Cultural and Social Impact of The Concepts of Animal Magnetism
The various further developments of “mesmerism” and somnamnbulism have been recently documented extensively, and there is no longer any doubt about its key importance for the magnetic movement with regards to a whole series of extremely influential, and closely interrelated, developments in nineteenth-and twentieth-century culture.
Animal Magnetism and its so- called "higher" phenomena has been in fact extremely appealing both to the crowds and to many men of science. It posed in fact a threat to the rational logic attitude, and at a certain point it became a very popular practice that spread throughout almost all levels.
The key point is that in mesmerism knowledge is extracted from "intuition". Taking one of Mesmer’s examples: in a similar way as intuition guides birds toward the right path, reconnnecting to Nature and its inner perceived "flow" can bring both health, and hence the magnetic cures. This reconnection also allows the gaining of higher truths as human development lies inside man.
A not exclusive list of the mesmeric developments would mention its influence on German Romantic culture, on Naturphilosophie and the philosophies of Schelling and Schopenauer that developed the concepts of "indeterminism". In France philosophy magnetism and its later development influenced the works of Maine de Biran and Bergson The further development of some aspects of magnetism into the streams of spiritualism and occultism brought in the twentieth century not only the continuation of this stream but also the offspring of parapsychological researches both in America (William James) as in Russia. Another direct derivation is the American New Thought movement and its many offshoots up to the present day, the theosophical movement that still holds Mesmer as one of its spiritual master, and in the psychological field, the “discovery of the unconscious” and namely of the idea of accessing to untapped potentials typical of somnambulistic séances leading to modern concepts in psychology and psychiatry. Modern hypnotism also represents clearly a stream born from animal magnetism. In Sociology some researchers have argued that the theory of the "social bound" of Durckheim could be reconducted to the influence of the contemporary researches in magnetism and on the evolution of the concept of "magnetic rapport". In the artistic field, various artists such as Kandinsky cite many magnetic authors in their books’ references with regards to their aptitude in tapping unconscious resources. On the literary side Animal Magnetism influenced and/or inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and many others.
Read more about this topic: Animal Magnetism
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, social, impact, concepts and/or animal:
“If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being “mother’s only accomplishment,” today’s children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child’s needs are thus a cultural football in an economic and marital game.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“The beaux and the babies, the servant troubles, and the social aspirations of the other girls seemed to me superficial. My work did not. I was professional. I could earn my own money, or I could be fired if I were inefficient. It was something to get your teeth into. It was living.”
—Edna Woolman Chase (1877–1957)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary—and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)