Hypnos and Music for Healing

Foto: Peter de Ru
One of Villa San Michele’s distinguishing features is Axel Munthe’s collections of antiques, art, and attractive objects.

Among much else in the villa are two portrayals of the god Hypnos. Munthe had a special relationship to the Greek god of Sleep, who was also the brother of the god of Night and Death, Thanatos. The relationship between sleep and death is a continually resounding undertone in Munthe’s “The Story of San Michele”.

When I have finished reading this tall tale, my ears are ringing with all my encounters with Munthe in the literature about him.

I see the presence of the god in the villa as a sign of Munthe’s fascination with this theme. Hypnos has given his name to a brand of medicine that was developed around the end of the 19th century, and which strongly attracted the new doctor Munthe. Neuroses were the rage in the Paris where he received his degree as the youngest doctor ever. It was natural that after his dissertation on bleeding during birth, Munthe became interested in the treatment of women suffering from hysteria and nervous disorders. These recur through-out his career and make “The Story of San Michele” an exciting chronicle of its time. I see Freud’s hysterical women in Munthe’s. The period and the atmosphere around them are the same.

The famous doctor Jean Martin Charcot also treated such women at the La Salpêtrière hospital. His methods laid the basis for hypnosis and Sigmund Freud was among those who attended his public demonstrations. In “The Story of San Michele” Munthe describes himself as a colleague of Charcot.

This is often disputed and can scarcely be true, which is why I call the book a “tall tale” and not a biography.

Munthe is, however, well-acquainted with Charcot’s methods. He can very well have attended the hypnotic shows the hypnosis master staged in the old gunpowder factory.

The public demonstrations, where Charcot hypnotised his hysteria patients to perform all manner of imaginable and unimaginable acts, where open to the public, and were well-attended.

Axel Munthe describes women who smell ammonia and think it is perfume and who eat charcoal as if it were chocolate. He dismisses these as stunts.

These public demonstrations are seen as harmful for the patients involved. With few exceptions Charcot’s girls end up at Salle de Agités, the insane asylum.

To some extent the dismissal is unfair. “The Story of San Michele” was published decades after Charcot’s experiments were in their heyday. The author can safely view them through hindsight.

This gives me another reason to doubt Munthe’s biographical pretensions. There is no ambition here to tell the truth, but a strong desire to tell a good story.

The novel takes over. Munthe is no biographer, he is a storyteller, and one who likes to reconstruct himself. He attributes great influence to Charcot, however, and does not dismiss hypnosis as such. Instead it is newer and more comprehensive discoveries within hypnotism, his own and those of others, that allow Munthe to criticise Charcot’s theories.

What is Axel Munthe’s Opinion of Hypnotism?

The god from his beloved villa provides a clue. Hypnotism is, as I have implied, intimately linked to sleep, calm, rest.

The great benefit of hypnosis is the relief it provides for pain and worry. It can and should be used before and during surgery and birth.

Its foremost advantage, and the area Axel Munthe seems to have most taken advantage of, is its calming effect on dying patients. Munthe thanks hypnosis for allowing him to help countless soldiers during the First World War die with a smile on their lips.

Hypnosis for Axel Munthe also seems to be a complicated battle of wills. As a doctor you have be pose as the stronger, and successfully hold this position. The passages in “The Story of San Michele” where he describes such power struggles are the most exciting parts of the book. After the balance of power has been established, the patient can slowly and carefully be made to understand what is best for him, or usually in Munthe’s cases, her.

His frequently unconventional methods of treatment, such as prescribing buying a dog, are mostly based on psychology. Even though he dismisses psychotherapy as “nonsense” Axel Munthe seems to have an unerring ability to read his patients’ subconscious minds.

The most important variable in a successful treatment is hope. The patients are manipulated into believing in their recovery.

Even if Munthe never lied to a patient about their condition, he is just as careful not to divulge any more details than necessary.

No one feels better by knowing exactly how hopeless their condition is. Knowing too much means more anxiety and can result in a painful death that Axel Munthe does not wish anyone.

In “The Story of San Michele” Munthe writes of his early encounters with Death. After first running away from this demon, a desire is born in the young Munthe to understand the Inescapable.

Munthe writes:

I began to realize that he also had his mission, just as I had mine, that in the final analysis we were companions. (Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele, 10th Swedish edition, Stockholm 1931, p 287)

Does one not see here Tanatos and Hypnos, Night and Sleep, the divine brothers, side by side? Axel Munthe seems to me to be an incarnation of his beloved god. The underlying tone of sleep and death grows stronger.

