Hypnosis is widely used today for pain management and emotional trauma therapy. But a Goan, José Custodio de Faria, or Abbé Faria (1756-1819), laid its scientific foundations almost by fluke. When Faria was 15, his father took him to Portugal. Ordained a priest, he was invited by the Portuguese queen to preach in her chapel. But Faria was struck by stage fright. Sitting nearby, his father whispered: “Chop off these vegetables, they are all vegetables”.
A surge of confidence swept over him and he spoke eloquently. The incident made Faria mull over the power of suggestion. He went to France and held hypnosis lessons and became the first stage hypnotist ever. He would relax his patients using Goan massage-like ‘woll’ (stretching) and ‘mutt marunk’ (hitting with fists) and then command them: “Sleep!” Most would drop off into a deep trance.
Dr Rajendra Hegde, a psychiatrist, was so impressed with Abbé Faria’s contribution to the medical use of hypnosis that he sponsored the translation of Faria’s French opus De La Cause du Sommeil Lucide (On the causing off lucid sleep) into English.
“It was reserved for Abbé Faria to recall public attention to animal magnetism and to revive the science,” Georges Surbled, a science historian wrote. “He was the first to effect a breach in the theory of the ‘magnetic fluid’ (propounded by Mesmer) to place in relief the importance of suggestion, and to demonstrate the existence of ‘auto-suggestion’. He boldly developed his doctrine that nothing comes from the magnetiser, everything comes from the subject and takes place in his imagination. Abbé Faria was the creator of hypnotism; most of the discoveries of the scientists now are really his. We need only recall that he practiced suggestion in the waking state and post-hypnotic suggestion. Faria declared, “It appears that people can be charmed into health as well as illness.”
Abbé Faria’s statue—hypnotising a lady stands near the state secretariat in Panjim.
This year is Faria’s 250th birth anniversary.
