Jules Joseph Liégeois (30 November 1833 – 14 August 1908), Knight of the Legion of Honour ("Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur"), was a French jurist who was also widely known as an important foundation member, promoter, and defender of the Nancy School of Hypnosis. He also was a professor of administrative law at the University of Nancy for forty years.
In addition to his numerous publications on administrative law and the relationship between economics and the law, he was recognized for the significance, scope, and systematic nature of his critical and innovative personal investigations into natural/spontaneous somnambulism, hypnotism, and hypnotic suggestion in the wider medico-legal domain. He "was the first forensic scientist to scientifically address the medical question of hypnotism",Guilhermet (1909), p. 18: "Liégeois fut le premier légiste à s’étre occupé scientifiquement de la question médicale de l’hypnotisme". and "was the leading researcher in the nineteenth century into the possibilities of the abuse of hypnosis for the purposes of crime",Temple, 1989, p. 331. not only in the sense of crimes committed upon a hypnotized subject, and those committed by a hypnotized subject, but also in the sense of the hypnotized subject having no memory of either their hypnotization or their subsequent activity, as a direct consequence of the hypnotist's suggestions. "Besides doing successful work in economics, [Professor Jules Liégeois] has put both psychologists and jurists in his debt by his pioneer studies of hypnotism and suggestion in their medico-legal aspects." The American Journal of Psychology (January 1910).AP.1.
Family The son of Joseph-Martin Liégeois (1797-1854), a forester, and Anne-Rosalie Liégeois (1810-1890), née Tabutiaux, Jules Joseph Liégeois was born at Damvillers, Meuse, France on 30 November 1833.BM.1, p. CIII.Touzeil-Divina (2024a).
He married Hélène Marie Henriette Peiffer (1842-1935) in Nancy on 25 September 1867; they had two children: Marie Marguerite Liégeois (1868-1897), who married the linguist and philologist Ferdinand Brunot in 1891, and Jules Albert Liégeois (1875-1930), who went on to become an examining magistrate in Évreux.
Academic career His first employment was in various administrative roles first, in the Meuse Department, at Bar-le-Duc (1851 to 1854), and then in the Meurthe Department, at Nancy (1854 to 1863) and it was not until he was in his late 20s that he began formal legal studies at Strasbourg (there was no University in Nancy at that time).
Having successfully submitted his bachelor's degree dissertation, Du prêt à intérêt en droit romain et en droit français ('Interest-bearing loans in Roman law and French law'), at the University of Strasbourg's Faculty of Law and Political Science in 1861, he went on to defend his doctoral dissertation, Essai sur l'histoire et la legislation de l'usure ('Essay on the History and Legislation of Usury'), at Strasbourg in 1863.
Personally appointed directly by Victor Duruy, the French Minister of Public Education (1863-1869), in October 1865, he served as professor of administrative law (as distinct from civil and criminal law) at Nancy University from the University's re-establishment in 1865 until his retirement in 1904, when he became an honorary professor.RI.1 (1909).
He published widely upon important matters of public and administrative law including two important works (1873b, 1882b), jointly written with Louis Pierre Cabantous (1812-1872), Professor of Administrative Law, and Dean of the Faculty, at Aix-Marseille University and on political economy and the relationship between economics and public law, many of which displayed the influence of the economic theories of Frédéric Bastiat: e.g. 1858; 1861; 1863; 1865; 1867; 1873a; 1873b; 1873c; 1877; 1878; 1879; 1881a; 1881b; 1882a; 1882b; 1882c; 1883, and 1890a.Vapereau (1893).
The two French "Schools" of hypnotism (1882–1892) It is significant that neither the "Salpêtrière School" (a.k.a. the "Paris School"), or "Hysteria School", nor the "Nancy School", or "Suggestion School",The designation "Suggestion School" was given because those at Nancy felt that "hypnosis" was a product of "suggestion", in contrast to those at the Salpêtrière School, who felt it was a pathological condition, analogous to "hysteria"; in fact, both "schools" were equally interested in what is known as "hypnotic suggestion". as they are widely known, were "Schools" in the classical sense; neither, for instance, had an undisputed "master". However, as Mathieu Touzeil-Divina (2024a) observes, whilst the members of each group displayed as many differences of approach between themselves as points of agreement (that is, apart from the Nancy School's agreed-upon views on hypnotism and suggestion, and their opposition to the views of Charcot and the Salpêtrière School), it is still useful to speak of the two groups as competing "schools of thought", on the basis that the members of each group shared entirely different geographic, thematic, and chronological linkages from those that were shared by the members of the other group; and, also, all the research and experimentation of each was conducted entirely independent of the other.
