Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'établissement du magnétisme animal

The Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'établissement du magnétisme animal records Puységur's discovery of "artificial somnambulism," a finding that quietly subverted Mesmer's system. Its central claim is that the essential phenomenon of magnetism is not a physical fluid but a special state of consciousness in the subject—calm, sleep-like, yet lucidly responsive.

Puységur describes how a magnetized subject, rather than convulsing in crisis, entered a tranquil trance marked by heightened rapport with the operator, apparent clairvoyance, extreme suggestibility, and subsequent amnesia. By attending to the subject's altered mind rather than the operator's fluid, he shifts the locus of the phenomenon inward.

The work is the crucial second hinge in the transition from occult fluids to psychological suggestion, anticipating the reframing that Braid and the Nancy School would complete. Its account of rapport and suggestibility is the empirical seed of all later suggestion therapy.