MCLC: Hypnotism in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Hypnotism in China
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Source: Dissertations Review (5/13/14):
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/9026

Hypnotism and Pseudoscience in China
Studying the “Pseudo” Seriously: Hypnotism in Early Twentieth-Century China
By Tie Xiao

My interest in hypnotism stems from my study of another “dubious”
discipline, crowd psychology. Part of a book manuscript I am working on
explores the invention of qunzhong (crowd) as a psychological entity in
modern China. Central to this psychological, and, more often than not,
psychopathological, figure of the crowd were such notions as anshi
(suggestion), gexing xiaoshi (disappearance of individuality), and huanjue
(delusion), etc., notions that not only belonged to the stock assumptions
of a psychopathological language of depicting the crowd that circulated
globally around the turn of the twentieth century, but also bespoke the
fascination with the primacy of the irrational in the redefinition of the
self that first emerged in Europe at the time. In the theories of crowd
mentality and behavior around the turn of the twentieth century, hypnotism
held an important if unexamined explanatory place. For a wide range of
crowd psychologists across the globe, hypnosis was regarded as a main
model of social interaction and control. It is not surprising, then, to
find that such notions as anshi, gexing xiaoshi, and huanjue, which
characterized this “psychological crowd,” were also central to the
discussions of hypnotism that began to emerge in China in the 1900s.
However, the widespread engagement with hypnotism in early
twentieth-century China reveals interests that went much beyond the narrow
concern with crowd manipulation.

Indeed, it must have meant more than that. Otherwise, how can we explain
why an anti-Machu revolutionary went to Japan to study hypnotism in 1904
and came back to Shanghai where he made a living by teaching hypnotism at
the Educational Society of China (Zhongguo jiaoyu hui)? Why did a young
adventurous student of his, after trips to both the center of the earth
and the outer space, disseminate the secret of animal magnetism as a
source of empowerment of the masses, a practice so subversive that it had
to be suppressed by interested parties? Why, around the same time, did the
news that the Governor-General of Zhili, Yuan Shikai, had “examined” the
display of stage hypnotism by two French showmen become an illustrated
item for the emerging print sensationalism? A biographical anecdote leads
to a science fantasy; a news illustration unfolds a world of itinerant
performers of wonder shows travelling across all kind of boundaries. I
find myself wandering, unexpectedly, into a labyrinth of dispersion, a
profusion of connections: a mail-order textbook leads to a variety of
manuals for hypnotism; a piece of advertisement in a popular magazine
leads to a whole group of hypnotists who founded their own research
society; while theories of hypnosis were introduced in elite educational
journals, a Shanghai-based troupe of magicians boasted about having the
“hypnotized-beauty-flying-in-the-air” as one of their main tricks, etc.
Did I mention all the weird, “scientific”-looking diagrams and
illustrations that populate the do-it-yourself hypnotism handbooks, the
detailed stage instructions and vivid descriptions of various apparatuses
and gestures of hypnosis induction, and the astonishing, or should I say
spectacular, photos that Chinese theoreticians and practitioners relied on
to authenticate their psychological wonders?

Now a few words about the history of hypnotism, particularly its history
in early twentieth-century China, are in order. Hypnosis is an
artificially aroused state of enforced suggestibility. At the heart of
this definition is the notion of “suggestion,” which refers to the
psychical process of induction. Through this process, an idea aroused in
another person’s brain, to borrow Freud’s words, “is not examined in
regard to its origin but is accepted just as though it had arisen
spontaneously in that brain.” Induced somnambulism was given the name of
hypnotism by James Braid in 1843, but its history goes back to Franz Anton
Mesmer, a Viennese physician who was one of the first person to
investigate magnetic sleep as a healing method in the eighteenth century.
The enormous interest in mesmerism mounted steadily from the 1770s to the
early 1780s and declined after 1785. In the early nineteenth century
official European medicine denounced Mesmer’s animal magnetism as
charlatanism, but the last two decades of the century saw a revival of
interest in hypnotism led by distinguished European neurologists. Around
the turn of the twentieth century hypnotherapeutics became recognized as a
respectable branch of medicine, and a hypnotic movement quickly spread
across Europe and America. The International Congress of Hypnotism in
Paris in 1900 drew philosophers, neurologists, psychiatrists, and other
participants from as far afield as Iceland, Persia, Rumania, and Venezuela.

The Chinese term for hypnotism is cuimian. Most Chinese advocates of
hypnotism complained about it, because hypnotism is really not about
making people sleepy as the literal meaning of the Chinese term indicates.
Closely associated with cuimian, as I find out, is a cluster of ideas
about communication, or more precisely the direct influence of mind upon
mind, that transcends the recognized channels of senses—ideas such as
xinxing xiangtong or sixiang zhuanyi (thought transference), gantong or
tonggan (telepathy), and tianyantong (clairvoyance). In the 1900s and
1910s, scattered reports of foreign itinerant performers of stage
hypnotism entertaining Chinese audience appeared in the popular
illustrated press. The systematic introduction of animal magnetism and
hypnotism in China cannot be separated from Japanese Spiritualism in the
late Meiji and Taisho periods. A new vocabulary for discussing the mental
life emerged in turn-of-the-century Japan. A great number of societies for
psychical research and therapeutic/educational institutions were founded
across the nation. Hypnotism permeated the popular consciousness through
entertainment shows and literature. Chinese students in Japan were
attracted to the books about mesmerism, hypnotism, clairvoyance, and
telekinesis that flooded the market and to wonder shows of hypnotherapy at
public pleasure halls. Many of them attended hypnosis schools in Japan and
joined Japanese associations of psychical research.

