Animal Magnetism

Introduction to Animal Magnetism

Animal magnestism was a system of healing theorized by the Austrian physician and astrologist Franz Mesmer in the late 18th century. While he initially generalized a salutatory relationship between celestial bodies and human wellness in the 1760s, his theory of animal magnetism was fully formalized in his 1778 work Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism

The work of animal magnetism is, foremost, a natural and universal one.

"The spheres exert direct action on all parts that go to make up animate bodies, in particular the nervous system, by an all-penetrating fluid" (34).

This "direct action" is denoted by an "ebb and flow" (sea analogy) or what Mesmer also refers to as "intensification and remission" of the properties of matter. Thus, as the planets effect the ebb and flow of the tide, so to do they cause the intensification and remission of properties of the organic body. This body is like a needle--unmagnetized, its direction is random and open to whatever influences it, but magnetized it may maintain its initial position. The body, once disturbed, is unharmonious, until a general agent restores the harmony (36).

His first extensive case study is with Franzl Oesterline, whose symptoms he describes as "who for several years had been subject to a convulsive malady, the most troublesome symptoms of which were that the blood rushed to her head and there set up the most cruel toothache and earache, followed by delirium, rage, vomiting, and swooning" (36). (symptoms we would now align with hysteria). Mesmer tries to replicate the magnetic force necessary to reset her, to "imitate artificially" the celestial forces he believes are interfering with her. Mesmer can magnetize other people. He's NOT drawing from the universal fluid, he's drawing it from how own inner harmony.

The Blockage

illness as a disruption in the body's internal harmony

The Magnetic Poles and the Magnetic Pass

how mesmer theorized the body as a compass

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

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)