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Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature Oct 21, Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Reflections on Human Nature by Douglas K. Only 2 left in stock - order soon. Archeopsychology and the Modern Mind Nov 24, Available for download now. Only 1 left in stock more on the way. Emotion Core books in psychology series. Available to ship in days. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. The Javanese males performed traditional songs and dances, the Laps showed their reindeer Caribou to North Americans , and even in the summer heat of Chicago Eskimos showed off their fur wraps.
Thirty-five years later, her gyrations were specifically included in a scene based on the fair in the musical Showboat.
Tribal marriages were performed, children reared and, obviously, romances were begun, consummated, and concluded. The police record shows a total of arrests, and the finding of three fetuses.
This, it was argued, to maintain the integrity of the exhibit. Displaying living people led to difficulties, both in acquiring such and in caring for their needs during their long stay within the fairgrounds, but such was managed. We know even less about how the Asians were recruited.
Dance and music were featured, but some groups, the Dahomey being conspicuous examples, took seriously the charge to display their customs not only as represented by music, but by presentations of family customs, including marriage, and preparations for war. There are hints that they took special pleasure in the war chants, as these seemed to have the desired effect on the largely Caucasian audience. Such was not the case.
The displays of peoples were laid out by latitude, from the northern most peoples the Esquimaux to equatorial peoples, these being from the south, at least by northern standards. The difference in placement may of course have been disingenuous, as many surely held the still prevalent belief that, except in Great Britain, northerners are intellectually and physically superior to southerners. Regardless, it is quite likely that the average-fair goer saw the displays as arranged in the order of human progress.
One author of a popular article on garden flowers had written the connection and later claimed credit; other, more academic, less practical folk, had nibbled at the central idea without catching its center. The discovery of dinosaur and large mammal remains in the American West, a cause of much excitement in the s, gave Darwinism a presence that was very real and newsworthy for Americans. Here we find a small but promising mental fossil.
To the minds of the fair-goers, God had a goal in mind, and that goal could be determined through observation. If the Divine Hand was not always guiding visibly, it was nonetheless doing so invisibly, as Adam Smith had noted was the case in capitalism. The notion of truly random effects, that the design of creatures and their activities were purposeless, seemed somehow wrong-headed.
What we see as design and purpose is thought to merely be our mind imposing order on otherwise chance occurrences. We have no direct justification by those involved in the procurement as to how the mind of this time and place was able to conceive of the idea of human evolutional displays, nor how the plan was carried out to display the cultural and intellectual progress of human beings. We wonder of this just as generations future to our own will be interested, perhaps, in grasping why folk of our time are conflicted about the propriety of maintaining zoos, not to mention animal-shoots events in which large numbers of caged animals are released before a crowd equipped with guns.
Living Human Displays Beyond the Fair We shall use our ability to skip to the future to visit three men who themselves would be kept in settings for education and entertainment: Let us visit Ota Benga, Minik and Ishi, for their stories may help us understand the beliefs of those who created and viewed such displays. Our contemporary views ascribe different feelings to the conditions of these men. I believe that there is a general feeling today, held by those familiar with one or more of the stories, that Ishi was fortunate, his treatment humane.
In contrast, we read of Ota Benga with remorse, viewing his treatment as characteristic of the thinking of another time, another place, another kind of humanity. But these feelings are our modern view. For different purposes, all three were on exhibit or made their homes in the United States at the same time, the first and second decades of the nineteenth century; one at the Bronx Zoo, one at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and one at the Anthropological Museum, then in San Francisco.
The people whose lives we meet were chosen by their captors and keepers because they represented distinct variation, perhaps a representative of a race and culture unfamiliar to the examiners; perhaps someone thought to be the last of their race, therefore providing the last chance for information about the group to be gathered. Perhaps they had nowhere else to go except into a society that wanted to examine them.
They were chosen due to the modern fascination with variation, and the belief that it should be seen, studied, and cataloged. Least we moderns think such exhibitions to be the oddity of another age, consider Figure 3.
