The present work intends to highlight the fact that the relations between hypnosis and pain date back to a clinical origin and tradition, which remits to the subjective universe of the occidental paradigm. Criticizing the false notion of the beginning of scientific hypnosis based upon experimental perspectives, this article emphasizes how notions of such universe were present in the origin alongside the thinking process and the practices of eminent magnetizers and hypnologists. Despite having gone through historic changes, notions such as relation, subject, autonomy, imagination, and language have been in the origin of the understanding not only of the experience of pain, but also of the treatment given to those who experienced such form of suffering. Therefore, this article is concluded pointing out the necessity to recognize the persistence of past writers, since a great part of the subjective conceptions inherent to both the treatment and the understanding of pain from present writers holds a close kinship with past writers' masterpieces.
hypnosis; clinics; pain; history; epistemology