Mesmer
Go see this movie and understand first handed how the fascinating word “mesmerize” came into our vocabulary. (“Hypnotism” was renamed from “mesmerism” in 1842 by James Braid.)
The Hypnosis pioneer Franz Anton Mesmer, who was a German-born physician, had a significant role in the development of hypnosis. He clearly knew how to mesmerize people, especially young beautiful French women.
The little love story between him and the young blind pianist Maria Theresa Paradies is also pretty touchy.
As the story unfolds, and Mesmer’s treatment for her pain and blindness receives results, we audience come to the understanding of complexity of one’s life, and the dilemma of a therapist.
Maria had been blind from an early age. She was also a gifted pianist. Mesmer was brought to give Maria a relief from a truly agonising treatment which had caused her enormous pain. And it was a blessing that Mesmer did it. The family might then have thought that it would be better to have a sighted daughter and went on trying to bring about a cure. However, partial sight started to make her nervous at the piano and it made her hit the wrong keys, which made her more nervous, and her family started to be afraid that she might lose the pension granted by the empress in consideration of ther blindness. So the consequences of an improvedment in sight were unfavourable to Maria Theresa and her family. The natural result was to react against the improvement, and to return to the staus quo ante. So very interestingly, Maria’s parents took her home from Mesmer’s house where he had been treating her, and the condition of her eyes promptly deteriorated again.
Now here’s an even more interesting part. And this should cause caution to all therapist. Mesmer started to have his own agenda in treating her, and failed to take all the dynamics of Maria’s life into consideration. He became furious that his cure should have been undermined. Maybe I should say he got too involved in his client’s life that he developed his own agenda.
What then happened to Mariia? She went back to her concert life and was a great success in Paris and London. She was so good that Mozart wroate a composition especially for her, the Concerto in B Flat Major. In other words that lack of sight did not blind her life, and might indeed have made it in many ways more fulfilling. Music may well have been all the more beautiful as a result of there not being any visual distractions. She would have had servants to do all the boring, practical things in life. She had music and friends and fame. Was life so very bad? We learned to beware of thinking that the improvement of a particular symptom by our technique must be the best thing for the client.
The life as a whole is the most important thing.