At a contemporary park wherein attendees can examine native Bushmen. The first of our displayed human beings, whom will only be mentioned briefly, is Ota Benga Figure 3. He resided with the New York Zoological Society at the Bronx Zoo and later developed a second career, this doing dances and the like at the St Louis Exposition and elsewhere. Ota Benga, housed at the Bronx Zoo, with a companion. There is far more to note about the Eskimo Minik, who was removed by Admiral Peary from his home in Lapland along with five other members of his village on arrangement with the American Museum of Natural History and a New York newspaper.
He was the only one of the group to survive their stay in New York. Minik was manipulated by various people for various ends, but ultimately found friends. He was befriended by an administrator at the Museum, Mr. Wallace unrelated to Alfred Russel and their son, whose surname Minik took. He also took Peary as a middle name. Education was sought for him, and he then lived in New York in a hotel on West 43 St.
Like many tourists, Mink eventually tired of New York and city life. Mink returned to Lapland, married, fathered, and, then tired of Lap life, returned to New York. He then gained nation-wide publicity when he claimed to have discovered the bones of his father on display in the museum. Admiral Peary, then one of the most celebrated people in America, when asked if he had a responsibility to the young man, showed little interest in the hegira of his captive: Both children lived into adulthood and were acknowledged, if only slightly, by the Peary family. He became non grata, and, rather like an animal involuntarily contributing to human experimentation whose usefulness is ended, the policy of the Museum was to say as little about his whereabouts as possible.
The life of Ishi, the last living native American Indian of the Yana tribe, and surely a truly native Californian, who found his way into northern California Caucasian civilization in , is apparently of a different nature. He was provided the guardianship of anthropologists from the University of California Berkeley who provided shelter, food, and companionship, and who investigated his language and recorded his arts of hunting and tool-making. Ishi lived the last four years of his life in the San Francisco Museum of Anthropology. His knowledge of native-American culture and language meant that he was able to provide information that otherwise would be lost upon his death, such as how his tribe made arrows and flint, what they ate, and their other customs.
However sensitive the staff was to his needs and feelings, then as now the press knew how to milk a story. His reactions upon being taken to a stage production were recorded by the San Francisco Sunday Call on October 8, in an article that tells us something about Ishi, to be sure, but also some things about how native-Americans were then understood. Ishi, the primordial man, the only really wild Indian in existence. At his side were learned pundits.
Cold terror sat upon him at first, but terror bravely mastered and hidden under a mask of stoicism such as only a son of the wilderness may wear. Never before had he seen white people, excepting in small groups. He could not believe there were so many people in the world, and knowing nothing of paleface custom, save what he had seen once, 40 years ago, when the gold seekers had slaughtered practically all of his tribe before his eyes, it is small wonder that he misjudged the spirit of vaudeville.
To him the stage was the mystery room of the gods, the singers were priests, the dancers were medicine men and women, and the orchestra was designed to drive the devils out of sick people. Later he asked the interpreter whether the applause helped to drive the demons away, as he had observed that everybody ran off the stage when the people spitted their hands together.
Minik, dressed in his Labrador wear, poses for a publicity photograph while he was living in New York. Reqquested from Kenn Harper and Steerforth Press, , Minik, enculturated and living with the Wallace family near New York City. Requested from Kenn Harper and Steerforth Press, , Requested from Kroeber and the University of California Press, Waterman, who first interviewed him in Oroville, California [10,11], has many resemblances to the descriptions of supposedly feral children who found their way into civilization in the eighteenth century, thereupon to serve both as objects of scientific investigations and of the kindnesses supplied by caring families and helpers.
True, a research specimen Ishi was, and his demonstrations of tool-making, canoe-making, hunting, and the like were surely of cross-cultural significance, while his place of residence, the Museum in San Francisco makes it hard to argue that he was integrated into society.
