Why an NLP library keeps Mesmer next to the manuals
This library puts two centuries of books on the same shelf. Reading the old magnetisers side by side with modern NLP, we noticed something that the newer manuals had mostly stopped saying.
Before words, people already act on each other. The magnetisers of the 18th and 19th centuries described with great care how a look, a way of breathing or a hand held near the body could change the state of another person. Abbé Faria, an Indo-Portuguese priest living in Paris, wrote about “lucid sleep” in 1819. James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, made the word hypnotism known with his book Neurypnology in 1843. Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, a country doctor in Nancy, treated his patients with suggestion. Hector Durville taught “personal magnetism” as a discipline for everyday life.
“Les pensées sont des choses.” Thoughts are things.Hector Durville, Magnétisme personnel ou psychique, section title
In 2005 we began publishing the old books of magnetism and hypnotism online, as free digital editions, so that anyone could read them. Many of them are hard to find in print today.
Our School, ISI-CNV, follows the same thread today: the non-verbal side of influence, which in our courses becomes fascination, in the line of the Belgian magnetiser Donato that the School continues, and Mesmerismus®, the method developed by Dr. Marco Paret. What exactly passes between two people in the first seconds of a gaze is still the question at the heart of our research. The old magnetisers left precise descriptions of it; in our courses we put them to the test, and part of the answer still escapes us.
In plain words: people feel each other before they understand each other. Researchers speak of non-verbal synchrony: the fast, mostly unconscious exchange of signals through face, voice and posture.