| By :
David King
While modern hypnosis is credited to Austrian Franz Anton Mesmer, it is actually an ancient practice. Hypnosis can be traced back as far as 3,000 years to the Evers Papyrus of Egypt. But Franz Anton Mesmer helps us to understand better modern hypnosis. While I know you are wanting the history on self hypnosis, you must first understand the history of hypnosis as self hypnosis is hypnosis minus another party hypnotizing you. Franz Anton Mesmer was 32 when he received his medical qualifications. His dissertation was written on heavenly bodies on people's health. This became the basis in which his philosophy of mesmerism would be founded on. His theory of magnetism would come from seeing a street magician use a magnet to get people to do his bidding. Mesmer had success with patients when he used his new founded magnetism techniques. He then at the age of 43 moved to Paris. Mesmer had great fame and success until a group of people one of which was Benjamin Franklin began to investigate him. The group concluded that the people who were cured had done so with the powers of their own imagination and that their cure had nothing to do with Franz Anton Mesmer and his magnets. It was in 1841 that Dr. James Braid would bring mesmerism back but this time be as hypnosis. Braid coined hypnosis from the Latin word Hypnos which happened to be the Greek god of sleep. Dr. Braid would go on to discover the fixed gaze technique that could cause a sleeplike state of mind. Many more people would follow suit and in the twentieth century Milton Erickson would begin to use hypnosis in his psychiatric practice. From there it was in 1958 that the American Medical Association accepted hypnosis as a medical form of treatment. As for the history of self hypnosis there have been important connections between self hypnosis and the Jewish cabalistic mysticism made. Before it was used in western medicine, self hypnosis was used for healing and as part of human religious practices. Self hypnosis now a days is widely accepted as a scientific approach to self discovery and change. The extent in which self hypnosis has become widespread is apparent in all those self help audio tapes that people are buying and listening to while they are in bed. This method is done in the hopes of achieving positive results while a sleep that will carry over into the waking conscionce. This is a far cry from the earlier day of hypnosis and even the earlier days of self hypnosis. . As history has unfolded and knowledge has taken shape, we have learned that if you have a problem or a bad habit hypnosis can be used to fix or cure your problem. More and more people are learning more about hypnosis and bypassing a hypnotist and doing their own hypnotizing. No longer are people dependent upon a trained hypnotist for them to be able to use hypnosis to bring about positive change in their lives.
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