Nonetheless, he was shown respect and cared for, regardless of motivation, this being yet another common justification for captivity. From the view of one of the anthropologists, T. It has nothing to do with artificially acquired tricks of behavior. Ishi was slow to acquire the tricks of social contact.
He never learned to shake hands but he had an innate regard for the other fellows existence, and an inborn considerateness, that surpassed in fineness most of the civilized breeding with which I am familiar. Ishi demonstrating the use of the bow and arrow. His presence was unarranged by people of the dominant culture unlike those of Ota Benga and Minik , but once he appeared, persons of science and medicine requested his presence, ordered his activities, and gave him home and work in the San Francisco Museum.
A federal government agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, watched the process and offered him sanctuary elsewhere, chiefly on Indian reservations. This fate, Ishi declined, preferring to work and live in the museum. His work consisted of displaying his tool-making abilities and something of Indian life to visitors at the museum. If not on display, he was, surely, engaged in displaying himself and performing Native American tasks for the edification of visitors.
Ishi was invited to Caucasian affairs, dinners, plays, musicals, and such. His reactions, say to women, were observed and recorded. The text is intelligent, far-ranging, informative, yet necessarily colored by the relationship of the author to a principle in the story. The text does not discuss this relationship, but the dedication makes it clear.
Her sympathy with Ishi, her tact in describing his beliefs and behavior, yields a book that is both complete and warm. In the end, Ishi is something of a tragic hero, a complex Shakespearean figure, to us. He was acculturated, his culture studied; he was integrated into Caucasian society in a kind way, yet he was a specimen; Ishi and his Caucasian companions summarize, perhaps, the puzzles that surround captivity.
Perhaps the most striking statement about Ishi comes in an obituary of his life written in the California Chico Record of March 28, He furnished amusement and study to the savants at the University of California for a number of years, and doubtless much of ancient Indian lore was learned from him, but we do not believe he was the marvel that the professors would have the public believe. He was just a starved-out Indian from the wilds of Deer creek who, by hiding in its fastness [vastness? And the white man with his food and clothing and shelter finally killed the Indian just as effectively as he would have killed him with a rifle.
We must now return, however, to our main task, and continue to uncover the fossils available to us at the Columbian Exposition. In Chapters 6 and 7 we shall read how persons in authority physicians, professors measured the naked bodies of college students in the hope of predicting behavior from body-type, while lawyers and professors worked in somewhat like fashion to predict which adolescent children would become criminals.
Department M The divisions of exhibits at the Fair reflect the classifications of human achievement: We cannot know whether fair-goers imagined a connection between this form of classification and the participants in the living anthropological exhibits, but it would be odd if they did not. Within Deparment M, a set of almost hidden displays catch our psycho- archeological attention, because we know where it will lead while the exhibitors do not.
Their importance is that they were the first public presentations of the achievements of three new academic departments. Anthropometry, psychology, and neurology were housed in the Anthropology Building, each occupying small alcoves along one wall. The floor plans [14] show these as each occupying three 12 by 12 foot areas of the building which was itself by feet.
One of these alcoves offered an exhibit of the techniques and achievements of the emerging science of anthropometric measurement. Included were displays of German and French instruments specially designed for the budding enterprise. A practical use of such would be the identification through body or facial characteristics of those practicing, or likely to practice, criminal behavior Chapter 7. A like idea, sometimes discredited, sometimes not, was the idea that intellect, talent, and character could be predicted from certain measurements of the head Chapter 5 or the shape of the body Chapter 6.
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The motives of the anthropologist of the day are often evident in their writings: Sample exhibit at the Chicago Fair of on facial types and criminality. From the exhibition of, perhaps, psychology or anthropology. Permission requested from Brown and the University of Arizona Press. A major task of anthropometry at the time was to use bodily measurements as indicators or correlates of temperament.
To this end, the Harvard University medical and physical education authorities had been photographing enrolling students, naked. An example is shown in Figure 3. Each student was photographed from three angles so anthropomorphic measurements could be made of aspects of the human form. So tactfully, in fact, that on the night before the opening of the fair, the authorities insisted that Adam be turned to the wall. Perhaps the measurements and reconstructions were far more thorough than contemporary sources describe.
