Hypnosis and suggestion in a century of psychotherapy: an epistemological assessment

From 1882 to 1982, a century of psychotherapy passed. Its inception was marked by the rehabilitation of hypnosis in the work of Charcot at the Salepêtrière, and in the Nancy School (Liébeault and Bernheim). The young Freud became acquainted with this work in the course of his visits to France at this same period. It was thus that he was put on the track leading to the discovery of psychoanalysis. With the concept of transference, Freud thought he was reabsorbing suggestion and placing affect under the control of cognition. But today it is realized that suggestion (direct and indirect) is ever-present in psychoanalysis, as in other psychotherapies, which indeed do not cease to proliferate. This common element might be an important constituent of the curative process. Under these circumstances, it seems highly desirable that suggestion and hypnosis, those "crossroad" concepts which still remain so mysterious, become the subject of basic research, notwithstanding the prejudices that are still very much alive. The results of such research would prove beneficial to psychotherapy, as well as to the other human sciences.