The nineteenth century in Europe was an epoch in which inventiveness manifested itself in all domains, even in what is sometimes referred to as the esoteric sciences. One of the central moving forces of the innovations in this domain is the Freemason movement, which can boast of having influenced the creation of the United States of America,1 the beginnings of the French Revolution, the women’s liberation movement, some non-Marxist socialistic movements, and the need for a secular government.2 Another important development at the time is formed by the Protestant spiritualist movements that support the impression that one can communicate with the dead and that faith can heal. The whole of the ancient esoteric systems, like tarot and astrology, were entirely revised. Up until the seventeenth century, astrologists were astronomers who drew their charts from the observations of the stars.3 The illustrious Kepler is one of the last examples of this long tradition, which goes back to the city of Babylon in ancient Mesopotamia. Since the nineteenth century, the astrologists possess printed charts that invent an approximation of the sky whose harmony and logic make easy calculations possible and for conclusions compatible with divination using the symbolic language of tarot.4
The filiation that is often mentioned between Mesmer and Freud passes through a series of trends that participate in this immense reconstruction of the field consisting of schools with spiritual orientations. Because I am not a specialist in this matter, I only briefly touch on it. It merits development because it remains powerfully influential in the world of psychotherapy. Some psychotherapists integrate, in innovative ways, approaches developed by the yogi and the alchemists of China and Europe. Jung’s name is often used to support this way of thinking.
Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) became fashionable in the eighteenth century in various mundane settings that appreciated his healing methods. His theory was that certain magnetic animal fluids could heal illnesses. He presented methods that allowed him to facilitate the passage of these fluids in the organism of an individual who wanted to be cured by him and his followers. He encouraged scientists to undertake research on the phenomena that he brought about with his patients.5 Researchers often contented themselves to relate Mesmer’s magnetism to a placebo effect, defined as a mobilization of the patient’s hope that can sometimes unleash a cure. Independent of the explanations proposed by Mesmer, many testimonials attest to the efficacy of his practices. To my knowledge, we do not always know today how this placebo effect really functions.6 Materialistic minds evoke it to disqualify this type of approach, but no serious scientific research demonstrates that Mesmer’s fluids are effectively without results or can only be explained by a patient’s belief. The scientific point of view developed by Descartes determines that a scientist can only approach a research subject that is close to something that has already been studied and for which he has adequate methodological tools. There are manifestly many subjects that cannot yet be studied scientifically.
Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur, was an influential student of Mesmer. He developed a form of hypnosis that made the subject fall into a state that is close to sleep and trance state and that created an artificial state of somnambulism.
The effects of hypnosis as described by de Puysegur. This state activates mechanisms of auto-reparation in the organism. It also permits obtaining information about the subject that the subject ignores in a waking state. Certain types of habits can be eliminated through suggestion. De Puysegur shows that the subject can, under hypnosis, recover memories that are not available in a waking state and that this remembering can treat certain disturbances. This allows him to affirm that the function of memory and consciousness sometimes has an impact on the functioning of the organism without the person knowing it. He also shows that he can suggest something to a person under hypnosis that she will not be able to avoid doing once awake (she strokes her chin every time she hears the word cat, for example), while she is unable to recall the suggestions of the hypnotist. When we were to ask why she strokes her chin, she would invent false explanations, as do certain patients who suffer from neurological problems.
These techniques were gradually integrated into the practice of Mesmer’s students, who in turn influenced Freud. The hypnotic methods recommended free association long before Freud did, the exploration of free writing (stream of consciousness), free drawing and free movement, to explore the dimensions of the being that make us move, draw, and write. The basic idea is that mental functioning is part of the equilibrium established by the organism. When a person allows his mental functioning to change, the organism must accommodate to these changes. The methods developed by the hypnotists had the goal of inducing a global change of the organism starting from a functional change of the mind.
John Elliotson introduced hypnosis to medicine around 1840. He was also the first English physician to use the stethoscope. He was particularly interested in the possible anesthetizing effect of hypnosis. In spite of vociferous critics, hypnosis entered into certain medical practices in a lasting way.
In the 1850s, a form of mesmerism was assimilated by spiritualistic movements inspired by the visions of the Swede, Emmanuel Swedenborg.7 This movement also connected with the spiritualism developed by some Protestants in the United States, with which Alfred Russel Wallace associated himself.