If measures were taken from the entering classes at Harvard and Radcliffe only, they are based on American Caucasians of north European descent, although it is not evident that the legendary Adam and Eve were of this genetic and social group. The perfect man and perfect women, as calculated as measurements of students at a university, displayed at the Chicago Fair, Permission requested from Brown and Harvard University Press.
The photographing of persons naked as part of their college-orientation has been treated by contemporary re-discoverers of it in several ways. One answer lies buried within the question itself. In that era, it was commonly believed that social science would improve the human lot; that research on behavior and society could reveal something about how society might end or ameliorate human suffering. Cooperating with the investigative needs of social science was, in a sense, patriotic. A second exhibit, this displayed in a small area of the same hall, featured equipment representative of the new laboratory psychology.
No doubt, the presenters were proud of these demonstrations of how to measure variation with accuracy. Of the exhibit as a whole, we learn: The laboratories are divided into three sections — Physical Anthropology, Neurology, and Psychology. An interesting series of charts in the Physical Anthropological section is that illustrating the development of over 50, school children in various cities in North America; while another series of diagrams and maps shows the physical characteristics of the Indians of North America, as derived from measurement and observations upon nearly 20, Indians, recorded by about twenty-five special assistants of the department, who were engaged for nearly two years in this work.
Perhaps he was tired of the fair scene, as he had attended and conducted seminars at the Paris fair only a few years earlier. However, had he attended, he would have noticed quite a difference. The academic work featured in Paris was on animal magnetism, hallucinations, and hypnotism, while that displayed in Chicago showed the cusp of the shift from the medieval and spiritist to modern experimental psychology. He sent, instead, parts of his fledgling psychological laboratory at Harvard, displayed by assistant professor Hugo Munsterberg Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin is reported to have headed, with the hesitant approval of the young American Psychological Association, Galton-inspired measurements of those willing to pay a 10 cent charge.
Although the closing catalog of the Fair lists this event, I do not know what became of the data that were collected. The relationship between academic psychology and commercial psychology was soon to be established, this being an industry which separates the motives of social science into our day. The professors, more interested in pragmatic issues than James, demonstrated the individual differences to be found in the reaction time of the nervous system, along with other promising techniques involving psychological measurements.
The similarity between these measurements and those of Mr. The testing-movement in North America can be said to have begun at the Fair. With impetus from World War I, when tests were used to distinguish the likely abilities of soldiers, along with the development of tests of intelligence, aptitude for college, and the like, testing would soon become the most influential and widespread tool of psychology and, perhaps, of all social science.
Equipment available at the time was mostly of German design and construction. The laboratory is thus designed, not as are those connected with universities, for special research, or for demonstrations and instruction in psychology, but as a laboratory for the collection of tests. As in physical anthropometry the chief proportions of the human body are systematically measured, so in mental anthropometry the fundamental modes of action upon which mental life is conditioned are subjected to a careful examination With this determined, each individual can find his place upon the chart or curve for each form of test and from a series of such comparisons obtain a significant estimate of his proficiencies and deficiencies.
The problems to be considered are such general ones as the growth and development with age of various powers; what types of faculty develop earlier and what later; how far their growth is conditioned upon age and how far upon education; again, the difference between the sexes at various ages, differences of race, environment, social status, are likewise to be determined.
The relation of physical development to mental, the correlation of one form of mental faculty with others, the effect of a special training, -these, together with their many practical applications, form the more conspicuous problems to the elucidation of which such tests as are here taken will contribute. Thus the psychology of this display advertised the experimental approach to human and animal variation.
For example, consider reaction time, the time required for a human being to make a motor response to a perceptual stimulus, which was originally thought to measure differences in the speed of nervous-system transmission.
