Hypnotic catalepsy: suggestive immobility, not Charcot’s three phases
Catalepsy in the Nancy sense is a limb or posture held because it was suggested. It is not proof of Charcot’s grand hypnotisme.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026
Catalepsy, in Nancy’s vocabulary, is suggestive immobility: a limb stays where it was placed, or cannot be lowered, because that was suggested. It is a methods observation. It is not a diagnosis.
Key evidence
Bernheim’s Suggestive Therapeutics lists suggestive catalepsy among Liébeault’s and his own degrees of hypnotic response. He says a limb can be held up by assertion, without the Salpêtrière manoeuvres of opening the eyes or using a brilliant light. See the Nancy school.
Charcot’s Salpêtrière treated catalepsy as one of three phases of a hypnotic neurosis (lethargy, catalepsy, somnambulism). Bernheim writes that he could not reproduce those three phases in his own cases.
Ideomotor response is the older English-language claim that an idea can move (or hold) a muscle without volition.
Limitations
A held arm in a lecture theatre is not a neurological examination. Dramatic cases were selected.
What we don't know yet
How much of “waxy flexibility” in any one demonstration was suggestion, imitation, or something else cannot be recovered from the 1880s notes.
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