How Psychology Cured Itself of Wonder

In 1784 the finest minds in France witnessed a miracle, acquitted it, and charged imagination with the crime. A short and mostly disgraceful history of the profession that keeps burying its best medicine, and of the medicine that keeps digging itself out.

By Geoff Fane & Lux Lume. July 2026.

An afternoon at Passy

On a spring afternoon in 1784, in a garden at Passy on the outskirts of Paris, a royal commission of the most distinguished scientific men in France gathered to watch a blindfolded boy hug a tree. The boy had been told that one of the trees in the orchard had been charged with a subtle healing fluid by a disciple of Dr Franz Anton Mesmer, the Viennese physician whose patients had lately taken to convulsing, weeping and rising cured from fashionable chairs all over the capital, and the commissioners, who included Benjamin Franklin and the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, wished to observe what would happen when belief was given a tree of its own choosing. The boy embraced a tree that nobody had enchanted, and convulsed with complete conviction [1][2].

The report, when it came, was a quiet masterpiece of having things both ways. The convulsions were genuine, the recoveries were genuine, and the magnetic fluid supposed to be responsible for both did not exist; the author of the entire spectacle, the commissioners concluded, was the imagination of the patients themselves [2]. It remains the strangest acquittal in the history of science. A panel of the finest minds of the Enlightenment had just demonstrated, under something close to controlled conditions, that a human being supplied with belief, ceremony and an audience can be convulsed and healed by nothing whatsoever, which is to say that they had discovered the most powerful medicine the species possesses. They then charged that medicine with impersonating a cure. Imagination has been doing community service ever since, reporting for duty under a series of assumed names: placebo, expectancy, suggestion, nonspecific effect. The profession that eventually grew from that garden kept the technique and the fees, and locked its miracle in the basement, and the remainder of this history concerns the noises that have been coming from the basement ever since.

The secret society and the sleeping servant

Mesmer himself was never quite the charlatan of the pamphlets, or at any rate never only that. His doctoral thesis of 1766 argued in perfect earnestness that the planets influence the human body [1], and the Société de l’Harmonie universelle he founded in Paris in 1783 was a genuine subscription society, complete with secrecy provisions and Masonic overlaps, in which the paying curious were initiated by degrees into the science of the fluid [3]. Nor was the membership obscure. The Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, wrote to George Washington in May of 1784 in the tones of a man who has glimpsed the future, announcing the great discovery of a German doctor named Mesmer and promising to carry the secret across the Atlantic in person [4]. The techniques that would one day become hypnotherapy, and in their long descent the talking cure itself, first crossed the ocean in the luggage of an initiate.

The truly consequential discovery of 1784, however, was made not by the commission but by one of Mesmer’s aristocratic pupils, working on his own estate with no audience worth mentioning. When the Marquis de Puységur magnetised a young farm servant named Victor Race, the young man declined to convulse. He slipped instead into a lucid, tranquil sleep in which he seemed somehow sharper than his ordinary self, discussed that ordinary self as though describing another man entirely, and woke remembering nothing about it. Historians treat the episode as the moment divided consciousness entered the Western scientific record, several decades before Freud drew breath [5]. The self, it turned out, was not the tidy monarchy philosophy had been assuming, but a larger and considerably stranger country, and the first man to sight its border was not a professor but a mesmerist, which is exactly the sort of detail a respectable discipline learns not to mention.

The respectable years

What followed was a century of the new science of the mind conducting a long and awkward romance with everything it officially despised. France’s earliest psychological societies investigated thought-reading and mental suggestion in complete seriousness, and Charles Richet, a future Nobel laureate in physiology, moved between the laboratory bench and the séance table without feeling any evident need to change his coat [6]. Pierre Janet, whose theory of dissociation still lies beneath every modern account of trauma, began his career among the magnetisers and the psychical researchers and then, as the discipline put on its respectable suit, edged quietly toward the door [7]. Freud managed the matter with characteristic thoroughness by occupying both positions at once: in public he warned against the occult with the vigilance of a man defending a fortress, while in private he joined two societies for psychical research and published papers on telepathy and dreams [8], having first rehearsed his theory of dream interpretation before the lodge brothers of B’nai B’rith a full two years before the general public was permitted a look [9]. The scholar David Bakan later argued, at book length and with considerable documentation, that psychoanalysis had quietly secularised the Kabbalah [10], a thesis that remains contested and, in the manner of the best theses, declines to go away.

