Hippolyte Bernheim

Hippolyte Bernheim ( born April 17, 1840 in Mulhouse ( Alsace ); † February 22, 1919 in Paris) was a French psychiatrist, neurologist and Hypnologe.

Biography

Bernheim studied at the University of Strasbourg, where he graduated in 1867 as Doctor of Medicine. In the same year he became a lecturer at the university and established himself in the city as a psychiatrist.

As in 1871 after the Franco-German War Strasbourg fell to Germany, Bernheim moved back to Nancy, at the university, he became a professor.

As the medical school in 1880 took up the tray hypnosis, Bernheim showed enthusiastic and soon became one of the leading researchers in this field. Up to this point, the hypnosis had been used mainly as a show effect. Bernheim contradicted the then widespread thesis that only hysterics could be hypnotized. Rather, he was of the opinion that hypnosis would be a normal, unpathologisches phenomenon that unites devices to suggestions as psychological reaction and not, as was then often assumed, could be affected by magnets and metals.

In 1889, the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud visited Bernheim and was informed about his experiments with the so-called " post-hypnotic suggestion ." From Bernheim experimental results concluded Freud, that there must be an unconscious.

During his professorship at the Faculty of Medicine of Nancy (1910-1919) Bernheim took the view that the subconscious mind is the bridge between doctor and patient, if the patient is disease only imagining it. So he reports in his the suggestive therapeutics among other from a case of tongue paralysis, which he healed completely by telling the patient of a new, completely safe healing device and then scored an immediate success when he him - from the patients do not as such recognized - fever thermometer stuck in his mouth. In another case, he administered a patient who was no longer to speak, some slight power surges on the larynx, which would have no medical effect may have before the assembled student body capable of - what was the patient but not known. She was healed on the spot.

Works

• About the typhoid fever in general, Strasbourg, 1868;
• Lesson of clinical medicine, Paris, 1877;
• About the suggestion in the hypnotic state and in the state of consciousness, Paris 1884;
• About the suggestion and their use in therapy, Paris, 1887.