What Bernheim Actually Said

In the following quotations from his New Studies in Hypnotism, Hippolyte Bernheim, the father of 20th century hypnotism, makes it abundantly clear that he believes “hypnosis” is something of a misnomer in that the effects of hypnotism do not require any form of “sleep” whatsoever.  Instead, he proposed that “hypnotism” would be better defined simply as a state of heightened suggestibility, or rather “suggestibilities” of various kinds.

Copying Braid, every author defines hypnotism as artificial sleep, nervous or induced.  This definition does not seem to me to be comprehensive enough.  It does not include a generalization of the actions that produce hypnosis. [...]

Sleep, or the idea of sleep, is not necessary for the hypnotic influence.  There is hypnosis without sleep. [...]

Have I not demonstrated that sleep, or the idea of sleep, is itself only one of the phenomena obtained by the hypnotic influence, just like catalepsy and hallucinations, but that the phenomenon of sleep does not necessarily precede or generate the others?  It can be dissociated from the others.  there is hypnosis without sleep – all the phenomena of hypnosis can exist without sleep. [...]

The conception of the word hypnosis is singularly restrictive.  The real nature of the phenomenon, when defined as induced sleep (as Braid and his successors have done) is misunderstood. [...]

We have seen, however, that this abnormal state is not always sleep; we have seen that sleep itself is only a phenomenon of suggestion, in the same class as catalepsy, anesthesia, and hallucinations.  In my opinion, it would be best to completely abolish the word “hypnotism” and replace it with “a state of suggestion.”  The procedures called “hypnotic” are reduced to demonstrating or heightening various suggestibilities. [...]

If one wishes to keep the words “hypnosis” and “hypnotic state”, we will define them as follows: a particular psychic state,  capable of being induced, which activates or heightens various suggestibilities, that is, the capacity to be influenced by an idea accepted by the brain, and to realise it.

In reality, hypnotic phenomena are only phenomena of suggestibility.

Although sleep is not necessary for suggestion, nevertheless, it may be said to facilitate it.  Whether it is natural or induced, it suppresses or attenuates intellectual initiative and concentrates cerebral activity on the phenomena of automatism.  It frees the imagination of the moderating brake of the faculties of reason.  Dreams are the hallucinatory autosuggestions of natural sleep. [...]

Many subjects only become suggestible to a noticeable degree when one has successfully induced the appearance of sleep.  Also, one generally tries in hypnosis to induce sleep, or a state as near to sleep as possible, in order to render suggestion as intense as possible.  But it as important to recognise that these two phenomena are not absolutely correlated.  As Braid previously indicated, this is shown in the frequent therapeutic failures that accompany a rather profound sleep.

Bernheim seems to overstate the extent to which James Braid, the founder of hypnotherapy, associated hypnotism with sleep.  Braid himself had observed that a state resembling sleep only occurred in approximately 10% of his subjects and therefore argued that the term “hypnotism” was a misnomer and should be replaced with a more descriptive terminology such as “mono-ideo-dynamics”, i.e., focused attention on a single dominant expectant idea.  This concept makes no reference whatsoever to sleep or relaxation and this definition in terms of conscious focused attention, if anything, is somewhat antagonistic to the notion of hypnotism as a kind of sleeplike state.