Magnetizing a patient by passes of the hands and directed will induces a distinct sleep-like lucid state (artificial or magnetic somnambulism), different in kind from Mesmer's convulsive crisis, in which the subject speaks and responds to the operator while apparently asleep and afterwards remembers nothing.
This is the one claim of the case that holds up, narrowly. The induced state Puységur described from 1784 onward is a genuine, reproducible psychological phenomenon: an altered, suggestible, sleep-like condition with later amnesia. It is the direct forerunner of what the nineteenth century isolated and renamed hypnosis. What does not hold is the explanation: the state is produced by suggestion and expectation, not by redirection of a magnetic fluid. So the surrogate (the trance can be induced) is real; the mechanism Puységur attached to it is not.
Appears in
Sources
- Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l'homme dans l'état de somnambulisme naturel, et dans le somnambulisme provoqué par l'acte magnétique — Chastenet de Puységur, Armand-Marie-Jacques de. *Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l'homme dans l'état de somnambulisme naturel, et dans le somnambulisme provoqué par l'acte magnétique*. Paris: J.G. Dentu, 1811. Wellcome Collection.
- The Marquis de Puységur, Artificial Somnambulism, and the Discovery of the Unconscious Mind — Crabtree, Adam, and Sarah Osei-Bonsu. *The Marquis de Puységur, Artificial Somnambulism, and the Discovery of the Unconscious Mind*. London: Routledge, 2024. ISBN 9781003300625. DOI: 10.4324/9781003300625.