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At one point in his work Charcot rose to a level higher even than that of his usual treatment of hysteria. The step he took assured him for all time, too, the fame of having been the first to explain hysteria. While he was engaged in the study of hysterical paralyses arising after traumas, he had the idea of artificially reproducing those paralyses, which he had earlier differentiated with care from organic ones. For this purpose he made use of hysterical patients whom he put into a state of somnambulism by hypnotizing them. He succeeded in proving, by an unbroken chain of argument, that these paralyses were the result of ideas which had dominated the patient’s brain at moments of a special disposition. In this way, the mechanism of a hysterical phenomenon was explained for the first time. This incomparably fine piece of clinical research was afterwards taken up by his own pupil, Pierre Janet, as well as by Breuer and others, who developed from it a theory of neurosis which coincided with the mediaeval view - when once they had replaced the ‘demon’ of clerical phantasy by a psychological formula.

Charcot’s concern with hypnotic phenomena in hysterical patients led to very great advances in this important field of hitherto neglected and despised facts, for the weight of his name put an end once and for all to any doubt about the reality of hypnotic manifestations. But the exclusively nosographical approach adopted at the School of the Salpêtrière was not suitable for a purely psychological subject. The restriction of the study of hypnosis to hysterical patients, the differentiation between major and minor hypnotism, the hypothesis of three stages of ‘major hypnosis’, and their characterization by somatic phenomena - all this sank in the estimation of Charcot’s contemporaries when Liébeault’s pupil, Bernheim, set about constructing the theory of hypnotism on a more comprehensive psychological foundation and making suggestion the central point of hypnosis. It is only the opponents of hypnotism who, content to conceal their lack of personal experience behind an appeal to authority, still cling to Charcot s assertions and who like to take advantage of a pronouncement made by him in his last years, in which he denied to hypnosis any value as a therapeutic method.