Mesmerism, Hypnotism And Spiritualism In Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

The mesmeric trance is today identified as hypnosis, and its value in the management of certain medical conditions has been widely recognized.
             In the course of treatment applied by animal magnetists many patients fell into so called somnambulic sleep. This and similar conditions observed by magnetists were described as "rapport". When in this condition the subject could hear no voice except that of the operator and would be under his influence. This somnambulic sleep seems to have been the condition known subsequently as hypnotic trance, and such cures as were effected seem to have been the result of suggestion given by the hypnotist and not of magnet fluid as claimed by the magnetizers. .
             About the same time, the British surgeon James Braid provided a scientific explanation of mesmerism and thus helped to establish the modern technique of hypnosis. He said that cures were not due to animal magnetism, but to suggestion. He developed the eye fixation technique of inducing relaxation and called it hypnosis (after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep). (DuPont dissociates from mesmerism and recognizes the theory of Braid - Quotation 1 : p. 83 further on quotation 2 p. 396).
             Most of the theories developed in the late 18th and in the 19th century became forerunners of the sciences such like the experimental psychology, psychical research (parapsychology), psychiatry and the well known Freudian psychoanalysis - especially Grace's dreams and her double personality.
             2. The origins of Modern Spiritualism.
             The fact that hypnosis always remained undefined and immeasurable and there is no definition or empirical test proving that the hypnotic state ever existed, prepared the ground for the emergence of the very controversial Spiritualism of the 19th century. The most influential reason for the growing interest in spiritualism was the animal magnetism and trance phenomena. .
             Spiritualism can be understood as a belief that the dead manifest their presence to people, usually through a clairvoyant or medium; also, as a doctrine and practices of those people who so believe.