Vol. 21 No. 3 · 4 February 1999
pages 14-15 | 3521 words
Like a Retired Madam
Rosemary Dinnage
- Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain by Alison Winter
Chicago, 464 pp, £23.95, December 1998, ISBN 0 226 90219 6
‘What is it that makes the lodestone attract the needle? What is the secret of electricity?’ asks the heroine of a popular novel published in 1845:
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 7 · 1 April 1999
From Harvey Roy Greenberg
In her review of Alison Winter's inquiry into Mesmerism and the Victorians (LRB, 4 February), Rosemary Dinnage asserts that psychoanalysts have yet to grasp the obvious analogies between the hypnotic and nursing scenarios. Pace Dinnage, it was often theorised during my psychoanalytic training that the lulled state of the nursing infant might constitute a paradigm for the hypnotic trance – all-powerful analyst substituting for all-powerful nursing mother. I don't know who first conceived this notion (one would think Freud himself, but no joy). Research by the American psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel has shown that induction of the hypnotic state requires the subject to mobilise a formidable degree of 'attentive receptive concentration' which, in turn, requires a reasonably mature neurological apparatus. When I spoke to him recently, Spiegel assured me that a suckling babe's immature cerebrum would be utterly incapable of marshalling the cognitive competence needed for anything like trance to occur.
Harvey Roy Greenberg
New York City
