The discovery of magnetic sleep-an artificially induced trance-like state-in 1784 marked the beginning of the modern era of psychological healing. Magnetic sleep revealed a realm of mental activity that was not available to the conscious mind but could affect conscious thought and action. This book tells the story of the discovery of magnetic sleep and its relationship to psychotherapy. Adam Crabtree describes how in the 1770s Franz Anton Mesmer developed a technique based on “animal magnetism,” which he felt could cure a wide variety of ailments when the healer directed “magnetic fluid” …
The discovery of magnetic sleep—an artificially induced trance-like state—in 1784 marked the beginning of the modern era of psychological healing. Magnetic sleep revealed a realm of mental activity that was not available to the conscious mind but could affect conscious thought and action. This book tells the story of the discovery of magnetic sleep and its relationship to psychotherapy.
Adam Crabtree describes how in the 1770s Franz Anton Mesmer developed a technique based on “animal magnetism,” which he felt could cure a wide variety of ailments when the healer directed “magnetic fluid” through the body of the sufferer. In 1784 Mesmer’s pupil the marquis de Puysegur attempted to heal a patient with this method and discovered that animal magnetism could also be used to induce a trance in the subject that revealed a second consciousness quite distinct from the normal waking state. Puysegur’s discovery of an alternate consciousness was taken up and elaborated by practitioners and thinkers for the next hundred years. Crabtree traces the history of the discovery of animal magnetism, shows how it was brought to bear on physical healing, and explains its relationship to paranormal phenomena, hypnotism, psychological healing, and the diagnosis and investigation of dissociative phenomena such as multiple personality. He documents how the systematic investigation of alternate consciousness reached its height in the 1880s and 1890s, fell into neglect with the appearance of psychoanalysis, and is now experiencing renewed attention as a treatment for multiple personality disorders that may arise from childhood sexual abuse. ISBN: 0300055889
Multiple Man is a reissue of Crabtree’s classical study of possession, multiple personality, and other dissociative states. The book deals both with normal human multiplicity and problematic forms. It is being republished at a time when the issues dealt with are every bit as relevant as when it first appeared.
“Adam Crabtree’s Multiple Man is a classic in a field still in search of its own identity. His unifying perspective, in an area characterized by multiplicity and inconsistency, is based on considerable sophistication in psychology, the history of hypnosis and trance, where he has an especially thorough grounding, and psychotherapy. Crabtree has drawn, with a nicely detailed hand, the outline of a new psychophysics: a science of the forces that make for human integrity–or fragmentation. This book is a marvelous Odyssey into the wonders and terrors of human fragmentation and coming whole again.” –Stephen Larsen, Ph.D. is the author of The Mythic Imagination and with his wife Robin, A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell.
“Adam Crabtree accomplishes the unusual in his groundbreaking book. He helps the reader come to grips with the fact that all is not as it seems–far from it. He explores the concepts of possession by the personalities of dead people, possession by living people, splintered off aspects of the core personality, as well as the conscious and subconscious minds, all within one individual. Crabtree’s book will greatly reward the reader. I highly recommend it!” –Edith Fiore, Ph.D. Author of The Unquiet Dead, You Have Been Here Before, and Encounters.
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and ‘mystical’ states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative ‘transmission’ or ‘filter’ theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
