Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault

Who was Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault?

Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was a French physician universally acknowledged as the founder of the famous school that became known as the "Nancy School", or the "Suggestion School" and he is considered by many to be the father of modern hypnotherapy.

The Nancy school held that hypnosis was a normal phenomenon induced by suggestion, in contrast to the earlier schools of thought, which considered hypnotic trances as manifestations of magnetism, hysteria or psycho-physiological phenomenon.

Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was born in Favières, a small town in the Lorraine region of France, on 16 September 1823. He completed his medical degree at the University of Strasbourg in 1850 at the age of 26. He then established a practice in the village of Pont-Saint-Vincent, near the town of Nancy.