Many people who confessed under the duress of torture may well have been releasing repressed material. In all likelihood, pain stimulated a flood of unconscious crimes, such as murderous rage against authority figures, incest wishes, or any number of socially determined offenses. Exorcism rituals aimed at rescuing the soul from Satan. The effects of the procedure may have also relieved some of the body's anguish through release of emotional pain. These techniques resembled modern emotional flooding techniques. The emphasis on emotion was strong in exorcism techniques; the exorcist tried to temper its expression or to liberate it. Nineteenth Century Pierre Janet and Hypnosis Pierre Janet was a French hypnotist who used hypnosis to study the dissociative tendencies of the mind. Researcher John Ryan Haule studied Janet's work and observed that Janet referred to the hypnotic process as 'influence somnambulique.' Before 1900, Janet saw somnambulism as the essential condition, of which hysteria, hypnosis, multiple personality, and spiritualism were variations. Janet used the word somnambulism to refer to any kind of activity pursued while in a dissociated condition, not just to sleepwalking. Janet used hypnosis to manipulate the somnambulistic condition. He identified three phases. 1. Fatigue: The treated patient feels exhausted upon awaking from the hypnotic trance. 2. Health: When the fatigue is gone, the patient seems to be in perfect health. All symptoms of the disorder are gone, and the patient appears to be "back to normal." However, the patient is not cured and this phase is temporary. The only sign that something is odd is the patient's obsession with the hypnotist. 3. Obsession: Following the brief phase of apparent good health, all symptoms return. The patient has a strong desire to be put to sleep, almost like withdrawal symptoms, and wants to undergo hypnosis again. The patient also has a strange, almost sexual, obsession with the hypnotist. Janet was not only a hypnotist. He would engage the patient, talk to him, address the "sick" forces within him, and attempt to use hypnosis to contact the unconscious. Like exorcism, hypnosis also attacked the unconscious. Experts now refer to Janet's approach as the cathartic method. In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft said that abreaction was the term applied to the expression of affect, with the subsequent alleviation of symptoms being the catharsis. Later, Sigmund Freud and his followers deemed the cathartic cure to be unsuccessful because it did not stimulate