But as variation was found and its significance recognized, the practical aspects of reaction time in predicting success at work, intelligence, and the like, became utilized. These were not the only displays of psychology and anthropometry present at the fair. French companies also displayed their surgical, physical, and psychological instruments, though they did so individually. The University of Pennsylvania exhibit, located in the Liberal Arts building, was intended to present an entire working laboratory and active data collection, but due to a lack of staff merely displayed tests of reaction-time and visual aesthetics.
The display of the University of Illinois, located in the Illinois State building, displayed the collections of the Department of Ethnology. The idea of the potential of measurement is evident; less apparent is that of photography, the mechanism by which images are seemingly forever set. We should note here in passing that, like electricity, photography has the characteristic, to the observer, of being an unseen power. Electricity and Photography The two remaining aspects of the Fair that command our attention are the use of electricity and the process of photography.
Contemporary accounts of the fair repeatedly turned and returned to expressions of awe regarding the electric lights. Electricity as an example of how technology becomes translated into metaphor and simile about life itself. But, there was something spiritistic about electricity: Who would guess that something unseen could be so predictable, and so useful? And, if electricity was unseen, what other unseen spirits awaited discovery?
Writing in the era of the Chicago Fair authors stumble time and again to find words, this in an age of extravagant writing, to describe the effects of the electric lights. Our explanations of ourselves, certainly of how our brains work, appear to follow the metaphor provided by the technology of the day. The sixteenth century in Europe imaged the brain to work rather like the water-driven figures at Versailles, an image that Descartes used.
Later, Mesmer and others thought the mind worked through the phenomenon of magnetism. Most in the 20th century offered an explanation of mental function which featured power, resistance, and outcome, reflecting the new understanding of electricity. The third was the belief in unseen worlds, this known as spiritism, from which human behavior, past and future, was guided. The latter we will delve into soon enough. In short, we use whatever technological marvel is at hand when we construct a theory of the brain and behavior, but let us not digress that far.
By the time of the Fair, photography, of course, had been around for sixty years or more, and it was no longer a magical oddity.
Yet only now were its practical uses being extended to academic science, especially to art, anthropology, neurology, and psychology. The exhibits are surely influenced by recently invented techniques of photography. It provides a more or less permanent record for that which, before, could only be described in words or artistic impressions.
Some aspects of Anthropology would come to see their basic data as being entombed in the photograph, rather like a fossil. And the photograph would become an essential tool for those wishing to demonstrate correlations between physical aspects of the body and talents, delinquency, and criminal behavior.
The value of the photograph was in its ability to record from different angles and to display thereby a sense of depth and surely a sense of proportion to the two-dimensional image. This encouraged measurement, naming, and categorization, which Aristotle told us are the beginning procedures by which science organizes its knowledge. Both psychology and anthropology found immediate use for the photograph.
Darwin [23], in his book on emotion, uses photography to document data critical to his theory of human and animal emotion. He had photographed facial images of the insane, his children displaying emotional states, and of the facial expressions of actors miming emotional expression. His experimental interest was whether other folk could identify the emotion being expressed or emulated. Usually they could, thus suggesting to Darwin the universality of facial expression.
Galton was amoung that group of British who, given inherited wealth and position, could devote all of their time to their interests in intellectual and academic pursuits. Among his many lasting discoveries were the statistical tools that form the basis of social science, chief among these being the measurement of statistical correlation. Galton believed that humanity had evolved through natural selection, that the differences among races and cultures were self-evident, and these states could be arranged along a ladder or continuum showing the evolution of mankind.
It was axiomatic that the English, as distinct from the British, sat on the pinnacle. Working-class people over-reproduced, while the upper-classes did not always do their duty to reproduce more heavily. Education should not be wasted on those who would not profit from it, Galton believed, and those of superior talents should be given special attention. These interests in heredity and class led him to collect measurements on how people differed mentally and physically.