Ironically Axel Munthe suffered from insomnia for most of his life. He doesn’t seem to have been able to cure himself with his magical hands.

He couldn’t hypnotise himself to sleep, as he successfully did with the secretary and admirer of his older years, Miss Dorothy Johnstone.

Hypnotic sleep is not the same as natural sleep. It is instead something to be treated with great care. Suggestion and hypnotic treatments should instead be performed in a more wakeful condition. Axel Munthe seems to have a similar attitude towards medicine. He has no problem using injections of morphine to relieve the final pain of unavoidable death, but he appears to be sceptical of using medications to treat the living. Wivica Ankarcrona, who lived on Capri at the same time as Munthe, is an instructive example.

Jangfeldt writes:

In his extensive Munthe biography Bengt Jangfeldt calls her a “professional invalid”. (Bengt Jangfeldt, En osalig ande. Berättelsen om Axel Munthe, Stockholm 2003, p 385)

Ankarcrona consults Doctor Munthe on a number of occasions. He condemns the treatments with injections and intravenous therapy she has been given by her other doctors and instead takes her for walks. Even Queen Victoria was criticised by Munthe for her frequent use of morphine towards the end of her life.

Drugs are for the dying, not for those who are to live.

An insomniac doctor who is incapable of or will not allow himself to find relief. This is the image of Axel Munthe that grows before me as I read his own words. It is completed with elements of hypochondria, a great need for solitude, and a predisposition for depression. He has, however, other sides.

Some of these are his sense of humour, very obvious in “The Story of San Michele”, his passion for music, and his great love for nature, people, and especially animals.

These characteristics can seem contradictory. But is the contradiction total? The need for solitude is understandable in a person whose profession and life-work mean constant listening. Munthe stresses the importance of trust between patient and doctor, and he himself won this trust through his ability to listen and to understand. A sense of humour is a natural way to deal with a reality where Tanatos is seldom far away.

Finally there is music. This seems to have been constantly present in everything Axel Munthe does. In his novels it forms a silent melody along with the note of death and repose which I have mentioned.

I also find it interesting that several of the doctor’s chroniclers say that music was the most important thing in Munthe’s life, as a permanent element in his writing and life, but they very seldom go into detail.

No one writes in detail about Munthe and music, but all are in poignant agreement about the importance of music in Munthe’s life.
Musical evenings of differing types are held at San Michele. In “The Story of San Michele” the celebration of the local holy day La Festa di Sant’ Antonio is described. A group of musicians are brought in to accompany the traditional festivities with a midnight concert and at morning mass.

Afterwards there is a wild party at San Michele. The musicians play until they are spitting blood and breaking drumskins.

On another occasion the American Ambassador to Rome flies in a string quartet from Baltimore for summer concerts at San Michele. During her stays on Capri, Queen Victoria often played the piano in the chapel.

Axel Munthe, who had an attractive baritone, often sang along to the queen’s accompaniment. He is said to have turned his back on the queen while she played in order to look out over the sea.

Munthe played the piano as well. His cousin Fredrik Lund has described how Axel refused to play on request, but sat behind the keys when he was provoked. Despite being self-taught and usually improvising, his playing was very enjoyable. At the piano discord turned into harmony. He could sit there for hours.

Here I see that relief, despite everything, is within reach. The music doesn’t help Axel Muntheto sleep, but it does give him peace from the outside world.

For him music provides that repose that he can give others through hypnosis. Munthe’s magic hands find an instrument for self-healing. At the piano the incarnated Hypnos can hold off his terrifying brother. Significantly the story of the author’s death in “The Story of San Michele” ends with reconcillation between the two brothers. Tanatos is mistaken for his brother, the god who Axel Munthe has always worshipped. Death has become beautiful. Munthe, who accuses Tanatos of tormenting his victims unnecessarily, promises that everyone who died shares in an draught of eternal sleep, relief from pain, before the deadly blow is dealt.

I believe that Axel Munthe found a kind of self-therapy in music. It isn’t impossible that he also used its healing powers on his patients.

Everyone who listened to him sing or play says that they wanted to keep listening as long as possible. There is no doubt that music was an essential shared element of Munthe’s relationship to Queen Victoria from their firist meeting.

There is no evidence that Munthe used music as a medical practice, but I believe that one should avoid underestimating his love and appreciation for birdsong.

From the big cities where he worked, Munthe constantly yearned for the birdsong of Capri. It doesn’t seem unlikely that the patients receiving a prescription to leave the city got this advice for partly the same reasons. Song and music, in all their forms, were undoubtedly healing for Axel Munth

Klara Möller Norén
Department of Literature, Stockholm University