepts of ‘blockage’ and ‘crisis’ to clarify the channels of the body for sensory balance would not find ground (<--does this sentence make sense?). However, lingering notions of classical sensory mediation allowed for the physician actor to be the apparatus or medium that would manifest the outside stimulus or catalyst, the magnetic fluid, for the patient to receive passively for therapeutic transformation. Crary documents the evolving thoughts on the composition of perception from the ‘soul reduced to pure receptivity’ as a notion on its way to obsolescence to the subjective observation as no longer dependent solely upon the inner world of representation. Rather, it was exteriorized so that the viewing body and its objects began to converge, to “constitute a single field on which inside and outside are confounded” (Crary, 73). Animal magnetism was therefore an interesting mode of mediation that stood at the crossroads between classical and modern notions of perception and sensory input prior to the modernization of the senses noted by Crary in the early 19th century. The very notion of a magnetic balance was wrapped up in these conflicted yet converging notions of classical and modern modes of perception.

Miscellany Crap

Arriving in France in 1778, Mesmer brought a fully articulated concept of animal magnetism to bear upon the Parisian medical and courtly society. His practice ballooned in the span of 6 months, and it is at this moment that the practice of manipulating animal magnetism took on a truly social dimension.

"an 'antimedical' movement movement was already afoot in the 1770s that was attempting to promote reliance on the healing powers of nature rather than the radical interventions of physicians [...] The antimedical movement attempted to make the relationship between patient and physician more personal, insisting that the ill person be regarded not as a passive receptor of medical action but as an active participant in the healing process" (Crabtree 15). (Perhaps cite from Foucault and the Lectures on Psychiatric Power alchemical processes of nature)

To Be Added Into Choice Locations:)

-A source calls Animal Magnetism “a failed or aborted therapeutic technology” (Lanska & Lanska, 314).