His purposes, he tells us, were to understand the qualities and composition of the British people, by which he seems to have meant those living in England. Two schools replied, and with the addition of data a few years later, Galton was able to publish information on the averages from city private schools as contrasted with rural public schools. Galton found differences, for example between rural and city fourteen-year old males: If we pause for a moment to ask what the differences mean, we get nowhere quickly. We cannot say that such differences are merely a matter of city versus country living, for certainly location co-relates with wealth, education of parents, medical care during development, nutrition, etc.
Nor was Galton able to say whether the differences found were sufficiently large to be statistically significant, for inferential statistics were yet to be invented. For a fee of three-pence, visitors were measured by Galton and two assistants. The visitors received a card showing their measurements and comparing them to the mean, while Galton kept a copy for his researches. American psychologists, with approval of the newly minted American Psychological Association, charged a fee, took measurements, and gave fairgoers a card comparing themselves to the population averages.
This was to become a major industry of the twentieth century. In each case, the study of individual differences held promise. The scheme came to be expanded in time to an attempt to find information on the presumed genetic inheritance of all Americans. Galton, is, and for some decades has been, out of favor. Neither anthropology nor psychology does much to recognize its debt to him as the theoretical and practical expert and pioneer of variation. Can we imagine a social science that fails to measure variation, or that has no descriptive statistics?
No more than we can imagine a biology without evolution. While Darwin seems to us to be reasonable, painstaking, and kind, Galton rankles the contemporary mind. Few readers of his work can separate his achievements form his motives. While Darwin has had thousands of publicists, Galton has had only a handful, most of whom appearing to be more enchanted with his racial and class views than with his grasp of measurement.
Before we make judgement, however, we might examine our own culture more carefully than we usually care to do. Who among us has not had their future decided or altered by the outcome of a test of mental or physical ability? The idea that variation may be used to predict is an idea of enormous significance to our cultural systems. If the Anthropological and Psychological Exhibits in Chicago can be said to have had a prompter, Galton is a leading candidate.
Speaking of which, it is time that we finally wished farewell to the fair, and searched for further pastures. Some of the towering, white, Renaissance buildings were put to permanent use, not the least of which being the development of the Field Museum. Eventually their presence annoyed the better off citizens, as it does today, and the authorities decide to reduce the remainingbuildings to rubble, thereby scattering the undesirable locals who had taken to living there. These inhabitants were the last human beings to see and to be seen at the Exposition, an ironic continuation and ending to the displays of native peoples and their customs.
Most of the folk who formed the living tableaux will return to their lands and cultures, although some will integrate themselves, so to speak, into the life of the city. The intellectual life promoted by the Fair is not in rubble and is not lost, but transformed. The University of Chicago, built adjourning the fairgrounds, remains a testament to the birth and rebirth that accompanies evolution, whether of human physical structure, or human ideas and institutions. Annie Besant would become a leader in the spritist movement, working with and then against Rudolph Steiner, who we will meet in the next chapter.
Samuel Gompers would become a major force in the unionization movement in the years ahead. Jastrow would promote the study of individual differences as the basic data of psychology. The ideas we seek are no longer to be found in Jackson Park our hunt for mental fossils there is over.
Yet these ideas refuse to be buried, they make their way into the public consciousness in ways difficult but rewarding to trace. Just as the Fair brought together people of all backgrounds, kinds of work, ages, races, genders, sexes; just as it displayed the unusual, the freakish, the rare; so too it brought further into the public conciousness the measure of human variation — measurements so, quite frankly, skimpily, done in the exhibits.
But before we see the future of those ideas, we explore the consequence of the fair in terms of the marvel of electricity and the application of photography. At the fair, the first turned night into day by unseen power unleashed, it would seem, by the mere pressing of a button. The second, much featured at the exhibits of anthropology, neurology, and psychology was seen as a technique that allowed for permanent recording of events, people, and human variation. We explore the impact now the power of the mental fossil represented by unseen power.
Spiritism and Other Worlds In , had you touted your belief that there were rays that could see through flesh, or those that could transmit messages through air, such would have been grouds for considering changing your residence to an asylum. The same proposition was is a hallmark of spiritist thinking, and also, alas, of schizophrenic thinking.
