The UK College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy: Was Hypnotherapy the Original Psychotherapy?
(c) Copyright Donald Robertson, 2008 Daniel Hack Tuke, an early English advocate of hypnotherapy and great-grandson of the Quaker who founded the famous York Retreat, had made some initial use of the term “psychotherapy” in his writings. However, it was effectively introduced to widespread use in the fields of medicine and psychology by Hippolyte Bernheim and the followers of his “Nancy school” of therapy, at the end of the late nineteenth century. Bernheim used the term specifically to describe hypnotherapy, and wrote, e.g., ‘to provoke this special psychic state by hypnotism and to exploit it with the aim of cure or of relief […] this is the role of the hypnotic psycho-therapeutic.’ (1886: 218). Historians believe that the very first use of the word “psychotherapy” in a book title came a few years later in the English hypnotist Charles Lloyd Tuckey’s Psycho-therapeutics, or Treatment by Hypnotism & Suggestion (1889). Tuckey popularised the use of the word “psychotherapy” as a synonym