Jung barely troubled himself with concealment. In 1916, over a handful of nights he described as compulsive, he wrote the Seven Sermons to the Dead under the name of a second-century Gnostic teacher, after an episode in which, by his own account, his house filled with spirits complaining that they had returned from Jerusalem without finding what they sought [11]. The visionary Red Book that grew from such experiences he kept locked away for the rest of his life, less out of shame, one suspects, than out of a perfectly accurate forecast of what academia does to prophets; it was finally published in 2009, forty-eight years after his death. William James, meanwhile, the father of American psychology, co-founded the American Society for Psychical Research and devoted a quarter of a century to the study of a Boston medium, in search of what he called his white crow, the single exception that disproves a universal rule, while his colleagues winced and he declined, with great magnificence, to stop [12]. And Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, maintained between his esoteric affiliations and his clinical publications a separation so deliberate that the psychosynthesis literature itself refers to it as a wall of silence [13].

Surveyed from this distance, the pattern is not the hidden guild of sorcerers that would make the better screenplay. It is something funnier and considerably sadder: a profession embarrassed by its own parents. Founder after founder drank from the well, took what worked, and absorbed the same professional lesson, namely that a man who speaks of the technique will be called a scientist, while a man who speaks of the wonder will be called a crank. The wall of silence was never a conspiracy. It was a dress code.

The business of being human

What the profession did next was what professions do, which is to organise the mystery into billable form. The despair of a human being, an experience formerly addressed by kin, ritual, priesthood and the occasional pilgrimage, was processed into units of fifty minutes, and the wilder possibilities of the consulting room, transformation, surprise, the loosening of the tidy single self, were gently escorted outside the codes of reimbursement. None of this was done cynically, which is what gives the story its comic undertow. It was done carefully, by decent and serious people, in the sincere belief that dignity and science required it.

And yet the profession’s own research has spent decades leading it, with visible reluctance, back to the garden. Ask the outcome literature what actually heals in psychotherapy and the answer keeps arriving in the same embarrassing shape: the relationship between two human beings, the expectation of recovery, the meaning made of suffering, and the structured ritual of the encounter itself, delivered by a sanctioned healer who genuinely gives a damn [14]. The research on ritual reaches the same conclusion from the opposite direction, finding that ceremony of any denomination regulates emotion and organises meaning wherever it is performed, in temples and consulting rooms alike [15]. The active ingredient, in other words, turns out to be the thing the village used to provide free of charge. Every generation or so the discipline descends from its tower, wanders into the village it has been studying at a distance, and announces, in the measured tones of a man who has just discovered his own grandmother, that human connection appears to be good for human beings. The grandmother is pleased to see him. She wonders only where he has been.

The garden at Passy explains where he has been. The commission’s manoeuvre, keeping the technique while arresting the mystery, became first the founding template and then the business model: reject the cosmology, retain the procedure, rename the wonder in Latin, and above all keep a straight face, because the straight face is the product, and nobody reimburses an enchantment.

The spice

At this point the history begins to make its own argument, and it deserves to be stated plainly. Mystery was never the impurity in the medicine. Mystery is the spice, and the spice is what makes the food worth eating.

This is the most thoroughly mapped moment the species has ever inhabited, with every street photographed, every genome legible, and every question answerable within the time it takes to lose interest in the answer. The uncharted did not die of all this cartography; it moved. It withdrew inward, into the imaginal country the commissioners glimpsed in 1784 and immediately prosecuted, the country in which a boy convulses at an ordinary tree and a scattered self finds its way home. Human beings are not merely entertained by that country; they are fed by it, and a life stripped of the unknown, however well mapped, well billed and well evidenced, loses purpose the way an overwashed shirt loses colour. Belief supplies purpose, scepticism keeps the belief honest, and a culture that retains only the scepticism has not so much grown up as stopped eating.

Fairness, being the sharpest knife in the drawer, cuts toward the towers as well, because the towers are temples too. A profession that trains its initiates for the better part of a decade, robes them in credentials, issues them a liturgical manual of disorders revised periodically by council vote, and ordains them to interpret the inner lives of strangers has not abolished the mystery school; it has franchised one, minus the incense. Gospels of authority are written for the same reason the older gospels were, because a mapped world still aches for meaning, and where meaning runs scarce it will be manufactured from whatever material lies to hand, whether scripture, sefirot or statistical significance. The question was never whether there would be a faith. The question is which parts of it will be admitted to be faith.

