Use Of The Glass example essay topic

A History of HypnosisHomeVitaminsThermometersBlood pressureSkincareHot SupplementsHypnosisWomenMenWeight loss Stop Smoking Erotic Hypnosis Self Hypnosis Personal ProtectionLinksDr. Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer was an Austrian physician who was infamous for inducing a hypnotic and trance like state in human beings as a curative remedy. This process of mesmerism, as it soon became known, was powerful enough to exercise an extraordinary influence on the human body. The doctor labeled this ability as animal magnetism. In 1772, Mesmer first began to develop and refine his technique, and three years later he published a report on his discovery, under the claim that it possessed medicinal value. Mesmer's system included the use of the glass ar monica as a hypnotic device, because the sounds produced were extremely high-pitched and ethereal.

To hear a sound similar to the glass ar monica, be sure your hands are clean, take an empty crystal wine glass, wet your finger with water and run it around the rim of the glass in a complete circle, several times. Move your finger smoothly in a circular motion. The sound will change by adding different amounts of liquid in the glass. The presence of water in the glass decreases the vibrational frequency. Therefore, the pitch is lower than that of the empty glass. Increasing the size of the glass would produce a similar effect in the tone of the sound.

The glass ar monica was a vital ingredient in Mesmer's hypnotic 'magnetic s'e ances'. His patients, mostly 'hysterical bourgeois women', were placed in a magnetic tub filled with glass powder and iron filings, and massaged into a relaxed state by the sweet, distant tones of a glass ar monica played behind curtains covered with astrological symbols. Then Mesmer himself, clad in a long purple robe, would enter and touch each patient with a white wand, sending them into a magnetic trance from which they awakened fully cured. In 1778 Marie Paradies, a blind pianist who suffered from hysterical blindness, approached Mesmer for treatment.

Mesmer temporarily restored her eyesight, but the inundation of visual stimuli ruined her nerves and destroyed her ability to play the piano. Mesmer was therefore in bad graces with Empress Maria Theresa, godmother of Marie Paradies, and wisely moved to Paris. He became extremely popular in Paris through the efforts of Queen Marie Antoinette; in fact too popular for King Louis XVI, who in 1784 appointed a special committee from the Paris Medical Society and Academy to 'check this Mesmer's success. ' Incidentally, in 1785 the French government appointed a committee of physicians and scientists to investigate the work of the Austrian. Their incriminating findings forced Mesmer into a life of shame and disrepute. Nevertheless, the world will never forget Dr. Mesmer, who pioneered the field of hypnotic therapy In 1841, when well established in a surgical practice at Manchester, Braid developed a keen interest in mesmerism, as hypnotism was then called.

Proceeding with experiments, he disavowed the popular notion that the ability to induce hypnosis is connected with the magical passage of a fluid or other influence from the operator to the patient. Rather, he adopted a physiological view that hypnosis is a kind of nervous sleep, induced by fatigue resulting from the intense concentration necessary for staring fixedly at a bright, inanimate object. Braid introduced the term 'hypnosis' in his book Neurypnology (1843). He was mainly interested in the therapeutic possibilities of hypnosis and reported successful treatment of diseased states such as paralysis, rheumatism, and aphasia. He hoped that hypnosis could be used to cure various seemingly incurable 'nervous' diseases and also to alleviate the pain and anxiety of patients in surgery.

Hypnosis attracted widespread scientific interest in the 1880's. Ambrose-Auguste Li', an obscure French country physician who used mesmeric techniques, drew the support of Hippolyte Bernheim, professor of medicine at Strasbourg. Independently they wrote that hypnosis involved no physical forces and no physiological processes but was a combination of psychologically mediated responses to suggestions. At about the same time, the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud visited France and was impressed by the therapeutic potential of hypnosis for neurotic disorders. On his return to Vienna he used hypnosis to help neurotics recall disturbing events that they had apparently forgotten. As he began to develop his system of psychoanalysis, theoretical considerations, as well as the difficulty he encountered in hypnotizing some patients, led Freud to discard hypnosis in favor of free association.

(Generally psychoanalysts have now come to view hypnosis as merely an adjunct to the free-associative techniques used in psychoanalytic practice.) Despite Freud's influential adoption and then rejection of hypnosis, some use was made of the technique in the psychoanalytic treatment of soldiers with combat neuroses during World Wars I and II. Hypnosis subsequently acquired various other limited uses in medicine. Various researchers have put forth differing theories of what hypnosis is and how it could be understood, but there is currently still no generally accepted explanatory theory for the phenomenon. See Recent findings.