"The Secret Power of Suggestion: Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject"

Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne R. "The Secret Power of Suggestion: Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject"
Diacritics - Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 60-79
The Johns Hopkins University Press


Excerpt
Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg

He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [. . .] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow his movements like a magnet. [. . .] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [. . .] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [. . .] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [. . .]
—an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886)
Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called...