Jean Martin Charcot

A  NEUROLOGIST;
      . . . Along with his colleges at the Salpêtrière School in Paris, adopted Braid's psychological notions, while maintaining a principally physiological basis to hypnotism.   Psychological concepts and theories were vital components in their approach to the understanding of psychiatric illnesses.   This was due mostly to the large number of patients who presented themselves to them afflicted with sensorimotor manifestations of major hysteria.

      Dr. Charcot and his colleges, in the course of their investigations, developed the theoretical framework to explain these phenomena.   They discovered that specific mental functions were lost to conscious awareness and to voluntary recall and control, in those individuals who displayed hysterical disturbances of sensations and muscular movements.   Further, these apparently lost mental functions remained operative beneath the patient's level of full consciousness.

      From the various clinical manifestations of hysterical symptoms, along with experimentation, Charcot and his colleagues arrived at the concept of Dissociation.   Consistent with this concept of ^«Hypnotic Dissociation,^» specific mental functions (while still operating) become seperated (or dissociated) from the mainstream of consciousness and as a result are lost to the individual's awareness and to voluntary control.   This loss of those mental operations contiguously leads to the emergence of hysterical symptoms. 

     As an example:

      If a patient presents with anesthesia of the foot due to major hysteria, and that foot is touched four times out of the patient's sight, he would suddenly - and spontaneously - think of the number ^«4,^» even though he consciously felt nothing in that extremity!

      Similarly, dissociation of audible perceptions is precipitously followed by hysterical deafness.   Loss of the memory for specific past events is manifested clinically as Amnesia.

      In Charcot's clinic, dissociation formed a pivotal point of articulation with the phenomena of hypnosis.   He and his associates discovered that hysterical patients were markedly hypnotizable and while in hypnotic trance, functions and memories dissociated could be brought to consciousness - with the subsequent return of those sensations, movements and memories - whose loss precipitated their hysterical symptoms.   By the close of the 19th Century, it became increasingly accepted that, mental activity could take place in human beings without their being directly aware of it;  a process known as

Unconscious Mental Processing.
      Ordinarily most discussion is about conscious memory, however unconscious memory also exists.   Since our defense mechanisms function as they do, many memories become undesirable and are stored away in the unconscious.
      It can be further said that many one-time useful memories have also slipped out of conscious memory into the Subconscious/Unconscious.   And there is unconscious processing going on that the conscious was never aware of.   These are Unconscious Memories.

Hypnosis opens an avenue to Unconscious Memories !