LADY PROBLEMS
The Healing Voice – A Philip Magonet
I found this book languishing on our shelves, forgotten and forlorn because of its ‘meh’ cover design and bland blurb. But then I spotted the author’s name – A Philip Magonet – Mag-o-net..? I wondered whether this was a purposeful play on the ‘animal magnetism’ reference – which would likely mean that this was penned by a stage hypnotist/mesmerist... and that its contents would therefore be glorious nonsense! Yay!
Alas, The Healing Voice: A Study of Treatment by Hypnosis is a perfectly sane and sensible overview of hypnosis and its medical and psychotherapeutic applications for the time it was published, 1959. Magonet was a Canadian medical doctor and obstetrician who also lived and worked in America. Hypnotism piqued his interest as a student during psychology class, and he went on to use it while deployed to a military mental hospital during World War II. Post-war, he used it to aid childbirth before specialising in psychotherapy via hypnosis.
Magonet’s opening chapter on hypnotism’s backstory shows him to be an intelligent, sensitive, and patient-centric healer. He is more focused on the stories of Franz Anton Mesmer treating Maria Theresia Paradis’s functional blindness or of Josef Breuer treating ‘Anna O’s’ ‘hysteria’ than in vainglorious stories of star hypnotists whose subjects barely feature. He considers the patients within the context of their familial and socioeconomic ecosystems, too, which feels rare for the late 50s.
This book is aimed at fellow medical practitioners, so chapters on what hypnosis is and how to do it are opaquely basic, relying instead on the prestige of being a 1950s doctor to whom patients are enthral. Given the fuss people make today about inductions and rituals and such, it’s nice to read the breezy confidence of Magonet “inducing hypnosis” in patients – presumably without doing much more than declaring it and waiting for them to comply.
After some amusing follow-up chapters on what an absolute balls-up parents are making of their ghastly offspring, and how to navigate the broken minds and psyches of the grown-up consequences of this literal clusterfuck, we segue into the usual anecdotes and case studies. These are arranged around themes such as “Painless Childbirth,” “Psychosomatic Symptoms,” “Sexual Variations,” and “Psychoneurosis.”
What comes through strongly is that Magonet inspired patients – particularly women – to open up to him in bold, sometimes taboo, ways for the time. Tackling sexual dysfunction between naïve newlyweds is a recurring theme and I sense a strong Freudian influence in his work. As per my comments on Maria Theresia and Anna O, I appreciated his awareness that a woman can only accept and act upon suggestions (hypnotic or waking) that do not upset her ecosystem. For instance, a woman afraid of childbirth has Magonet’s preparatory hypnotic relaxation suggestions undone by an unsupportive midwife and panicked husband, and has to be rehypnotised on Magonet’s arrival to reinstate a positive mindset.
Indeed, Magonet is such a hit with the ladies that he writes that one of the “bugbears” of a doctor’s life is that so many married women come to him with the sole complaint of an unsatisfactory sex life.
It must have been something of a miracle to have received such authoritative, practical, and persuasive life instruction from your doctor in 1950s Canada/America. While Magonet is a forgotten name, Milton Erickson – the granddaddy of hypnotism – is still being studied and deified by hypnotists and NLP acolytes. I’m not convinced people want or need 1950s solutions to modern problems, nor that qualified (or fake) medical practitioners should be dispensing psychological suggestions without informed consent anyway, but hey – that’s the kind of crazy, subversive, minority view you get from Cosmic Pancakes!
Perhaps it’s revealing of the laypeople drawn to becoming a hypnotist that the prestige of ‘The Healing Voice’ is something they still strive towards – as ‘operators’ and/or as seekers. But, having spent a great deal of time researching and considering the power dynamics of hypnosis, make-believing that you’re an idealised medical doctor is a sad and unethical deception. Erickson and Magonet are also simply fading roles and archetypes in a world in dire need of new ways to create, dispense, receive, and digest constructive suggestions.
So, if the answer to all my Lady Problems really is green juices and journaling (as a doctor recently advised me), you may as well grab some latex and rebrand as a dominatrix if you want to cow me into unquestioningly complying with your suggestions.
