A Teacher
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault
The country doctor who recast mesmeric trance as ordinary suggestion and founded clinical hypnotherapy.
The transmission
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was a French physician universally acknowledged as the founder of the Nancy School, also called the Suggestion School. Beginning around 1866 in Nancy, he treated patients with hypnotic suggestion, gaining the support of the physician Hippolyte Bernheim, with whom he co-founded the school.
They argued that hypnosis involved no physical forces or pathology but was simply a response to psychologically mediated suggestion. His book Le sommeil et les états analogues (1866), revised as Le sommeil provoqué (1889), laid out this theory and helped move mesmerism toward clinical hypnosis.
What they gave
The Nancy School: Founded the Suggestion School around 1866 in Nancy, treating patients with hypnotic suggestion and winning the support of Hippolyte Bernheim.
- Suggestion over magnetism: Reframed hypnosis as a purely psychological response to suggestion, free of physical forces or pathology, decisively breaking with animal magnetism.
- Foundations of hypnotherapy: Laid out the theory in ‘Du sommeil et des états analogues’ (1866), later revised as ‘Le sommeil provoqué,’ establishing the basis of modern clinical hypnosis.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: The mesmeric tradition of Franz Mesmer; the suggestion-based practice of Abbé Faria.
- Taught / Influenced: Hippolyte Bernheim; Émile Coué; Sigmund Freud.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Du sommeil et des états analogues1866
- Le sommeil provoqué et les états analogues1889