Hippolyte Bernheim

Hippolyte Bernheim (17 April 1840, in Mulhouse – 2 February 1919, in Paris) was a French physician and neurologist.

[1] Born into a Jewish family,[2] Bernheim received his education in his native town and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was graduated as doctor of medicine in 1867.

When, in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war, Strasbourg passed to Germany, Bernheim moved to Nancy (where he met and later collaborated with Dr. Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault), in the university of which town he became clinical professor.

Freud had already translated Bernheim's On Suggestion and its Applications to Therapy into German in 1888;[4] and later described how "I was a spectator of Bernheim's astonishing experiments upon his hospital patients, and I received the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of man".

[9] Bernheim has been criticised for failing to recognise the role of what Pierre Janet called the rapport between hypnotizer and hypnotised[10] - the element from which Freud would evolve the concept of transference.