To convert rot to exuberance: this is the spirit of the placebo effect, occurring when positive mental energy heals what ails you. Is James an adherent of such spooky science? I don’t quite know, but the possibility is intriguing, as is the case of one of the earliest and most notorious believers in the placebo, that of Franz Anton Mesmer, who spent the last decades of the eighteenth century placing the mentally and the physically ill in what he hoped were healing trances.
Soon after completing his medical studies at the University of Vienna, Mesmer in 1766 published a book claiming that an invisible force, animal magnetism, pervades all matter. When the magnetic powers in our bodies are aligned with the northern and southern poles of the universe, we are healthy. Discord with these cosmic coordinates results in disease, physical and mental. The cure requires a return to harmony.
Mesmer attempted to restore the concord through the process that now bears his name, mesmerism. He would sit facing the patient, touch his knees to hers, hold her thumbs in his hands, stare intensely into her eyes. He would move his hands around her body, about an inch from her flesh, much like a modern specialist in Reiki. This motion massaged her poles. He might also press his hands against her flesh, just below the diaphragm. Combined with his robe, a magic wand, and music from his glass harmonica, these procedures frequently hypnotized patients. While they were under, Mesmer would elicit conversations on their maladies, trying to put them through a “crisis” that would purge the bad energy and once more allow the good freely to flow. He might tell the patient that her fever was draining out of her body, and she might awaken believing that indeed it had and feel better immediately.
After failing to cure a blind girl in Vienna, Mesmer fled to Paris, where he continued his work. He became a sensation and soon had more patients than he could handle. To meet the overwhelming demand for his services, he constructed “baquets,” tubs containing magnetized materials to which patients could connect via several protruding iron rods. Once he even magnetized a tree, from which patients formed a human chain, one link passing the power to the next. Of course Mesmer became rich and famous and probably enjoyed the convulsions of the scantily clad young females (thick clothes blocked the flow) he often treated.
So great was the furor over Mesmer that it piqued the interest of King Louis XVI. In 1784, he commissioned a group of scientists, including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, to investigate. The group found no evidence for animal magnetism but did not discount the beneficial results of the hypnotism. It concluded that “imagination” somehow caused the results.
Franklin and Co. happened upon the placebo effect. A recent Radiolab episode featured several stunning stories of the power of placebo, ranging from the case of Mesmer to a physician who cured a terrible skin disease through hypnosis to the ministrations of medicine men to the restorative powers of pill colors. Researchers have concluded that believing you are being cured can cause the brain to produce the chemicals that compose many of our drugs, including opiates. The problem is, placebo curing works only about 25 percent of the time, and success is difficult to predict.
Still, the placebo effect demonstrates the power of the mind to shape matter, fiction to create fact, theater (Dumbledorean robes and phony magic wands and Enyaesque music) to dictate the examining room (where crisp white coats, stethoscopes, and Muzak usually reign).
I think that’s as far as I want to go into placebo, because if I were to keep pushing, I’d find myself staring at Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, the mesmerist from Maine who rose to fame in the middle of the nineteenth century, under whose tutelage Mary Baker Eddy developed the ideas and practices that resulted in Christian Science, which is based on the idea that all diseases are purely mental and so curable by positive thinking.
James, sick-souled, was actually taken aback by the hyperpositive attitude of Christian Scientists, who were becoming legion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James called them “moonstruck with optimism.” The psychologist was too much of a realist to put much stock in cosmic harmony. The universe is fractured, turbulent, painful, no matter how you look at it. Still, James shares one basic assumption with Mesmer, Quimby, and Eddy, as well as with Norman Vincent Peale, whose Power of Positive Thinking movement was significantly influenced by Eddy: “reality” is just as mental as it is physical.
James would probably even agree with Peale that repeating happy affirmations can make you successful in life. But from Peale it is a short step to all manner of New Age spirituality, with its astrology, parapsychology, chanting, herbs, Druids, Wicca, Aquarius, ambient music, crystals, incense, reincarnation, all of which is fine, really, and probably totally conducive to a good life, but which I find creepy and soft-headed and divorced from the nit and grit that give me traction in life. James would feel the same way, I think, knowing that it’s the parts of life that appear the most unmagical that stimulate the most powerful narratives, those of rebirth and redemption.
And anyway, while I’m speaking of creepy, ever seen a mesmerized man? You don’t have to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to realize that a hypnotized person is devoid of personal agency and so no different from a machine. And that’s where the real terror begins: when we don’t know the difference between a human and an android. Sleep in a room full of puppets or dolls one night, and you’ll see what I mean, or stare at a mummy a long time in a dark museum just about ready to close, or get lost in a robot factory.
Or read a biography of Descartes, who believed that our bodies are mechanisms somehow inhabited by mind, the ghost in the machine. In 1649, Descartes shipped from Holland to Sweden. He was bound for the palace of Queen Christina in Stockholm, where he was to become philosophy tutor to the court. Once aboard the vessel, Descartes told passengers that his young daughter, Francine, was accompanying him. But as the ship pushed north, no one set eyes on the girl. Folks, especially the crew, began to talk. A horrible storm broke out. Amid the chaos, no one could find Descartes and his daughter. Fearing the worst, sailors burst into the philosopher’s cabin. No one was there. But wait. A large box was standing in the corner. Curiosity overcame caution, and the men pried it open. Inside was a figurine of a small girl. One of the sailors picked it up. Its eyes opened. He dropped it and ran out of the room, the other crewmen following. They immediately reported this incident to the captain. A superstitious man, he concluded that this unnatural thing had caused the storm. He ordered the sailors to toss the girl into the ocean. How Descartes reacted to the loss of his automaton, no one knows. But he probably took it hard, because the doll was a substitute for a fully human daughter, also named Francine, who had died of scarlet fever ten years earlier, at the age of five.