Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 1 Issue 6, (I December2016) | Page 5

Abbé Faria: Indian Hypnotist, Priest and Philosopher,
"An Innovator in the History of Hypnosis."
A Brief Biographical Note.
Jose Custodio de Faria was born in Candolin, Bardez, Goa in 1756 to a family
which was descended from Hindu Brahmins prior to their conversion to
Christianity.
Faria left India in 1771 and went to Rome where he studied Philosophy and
took a Doctorate in Sacred Theology at the Roman college Propaganda Fide.
In 1780 he was ordained to the Catholic priesthood and subsequently preached
before the Pope.
In 1788 he left Rome for Paris and became involved in the French Revolution.
Subsequently Faria developed an interest in mesmerism / hypnosis which he
practised in Paris until 1811. From this time he taught Philosophy in Marseilles
where he also was a member of the learned medical society.
He returned to Paris in 1813 where he began to give regular demonstrations of
hypnosis in a salon. During this period he engaged in writing a four volume
work which was published posthumously after his death in 1819 at the age of
63.
The Book: De la cause du Sommeil lucide.
Faria uses the term 'lucid sleep' for what we now call hypnosis. Shridhar
Sharma (1979) describes four aspects of the nature of lucid sleep or hypnosis
and here I will briefly follow Sharma's account.
• Firstly Faria believed that lucid sleep was a pathological distortion of normal
sleep and in this sense he predicted what was to become a common idea
among the Charcot school that hypnosis was related to hysteria.
• Secondly, he questioned the idea that mesmerism was the result of some
form of animal magnetism which transferred from objects such as trees or a
barque.
• Thirdly, rather than speak of hypnosis as a activity of the imagination he
sought to describe hypnosis as a form of concentration and thus it is the
hypnotic subject who is of importance in the experience of hypnosis and not
that of the operator or hypnotist.