Mesmerism and spiritualism joined the theosophical movement founded by Helena Petrova Blavatsky. Influenced by Plato and the Renaissance mystic Jakob Boehme, she integrated into this movement formulations that she discovered in India and China. Theosophy especially makes the idea of deism fashionable. Yahweh, Jesus, and Mohammed would be three representations of the same force. The proposal to synthesize all of the forms of spirituality in the world inspired—and inspires—numerous movements.
Theosophy, which is close to some movements of Freemasonry, is associated to a different form of colonialism than the one influenced by eugenics and racism. It consisted in integrating into a grand European synthesis the profound wisdom of every civilization, with the idea that in some domains diverse cultures had developed important forms of knowledge ignored by European philosophers. Having said this, we again find the idea that only the Idealism developed in Europe permits the integration of the entirety of the knowledge on the planet.
The notion of energy used in the European spiritual movements will synthesize, in a poorly differentiated way, three trends of thought:
Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) is known for having proposed so powerful a physics of mechanics that it permitted industry to develop its capacity to create machines. He transformed a science that was struggling to find its way into a major social force. One of the aspects of Newton’s genius was to have found a way to reduce the immense variety of what exists to a few variables that could be included in mathematical formula, and as such, were capable of predicting certain behaviors of theoretical objects (spheres, cubes, etc.). My understanding of physics is rudimentary. Yet because the notion of energy is so often used by body psychotherapists, I think it can be useful to revisit the basic laws that most of us have learned in school. We need to distinguish between what is experienced as energy moving in the organism and what we can reasonably call “energy.” I begin this discussion by distinguishing two types of variables:
The notions of force and gravity do not designate existing phenomena but a constant mathematical ratio between measurements. The classic expression is “everything happens as if” a ratio corresponded to something that exists. Even so, no one to this day has observed a cause, an effect, a force, or gravity. This point is made particularly clear by David Hume, who loved Newton’s physics, when he considers the laws of cause and effect. He takes two objects and pushes one against the other. It is generally assumed that the movement is the cause of the movement of the second object:
Let us therefore cast our eyes on any two objects, which we call cause and effect, and turn them on all sides, in order to find that impression, which produces an idea of such prodigious consequence. At first sight I perceive, that I must not search for it in any of the particular qualities of the objects; since, which-ever of these qualities I pitch on, I find some object, that is not possest of it, and yet falls under the demonstration of cause and effect. And indeed there is nothing existent, either externally or internally, which is not consider’d either as a cause or an effect; tho’ ’tis plain there is no one quality, which universally belongs to all beings, and gives a title to that demonstration.
The idea, then, must be deriv’d from some relation among objects; and that relation we must now endeavour to discover. (Hume, 1740, 1.3.2.5–6, p. 53f)
The ratio between mass, distance, and weight furnishes a variable g that is gravity or gravitation. Gravity allows us to describe with precision the fall of a body to the Earth, or the attraction of a planet to another (as the play between the moon and the Earth, and the influence of this interplay on the tides). We do not perceive gravitation, but we perceive phenomena that can be elegantly handled with a model that uses the notions concerning gravity.
An analogous understanding makes it possible to describe the use of the term energy in the physics of the nineteenth century. The notion of energy was proposed by physicists at the start of the nineteenth century. In 1807, Thomas Young (1773–1829) proposed a formula to calculate the kinetic energy of the body. The status of energy in contemporary physics is more complex,9 but it brings us to the same conclusions. Energy is a measurement that designates the dynamics of the activity of matter. This activity can manifest itself under the guise of sound, heat, motion, or light to the human senses; in every case, it is impossible to isolate an energetic “substance” that engenders this activity. In his famous formula, E = mc2, Albert Einstein shows that there is a constant rapport between mass (m) and the energy (E) of an object (c = the speed of light, a constant). The more the mass of the object increases, the more the value of e increases. It is the same with gravity. The farther a body is from a planet (an object of great mass), the weaker the impact of gravity. The organism behaves as if it were lighter.
It is probable that all of these activities follow laws that are proper to them due to some mechanisms that are particular in each instance. Nevertheless, it is useful to have a form of measurement (energy) that makes it possible to show how a form of activity can engender another: how motion produces heat or heat produces light.