Meanwhile the towers have lately begun, in their careful way, to concede the point. At Johns Hopkins, of all respectable addresses, researchers now measure mystical experience with a standardised questionnaire descended from the work of William James [16], and report that the deeper a patient’s encounter with the sacred, the better things tend to go afterwards for the depressed and the dying [17]. The sacred, wearing a lanyard and a consent form, has been readmitted to the laboratory, and it works. James’s old wager, that strange experience deserves rigorous attention before its metaphysics are settled, is winning roughly a century behind schedule [12]. As for practitioners, most discover the remainder unassisted, usually within a few years of leaving the lecture theatre: that healing runs on connection, on kin and elders and witnessed stories, and that no protocol yet devised survives contact with a client who is loved by no one.

Hold both

The mature response to this history is not to pick a side but to hold both of its truths at once, since each keeps the other honest. The fluid does not exist; the commissioners were right about that, and the careful auditing of beautiful stories remains sacred work, because wonder left unaudited curdles reliably into conspiracy. But the garden was enchanted all the same. Nothing supernatural happened at Passy, and something marvellous did, and the finest scientific minds of the age caught the marvel red-handed and wrote it up as the culprit. Rigour without mystery produces a map of a country nobody lives in, and mystery without rigour produces a country from which there is no map home. The meal requires both the food and the spice, and for some two hundred and forty years the food has been proudly served plain while the journals wonder, in peer-reviewed tones, why nobody seems nourished.

So the next time an authority explains that imagination is merely imagination, it is worth remembering the boy and the tree. He hugged nothing, and nothing cured him, and the most powerful medicine the species possesses is still waiting at reception, filed under fraud.

This article was inspired by a very dear friend, Professor Pumperknot :), who sent me this great, slightly sensationalised, slightly embellished, non-scientific video. It is super interesting and might not have every fact correct, but it really does point to the missing spice that the science of psychology quietly acknowledges but, luckily, cannot quite put into a nice, tidy box. Mystery is the spice of life, and searching for it gives life such meaning :) Thanks, Prof. Love your work ❤️

References

No.	Authors	Date	Description	Link
1	Donaldson, I. M. L.	2017	History of the 1784 Royal Commission on animal magnetism, including Mesmer’s 1766 dissertation and doctrines	pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
2	Royal Commission (Bailly, Franklin, Lavoisier et al.); trans. I. M. L. Donaldson	1784 (trans.)	Translated report of the commissioners charged by the King of France to examine animal magnetism, including the Passy tree experiments	rcpe.ac.uk (PDF)
3	Gantet, C.	2021	Scholarly account of the dissemination of mesmerism, including the Société de l’Harmonie universelle (founded 1783)	onlinelibrary.wiley.com
4	Lafayette, Marquis de (letter to G. Washington)	1784	Primary correspondence of 14 May 1784 announcing Mesmer’s doctrine before Lafayette’s American tour	founders.archives.gov
5	Crabtree, A.	2019	”1784: The Marquis de Puységur and the psychological turn in the West”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences	onlinelibrary.wiley.com
6	Plas, R.	2012	”Psychology and psychical research in France around the end of the 19th century”, History of the Human Sciences	journals.sagepub.com
7	Alvarado, C. S., Evrard, R. and Maraldi, E.	2018	Pierre Janet and the boundary of psychical research, History of Psychology	doi.org/10.1037/hop0000086
8	Evrard, R. et al.	2017	”Freud as a psychical researcher”, Imago Budapest special issue	imagobudapest.hu (PDF)
9	Knoepfmacher, H.	n.d.	Study of Freud’s membership of and lectures to Vienna’s B’nai B’rith lodge	jstor.org
10	Bakan, D.	1958	Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, full text	archive.org (PDF)
11	Jung, C. G. (as “Basilides”)	1916	Primary text of the Seven Sermons to the Dead; the Red Book was published in 2009	gnosis.org
12	James, W.	1897	”What Psychical Research Has Accomplished”, in The Will to Believe	en.wikisource.org
13	Psychosynthesis Trust	n.d.	”Beyond the Wall of Silence”: Assagioli’s separation of esoteric and clinical work	psychosynthesistrust.org.uk
14	Wampold, B. E.	2015	”How important are the common factors in psychotherapy? An update”, World Psychiatry: relationship, expectation and meaning as central therapeutic ingredients	doi.org/10.1002/wps.20238
15	Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D. and Inzlicht, M.	2017	”The Psychology of Rituals”: review of ritual’s effects on emotion regulation, performance and social connection	faculty.haas.berkeley.edu (PDF)
16	Barrett, F. S., Johnson, M. W. and Griffiths, R. R.	2015	Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30) in experimental psilocybin sessions	pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
17	Griffiths, R. R. et al.	2016	Randomised trial: psilocybin produces decreases in depression and anxiety in life-threatening cancer, with mystical-type experience linked to outcomes	pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov