Review of Daniel Pick’s Svengali’s Web: the alien enchanter in modern culture:

The intricate complicity between symptoms and cures – and

between what people are considered to be suffering from and

what they claim to be suffering from – has made the history of

medicine, in its broadest sense, of so much recent interest. Part

of the fascination (so to speak) of mesmerism and hypnosis –

and of the history that is so well told in Svengali’s Web – is that,

as potential cures for a wide range of miseries, they were so

quickly seen to be at once remarkable breakthroughs, and

disreputable, if not criminal activities.

The reviewer wonders what it is about psychoanalysis that keeps it from being another form of hypnosis, if indeed it is not; and whether hypnosis shows that seducing and being seduced are the only things we are truly free to do, “making a mockery of our ideas of freedom.”