Nancy School

The Nancy School was a French hypnosis-centered school of psychotherapy. The origins of the thoughts were brought about by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in 1866, in Nancy, France. Through his publications and therapy sessions he was able to gain the attention/support from Hippolyte Bernheim: another Nancy Doctor that further evolved Liébeault's thoughts and practices to form what is known as the Nancy School.

It is referred to as the Nancy School to distinguish it from the antagonistic Paris School that was centred on the hysteria-centred hypnotic research of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

Liébeault was born to a peasant family in Farrières France. While expected to become a priest, he rather started his medical studies at Strasbourg, where he obtained his medical degree in 1850. At Strasbourg, he stumbled upon an old book about animal magnetism and became fascinated with it.

He moved to Nancy, France in 1860 and opened up his own clinic. Having finally established a successful practice, his thoughts turned back to that book on animal magnetism and he decided to start experimenting with hypnotic therapies. He did this by offering his patients a strange bargain: they could either continue their standard methods of treatment and continue their usual fee or they could be treated hypnotically, through suggestion, for free. Naturally, at first, many patients stayed with their standard methods because hypnosis at this time was still controversial. As more and more patients started receiving the hypnotic treatment and spreading news of its success, Liébeault became known as "Good Father Liébeault."

In 1866 he published his first book titled Le sommeil et les états analogues, considérés surtout du point de vue de l'action du moral sur le physigue (Sleep and its analogous states considered from the perspective of the action of the mind upon the body) that focused on the similarities between induced sleep (or trance) and natural sleep, the features of the hypnotic state, how the induction of sleep relates to the nervous system, and the phenomena of hallucinations. Within this theory, he labeled the key difference between sleep and the hypnotic state to be "produced by suggestion and concentration on the idea of sleep and that the patient was "en rapport" with the hypnotist." This book was largely ignored by the medical profession due to the fact that it was obscurely written and sold very few copies. Thankfully, Liébeault's theory on the hypnotic state that he devised within this book engrossed the attention of a prominent Nancy doctor, and soon to be student of Liébeault himself, Hippolyte Bernheim.,

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