At the fair and in our earlier tentative digs we touched upon the idea of unseen power in several forms: For some, the latter idea is fleshed out with angels interacting with human beings. Some folk attempt to translate between seen and unseen worlds, most often through religious postulates and hypotheses, though sometimes, as we shall read in this chapter, through mathematical formulae.
The first is the world we know via perceptions, which become organized by the mind into our understanding of reality. In the current chapter, the idea of unseen power, introduced as electricity at the Fair,is shown to appear in the ideas of Gustav Fechner , Carl Jung , Rudolph Steiner , and Sigmund Freud Freud and Fechner, whose achievements are often understood to represent antithetical ways of understanding ourselves, both postulated an unseen world as a means of explaining the world of perceptions and human understanding.
Freud distinguished the conscious from the unconscious, with the unconscious understood to modulate between reality and appearance. Steiner, the most practical theorist of the group, held to a belief in unseen power that gave rise to an educational system active today. Spirit and Healing A frequent and constant way in which the idea of unseen power makes itself known is through expression of religious faith and through healing of mental or physical ailments.
Faith and healing are associated, the one almost always involving the other. The promise of the ability to heal the minds and bodies of the ill is among the most prominent mental fossil evidence of spiritism. We pray, we hope, we have faith in being healed: We expect that some part of us will survive in an existence in another world, even if one now unseen and unknown, perhaps even one worse than the one we now experience.
Each has in common hypotheses regarding how and why we human beings react. Here is the pattern: The putative healer discovers an unseen, but powerful force or spirit, whose energy governs the state of the mind and body of the human individual; At first, the discoverer is alone able to use the power, but at some point other practitioners are taught and allowed to use the power; The nature of the power often requires some special relationship between the holder and the recipient; In time, the holder of the power transfers it to another person who is able to act as healer; When the power is transferred , the recipient often has an awakening, a realization of a new life or state of being; an understanding of oneself previously denied or hidden; The notion of their being such a power, or at least of the power having the characteristics claimed by the discovery, is attacked by established professions; The process is then practiced by a chosen few followers.
These aspects were evident: The person in trance appeared to show the memories and perceptions of a person different from him or herself in the normal state. Once released from hypnosis, there was no memory of the person who had appeared during the crises state. The healer could implant in the hypnotized person ideas and instructions that would influence the awake person and be acted upon, yet unremembered.
Mesmer celebrated his ideas and cures both as a scientist and as a physician. Patients were eager to see him, while his sympathy and policy of low or no fees for the poor gave him a reputation as a man truly interested in the welfare of his patients and humankind. Mesmer was celebrated for his humane-ness and healing. It was the curative aspect of the trance that came to hold his interest and to occupy his time. The doctor developed a method of animal magnetism for groups. The utility of group healing may have monetary motivations, of course, but there is an occasional claim that the group itself is a critical aspect of the healing.
The tub contained iron rods connected to magnetized jars of water. Music was provided, often by Dr. Mesmer himself, who played the glass harmonica invented by Benjamin Franklin, in Paris at the time. Franklin would also come to be the chair of the Royal Commission appointed to assess the validity of Dr.
Some describers say the patients held hands. The crises were curative: A splendid description of the group therapy is provided by Ellenberger. Note how the several elements of animal magnetism, hypnotism, electricity, healing, landscape, tree-worship, and the postulation of other worlds come together in this taut description from France in The public square of the small village of Buzancy.
In the center of that square stood a large, beautiful old elm tree, at the foot of which a spring poured forth its limpid waters. They began to feel the fluid circulate among them to varying degrees. After a while, the master ordered the chain to be broken and the patients to rub their hands. It was reported that within little more than one month, 62 of the patients had been cured of various ailments. His position reflects a theme that is long-standing, but one that, in our times, is generally devalued to favor the human capacities for thinking and reasoning.
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