Peter (2024, p. 6) draws attention to the fact that, despite all of the subject-centred research conducted by a wide range of researchers with a wide range of theoretical orientations and disciplinary allegiances in the last 150 years into "[what] has always been regarded as a hallmark of hypnosis" namely, "a non-judgemental, involuntary acceptance of suggestions", which, "[when] seen as a negative characteristic" is "a loss of control"The hypnotized subject's experience of involuntariness, or automatism (an essential feature of a subject's rated "hypnotizability"), indicates a loss of "control" in that they have transferred the agency of their actions to another individual, the operator (Peter, 2024, p. 8). the question of "whether such a suggestive-hypnotically induced loss of control is also possible in normal everyday life, [and] whether the hypnotized person is then helplessly at the mercy of the hypnotist" has never been unequivocally settled.See, for instance: Liégeois, 1884; Liégeois, 1889a; Liégeois, 1889b; Brodie-Innes, 1891; Gilles de la Tourette, 1891a; Gilles de la Tourette, 1891b; Delbœuf, 1892; Liégeois, 1898a; Barber, 1961; Murray, 1965; Orne & Evans, 1965; and Marchetti, 2015.Unlike the case of mesmerism where, almost without exception, every operator's manual speaks of the ideal spiritual, mental, moral, and physical "qualifications" of the mesmeric operator (e.g., Esdaile, 1846, pp. 11-14; Barth, 1850, pp. 83-86; Buckland, 1851, pp. 46-51; Davey, 1862, pp. 1-6; Coates, 1890, pp. 41-48; Randall, 1904, pp. 13-26, etc.) Peters (2024) also notes that, despite the extensive research conducted into theoretical and practical variables of hypnotism over the last 150 years, "the therapist variable [of] "hypnotization ability", i.e., the ability to induce hypnosis convincingly and to work with explicit hypnotic phenomena, has not yet been researched at all" (p. 9).
"Hypnotism" and "hypnosis" There is no objective evidence of any kind that the various allusions made by either of the Schools to "somnambulism", "artificial somnambulism", "hypnotism", or "hypnosis" were, in fact, speaking of the same psychological circumstances and physiological arrangements; and, so, the two may well have been "talking past each other", rather than engaging in an actual dispute.Further, in relation to Braid's "hypnotism": "It has been a basic assumption of modern (i.e., twentieth century) hypnotism that it is founded on the same phenomenology it historically evolved from. Such differences as exist between older versions of hypnotism and newer ones being reduced largely to a matter of interpretation of the facts. That there are common elements is not in question, but that there is full identity in questionable and basically untestable" (Weitzenhoffer, 2000, p. 3; emphasis added).
Imagination
At the time of their (1784) inquiries, the two Royal Commissions on Animal Magnetism one was from the Paris Faculty of Medicine) and the French Royal Academy of Sciences (i.e., Bailly, 1784a; 1800; 1784b), and the other from the Royal Society of Medicine of Paris (i.e., Poissonnier, et al., 1784) independently and emphatically concluded from their controlled trials and "blind" experiments that the (metaphysical) claims made by Mesmer's former associate, Charles d’Eslon, for the substantial existence of "animal magnetism" (le magnétisme animal) and of a substantial (rather than metaphorical) "magnetic fluid" (le fluide magnétique) were nothing more than a case (as Mesmer himself had argued)Mesmer (1799), pp. 15-17. of the inappropriate reification of metaphor (i.e, Alfred Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness"),In a similar vein, two centuries later, Michael Yapko warned therapists against reifying their "inner child" construct: "There is no inner child – it is simply a metaphor!" (1994, p. 34, emphasis in original). and were, therefore, entirely without foundation.It is significant that neither of the two committees examined Franz Mesmer himself, or Mesmer's theories, Mesmer's principles, Mesmer's practices, Mesmer's techniques, Mesmer's apparatus, Mesmer's claims, Mesmer's "cures" or, even, "mesmerism" itself (N.B., the term "mesmerism", coined by , was not introduced until his Mesmerismus (1814)).
Dominant ideas