San Antonio College Library

Susy Smith, internationally known author of twenty-one books on parapsychology and the occult, traces the fascinting, many-faceted history of hypnosis-from its shady origins to its present status of quasi-respectability and its promising future as a tool for producing Extrasensory Perception. The frightening story of a group of amateur hypnotists who placed a young girl in a trance so deep that she lost the use of English and began to speak in a...

Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris from Austria in February 1778 and established a medical practice which hailed him as one of the most remarkable men of his time. His skill lay in his theories and in his use of 'animal magnetism' to cure disease. Mesmer began a school of thought which spread across Europe and America, and enjoyed, at various stages, favour as a respected scientific and medical therapy, and disrepute as the tool of occultists, mystics...

"Before Freud is an anthology of psychiatric case histories published between 1869 and 1894 by five leading medical practitioners : George Beard, Richard Krafft-Ebing, Arthur Schnitzler, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Pierre Janet. Most of the cases here are translated from German or French for the first time. The purpose of this collection is to make accessible to English speakers important primary documents crucial not only for the history of psychology...

In Mesmerism and Hawthorne, Coale examines the mesmerist-spiritualist craze and relates it specifically to the way in which Hawthorne wrote fiction. Although many critics have discussed mesmerism as a theme in Hawthorne's work, few have analyzed the use of mesmerism as an influence on the very structure and texture of that work. For Hawthorne, mesmerism provided a fertile circumstance, complete with its sense of enchantment and the necessity of breaking...