http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://apaconvention.com/2013/08/04/hypnotic-credit-where-credit-is-due/ Hypnotic Credit Where Credit is Due by Kim I. Mills (American Psychological Association Annual Convention)
Although Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795-1860) is widely credited as the “father of hypnosis,” an earlier figure known as Abbe Faria was actually first to draw hypnosis out of the realm of parlor trick and into the practitioner’s office, according to a presenter at the session “History of Hypnosis – From Mesmerism to the Great Debates.” Faria, who was born Jose Custodio de Faria in 1756 on the Indian island of Goa, pioneered many of the hypnosis techniques and applications still in use today, said Ian E. Wickramasekera, PsyD, of the University of the Rockies. Faria came up with the practice of focusing subjects’ eyes on something and suggesting that they are feeling sleepy, Wickamasekera said. He also came up with the practice of using hypnosis (a term that didn’t yet exist; he called it “lucid sleep”) to block pain during medical procedures, “one of the most respected uses of hypnosis today,” Wickamasekera noted. “He also pioneered the use of post-hypnotic suggestion.” Faria, who was a Catholic priest, became interested in methods to control the mind when he developed stage fright while delivering a sermon to the Portuguese royal family in Lisbon, Wickamasekera said. His father was in the audience and, seeing his son’s terror, called out in the Goan language, “They are all vegetables; cut the vegetables.” “It snapped him right out of his stage fright,” Wickamasekera said. “He learned there were words that could actually dispel an anxiety attack at a critical moment.” Faria began studying the work of Franz Mesmer and his followers, but he did not believe in “mesmeric fluid” or that electromagnetism had anything to do with hypnosis, Wickamasekera said. “He developed a theory that the effects were due to the mental and psychophysiological properties of the subject.” Braid wrote about Faria’s work to downplay it, “while repeating his ideas and methods,” Wickamasekera said. Part of the reason much of Faria’s work has not gotten more renown was his book, “On the Cause of Lucid Sleep,” (1819), was written in a mashup of Portuguese, French and the Goan language, Wickamasekera said. It was translated into English in 2004 by Laurent Carre, PhD, he added. “I think we should be listing Abbe Faria more regularly” as a discoverer of hypnosis, he said.
