Mesmerize Me
Franz Anton Mesmer and the Mimetics of Attraction (and Sex)
Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can't you see?
Sometimes your words just mesmerize me. —Notorious B.I.G.
(Okay, those are not the real lyrics—but they should be. Alliteration.)
An Untold Story
Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician who practiced medicine shortly after Sir Isaac Newton, was fascinated by the corollary between the psychological ‘movements’ he observed in the world and the physical effects Newton described in his theory of gravity. Could there by a relationship between the two, he wondered?
In his Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum inflex, written in 1766, he remarked: “One must grant to Newton the greater praise, because he has clarified to the highest degree the reciprocal attraction of all things.”1
Thinking of mimetic desire—and desire in general—as a movement of desire that is influenced by the mass and proximity of models (not objects) in an analogous way to a gravitational pull is one of the most helpful mental models that I have ever run across in 7+ y…