Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis of Puységur

Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825) was a French magnetizer aristocrat from one of the most illustrious families of the French nobility. He is remembered today as one of the pre-scientific founders of hypnotism (a branch of animal magnetism, or Mesmerism).

The Marquis de Puységur learned about Mesmerism from his brother Antoine-Hyacinthe, the Count of Chastenet. One of his first and most important patients was Victor Race, a 23-year-old peasant in the employ of the Puységur family. Race was easily "magnetized" by Puységur, but displayed a strange form of sleeping trance not previously seen in the early history of Mesmerism.

Puységur noted the similarity between this sleeping trance and natural sleep-walking or somnambulism, and he named it "artificial somnambulism". His contributions were gradually forgotten, until Nobel prize-winner Charles Richet rediscovered his writings in 1884, and showed that most of what other people had claimed as their discoveries in the field of "magnetism" and hypnotherapy were originally due to the Marquis de Puységur. In this work, Sloterdijk emphasized Puységur's contributions in his refutation of the common idea that intellectuals of the Enlightenment were not interested in the subconscious mind. Sloterdijk continued on this theme in his 1985 debut novel Der Zauberbaum, which is about a disciple of Puységur.

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