The Marquis de Puységur, Artificial Somnambulism, and the Discovery of the Unconscious Mind
secondary literature · 2024
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SUMMARY
Modern scholarly edition and English translation of Puységur's *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'établissement du magnétisme animal*, with critical apparatus by Adam Crabtree (the leading historian of magnetic sleep) and Sarah Osei-Bonsu. The title-chapter translation, 'Memoirs to Serve the History and Establishment of Animal Magnetism' (DOI 10.4324/9781003300625-1, pp. 1-99), reproduces Puységur's own account of the 1784 Buzancy discovery, including the first artificial-somnambulism subject Victor Race; the surrounding scholarship situates Puységur's work as a turning point from Mesmer's fluid theory toward later conceptions of suggestion and the unconscious. Crossref record: monograph, Routledge, issued 2024-07-23, ISBN 9781003300625.
NOTES
Crabtree and Osei-Bonsu’s 2024 Routledge volume is the appropriate modern scholarly reference for this case. It provides a critical English text of Puységur’s foundational Mémoires, the documentary basis for the Buzancy discovery and for the identification of Victor Race as the first subject Puységur put into magnetic sleep, and it traces the line from Puységur’s somnambulism to nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of suggestion and the unconscious. The DOI (10.4324/9781003300625) and ISBN (9781003300625) were confirmed on Crossref.