Notebook October 1993
Mesmer revisited: Bill Moyers & New Age healing
On Bill Moyers’s ideas and experience.
In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Karl Marx famously wrote that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Nowadays, history repeats itself as a middlebrow package: the TV mini-series with its “tie-in” book. Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind is a model of the genre.1 The tie-in rests safely near the top of the Times best-seller list (twenty-four weeks as I write), not far beneath a Jungian analyst’s Women Who Run With the Wolves (fifty-one weeks) and Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be (forty-six weeks).
Moyers’s volume is...
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