In 1885 and 1886, a woman described in the contemporary reports as Mme B. became the subject of experiments at Le Havre that appeared to let an absent operator put her into a hypnotic state. Pierre Janet and the physician Gibert investigated the claim; Frederic W. H. Myers subsequently visited and published his own observations. The woman is remembered as Léonie. This account uses that name without supplying a surname that the reviewed original reports do not establish.
The question was whether an unspoken intention could cause a change in someone elsewhere. Seeing an apparently hypnotised person was only part of the proposed demonstration. The investigators also needed to establish when the change began, what the subject could have anticipated, and whether information had passed through ordinary conversation or behaviour. Their records preserve useful precautions, but also failures, uncertain timing and disagreement about what could safely be concluded.
The contemporary record and its dates
Janet’s first note, published in 1886, describes a stay from 24 September to 14 October 1885 and is dated Le Havre, 14 November 1885. Its experimental dates are therefore distinguishable from its publication date. His second note, presented on 31 May 1886, records further visits beginning in February and April. Those contemporary documents establish the 1885–1886 period used here.
These were encounters with a particular person in domestic surroundings, rather than a public stage demonstration. Janet described readily induced changes of responsiveness and movement, while using the psychological vocabulary of his period. Such descriptions document what he observed and how he interpreted it. They do not establish a modern diagnosis, nor do they make the woman’s reported experiences proof of an external influence.
Janet recognised an immediate difficulty with experiments in the same room. A silent operator could still change posture, stop talking or create an expectation that something was about to happen. Even moving into an adjacent room did not remove the subject’s knowledge that the operator was nearby. Sending the command from another building was intended to address that weakness.
Three October trials
On 3 October 1885, Gibert attempted a command at 11.30 while away from the subject. Janet arrived and found her awake. After ordinary induction she said that she had felt the influence and resisted it by putting her hands in cold water; other people confirmed the washing. Janet explicitly treated the intended sleep experiment as a failure, although he found the claimed resistance interesting. The washing was observed behaviour; its supposed connection to an absent thought remained an interpretation.
On 9 October the intended time was 11.40, and Janet found her asleep at 11.45. He acknowledged that he had not watched continuously: she had been upstairs, and he himself knew the appointed time. An observation made after the event could support a coincidence without independently fixing its beginning. Knowledge of the plan also left room for unintentional prompting.
The 14 October arrangement improved one safeguard. A third person selected the time, which Janet did not know, and Gibert operated from Graville, some distance away. Janet reached the subject around 4.30 and was told she had been asleep for about a quarter of an hour; Gibert subsequently reported an attempt at 4.15. Blinding Janet to the target reduced one route for expectation. It did not turn the retrospectively reported onset into a continuously recorded measurement.
The same note records commands to perform actions, including an instruction involving an umbrella and a garden walk. The woman reportedly walked twice but did not take the umbrella. Other attempts likewise produced movements or agitation without completing the requested act. These partial results belong alongside the more striking episodes. Counting any related movement as a full execution would change the question the experiment was meant to answer.
Practice, fatigue and the 1886 totals
In the second note Janet described repeated ordinary inductions before trying distant commands himself. As the subject became more accustomed to him, the time needed for close induction shortened. He also admitted that preparation for visiting observers had been excessive: several sessions a day left her exhausted, with headaches and an almost continuing drowsiness. He believed one apparently spontaneous episode followed an incomplete awakening.
This matters to the proposed distinction between induced and spontaneous states. The baseline was being altered by the experiments themselves. A person who was tired, repeatedly hypnotised and not fully alert between sessions presented a different evidential problem from someone observed through an otherwise ordinary day. The difficulty arises within Janet’s account; it does not require assuming deliberate deception.
Janet’s printed summary gave twenty-two distant trials, sixteen judged precise and complete successes and six failures. He counted incomplete or delayed sleep as failure, but explicitly omitted an unsuccessful attempt made during the subject’s ordinary night sleep because he considered its conditions abnormal. The resulting total is his stated selection, rather than every attempt without exception. His conclusion was that the facts deserved reproduction and study, with a defence of the precautions taken against inadvertent suggestion.
What the visiting observers actually saw
Myers’s report identifies his visit as 20–24 April 1886 and says that contemporary notes were checked by his brother, A. T. Myers. It provides additional observation, but not an entirely separate series: the visitors attended the same continuing work with the same operators and subject. Their accounts should not be multiplied into independent replications merely because several names appear in the literature.
Myers initially found ordinary suggestion plausible. On 21 April, observers entered the house after an attempted distant induction and first found the woman in the kitchen. Only after their departure was she found asleep in the intended room. Her explanation was that their arrival had startled her, but Myers acknowledged that the visit itself might have prompted the expected behaviour. A further late-night attempt produced no requested action.
He considered the evening of 22 April more impressive. Observers waited outside, then watched her leave and make her way to Gibert’s house. However, the attendant had not watched throughout the period in which the hypnotic state supposedly began. Myers also noted that an apparent correspondence between hesitation during the walk and Gibert’s interrupted concentration might have been accidental. The striking journey and the precision of its proposed cause are separate claims.
In another trial she eventually handled a photographic album after an earlier mental instruction. Myers favoured a genuine mental suggestion, yet admitted that several people knew the intended act and that an unnoticed spoken clue was difficult to exclude. His table enlarged the compilation to twenty-five trials, with nineteen coincidences and six failures. It incorporated earlier work and made explicit judgements about resisted attempts. It is not simply Janet’s twenty-two-trial total independently reproduced.
Janet’s later reservations
In his 1930 autobiographical account Janet recalled sixteen coincidences in twenty experiments and regretted the confidence with which others had circulated the early work. He said he had doubted its interpretation and would have criticised his own observations. This is a significant reservation by an original investigator, rather than a documented finding that every incident was fraudulent. The memoir also dates the experiments to 1882, unlike the dated contemporary notes. Its retrospective date and denominator are retained as differences between documents, not silently substituted for the earlier record.
Assessment and location
The outcome is disputed. Myers argued positively for telepathic influence; Janet’s later account challenged the assurance attached to the experiments. The contemporary reports themselves preserve incomplete commands, failures, uncertain onset times and possible ordinary cues. Their value is a detailed historical record of an investigation whose causal interpretation was contested. Neither the reported coincidences nor the later reservations establish a complete explanation of every episode.
The approximate map reference is 49.494, 0.108, rounded from the sourced coordinates for Le Havre. It represents the city, not a reconstructed experimental room, a private residence or a visitor entrance. The domestic settings described in the original papers are not presented as accessible attractions. The archival portrait shows Janet, not Léonie, and has no claimed connection to the date or appearance of an experiment.
Sources and further reading
Exact portrait file, Wellcome V0028134: CC BY 4.0 reuse and photographer attribution