As a blind man has no idea of colours, so we have no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched; nor ought he to be worshiped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have no idea of his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is we know not. In bodies we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only outward surfaces, we smell only the smells and taste de savours; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds. (Newton, 1686, The principia, III, p. 44If)
To clarify the difference between a concept such as gravity or energy, and what we are capable of representing to ourselves by using sensory analogies, Newton distinguishes between what can be “imagined” and that about which we can only have an “intellection” (Newton, 1670, 126).10 Humans can imagine an immense space, and they can imagine that a space can always become a bit bigger, but they cannot have a representation of a limitless space. On the other hand, humans can have a form of precise intuition that can be represented by a mathematical formula Newton calls an intellection. The imagination fashions notions that are possible to associate to a mental image or to a gesture, but this type of representation cannot sustain a true reflection on notions such as infinity, gravity, or energy. Mathematics and words are a form of socially constructed representations that can be associated to what an individual can only have an intellection about, be it an idea that cannot manifest itself in a form of representation furnished by the individual psyche. The capacity that certain individuals have to handle this type of notion characterizes intellectual practices. Because humans have the tendency to want to associate an intellection to something that they can imagine, they often deform what they have an intellection about so that the notion might be assimilated into an image.
The Taoists of antiquity feel unendingly obliged to remind everyone that the Tao is an intellection and every representation of it is by definition only an approximation. The Muslims do not cease fighting against all who would like to present an image of God. The human need to represent everything with the same format as the data of the senses corresponds to a need that suits the comfort of the procedures of individual consciousness. Taoist philosophers, Muslims, and scientists engage in the same battle when they ask everyone why they absolutely want the forces that created the universe to resemble an angry old man with a beard.
Fradin’s model can be of some help to us in this instance when he shows that consciousness links, above all, data engendered by the circuits of the limbic system and feels surpassed by the nonconscious sophistications of the frontal cortex. The intellections could be similar to nonconscious refinements and often have need of an institutional support (like mathematics or meditation) to maintain themselves in the dynamics of an individual’s consciousness.
The physicist conceives of one energy in the sense that there exists but one mathematical definition of energy. This energy is above all distinguished in function of criteria like those that I enumerate here:
This nonexhaustive list of the ways to use the term energy in its strict sense does not correspond to a single qualifying statement as to what energy is. Electrical energy is a certain type of activity of matter, but it is not necessarily a particular energy. It is not yet possible to know if there exists a single energetic mechanism that manifests in various ways or myriad mechanisms that we are not yet able to describe.
The theoretical physicists of the nineteenth century quickly stimulated the imagination of people who associated this fashionable term, supported by science, to a kind of mysterious fluid that circulates in and animates nature. They assimilated this term to ancient notions in circulation in the so-called esoteric schools. As we saw while speaking of the soul, vital energy is often nothing other than a transfer of the properties of Plato’s soul to a term that has become more respectable. This is how an imagination of Christian inspiration assimilated the notion of energy to a known mythology instead of accommodating itself to what the physicists were discovering. If the same energy can manifest itself in many different ways (vapor, heat, light, wind, etc.), it is then possible to think that a fundamental energy is the force that actively animates the universe. Spiritual movements, like theosophy, developed this way of thinking. These movements wanted to validate this notion by anchoring it in the greatest possible number of ancient traditions. Not only did they associate the respiratory forces of antiquity (prana, chi, and pneuma) to the notion of vital energy, but in return, they influenced the schools in a colonized Far East by explaining to them that they would become scientifically acceptable if they adapted their ancient models to the notion of vital energy.11 This is particularly evident in the literature on relatively recent disciplines like tai chi chuan and aikido.12 The teachers of these disciplines give demonstrations showing the chi is what makes the body breathe and the limbs move, anchors the organism in the Earth, and makes it possible to repel the enemy. For them, neither will nor force nor skill can be as effective as the right utilization of chi. Their demonstrations are often spectacular. Designating the chi as whatever produces these capacities does not give any information about the mechanisms at play.
The notion of vital energy developed in a Christian context that associates itself to some simplistic opposition between energy and matter that resembles the opposition between soul and body. These oppositions are not part of the ancient philosophies of the Far East. The notion of vital energy spread out into the world mostly by being associated with Protestant healing movements, born in the United States, and then disseminated in the Philippines, Africa, and South America. Their techniques assimilated the healing methods of the local culture and spirituality.