“Mesmerism led to a perception among ‘therapists’ that the entire social order could have resulted from suggestion. Many viewed mesmerism not just as a means of correcting the problems of an individual but as a means of changing society. Quite a few of the men who signed the early documents triggering the French Revolution were also members of Franz Mesmer’s Society of Harmony. One of the responses of the establishment was to proscribe mesmerism, and later hypnosis. Mesmerism remained officially banned for almost a hundred years; it took the influence of the most famous clinician of his day, Jean-Martin Charcot, to bring it back to the scientific domain.

“But the work of Charcot and [Pierre] Janet on hypnotism created further problems. It began to seem that many religious phenomena, including the stigmata of saints were hypnoid phenomena, and this perception led to the suggestion that saints exhibiting such effects were in fact hysterics. Hypnosis fell under a further cloud when its use by Freud was associated with his claims that hysteria was linked to sexual abuse during childhood. There was widespread disquiet. The Catholic Church, for example, proscribed hypnosis in the 1880s, and the ban was not lifted until 1955.

“LSD caused a similar ferment in the political and religious domains. The LSD users of the 1960s became the revolutionaries of 1968. This revolution, like the French Revolution before it, did lead to dramatic changes from authoritarian, hierarchic societies to looser, more democratic ones, symbolized eloquently by the student protests in Paris and in particular by the ransacking of the office of Jean Delay. The establishment mobilized against it in a manner that bore marked resemblance to the backlash against hypnosis.”