In the next two decades, works of Japanese hypnotists were translated for
the Chinese reading public. The Chinese Institute of Mentalism (Zhongguo
xinling yanjiuhui), the most important society of hypnotism in the
Republican era, was established in 1911 in Tokyo and later moved to
Shanghai. A great number of self-help books, theoretical monographs, and
pamphlets on topics ranging from hypnotherapy to animal hypnosis and
telepathy were published by both small presses and large publishers.
Journals dedicated to psychical research with particular attention to
hypnotism appeared. Theories of hypnotic phenomena, such as suggestion,
dual consciousness, and mental disassociation (by Jean-Martin Charcot,
Hippolyte Bernheim, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, and James Braid, among
others) were extensively introduced to the Chinese readers. Clinics,
institutes, and societies of hypnotism and psychical research emerged
across the country. Performances of hypnotism were staged and
commemoratory photo catalogues were printed. A rainbow of techniques of
hypnotizing was introduced, the most common of which included the use of
monotonous and uniform sensory stimulation such as eye fixation.
Correspondence courses were offered and advertised on newspapers.

While it is difficult to chart precisely the main twists and turns of its
course in early twentieth-century China, the interest in hypnotism mounted
steadily from the 1910s to the early 1930s and declined after the late
1930s. The Chinese Institute of Mentalism claims that by 1933 more than
sixty thousand students of hypnotism had graduated from the institute
alone.

Despite its intriguing presence,however, cuimian in modern China has been
largely disregarded and forgotten. Alan Gauld’s otherwise exhaustive
700-page study, A History of Hypnotism, for instance, focuses on Europe
and America and claims that there is “little to be said” about “other
parts of the world.” When it does get scholars’ attention, for example in
a recent study of the history of “pseudoscience” in China, hypnotism is
written off as a regressive throwback to shamanistic occultism. Both
studies share an anachronistic narrative of exclusion that pre-assigns the
“scientific” or “meaningful” centers to an intellectual world where the
very boundaries of plausibility and implausibility, proper practice and
fringe aberration, center and margin, might not be as clearly demarcated
as they would later be claimed to be. Both studies overlook the fact that
the heightened enthusiasm for hypnotism in East Asia, particularly in
Japan and China, was not only constitutive of a truly transnational
movement around the turn of the twentieth century but also, more
importantly, brings into relief the varied ramifications of the
dissemination, appropriation, and institutionalization of hypnotic
thinking in local contexts. In their dismissal, I feel, lies room for a
new “serious” study of the “pseudo.” But how?

I found myself eagerly comparing Chinese manuals and “encyclopedias”
(quanshu) of cuimian with Western handbooks of hypnotism from the 1900s. I
read translations, pamphlets, manuals, and theoretical treatises by
Chinese authors to check whether their renditions and introduction of
Mesmer’s animal magnetism or Braid’s hypnotism were accurate and faithful
to the original. I was spurred on, as I later realized, by a desire to
locate the “pseudo” theory ofcuimian “above” the threshold of
scientificity that was accepted as standard at the time, and I felt
relieved to see an obscured Chinese author tending to coherence and
demonstrativity when he tried to explain the mental mechanism behind
marvelous feats such as thought transference and clairvoyance. I found
myself, consciously or not, looking for evidence for the Weberian paradigm
of disenchantment: “Here you are, the secularizing logic of intellectual
rationalization,” I said to myself when I read a paper written by a
Chinese student for an exam for a Japanese society of hypnotism, in which
the student used the modern psychological theory of hypnotism as
explanatory model to disenchant the mysterious forces such as yuanguang
that traditional Chinese occultists used. But I realize that by doing so,
that is, by focusing exclusively on the “scientific”-sounding part of the
introduction, circulation, and appropriation of cuimian in modern China, I
am also engaging with a mode of exclusion and delimitation exterior to the
discursive formation that I examine—in fact, not unlike the two
aforementioned studies that pre-assign meaningful “centers” and ignorable
“margins”— and obscure the very coexistence of dispersed and heterogeneous
claims, practices, and stories that attracted me to this topic in the
first place.

For example, next to, or at the “margins” of, the theoretical discussions
of dual consciousness and disembodied mind that one often finds in cuimian
manuals from this period of time, are fanciful and sometime bizarre
anecdotes and recollections that I first found entertaining but not more
than that. A variety of anecdotes are collected in the appendix of a
mail-order textbook from 1915, compiled and printed in Tokyo and sold
across major cities along the China coastline and in Southeast Asia.
According to one of the anecdotes, at a friendly gathering in a small town
in southern China, a student of hypnotism, who had just finished reading
an earlier print of the very same textbook, successfully brought his
friend into a hypnotic trance, during which his friend, under his
suggestions, experienced flying to Paris, fishing, dining, and watching a
film there. When awakened, the hypnotized subject felt physically relaxed
and spiritually refreshed and thanked the hypnotist for “granting him a
free tour of Paris.”

At first, I did not even bother to make a note of the anecdote as I was
paying most of my attention to the theories and instructions of hypnotic
induction in the textbook. And yet, this little incident, vividly
described in the book, kept coming back to my mind, raising questions:
Does it merely function to prove the psychic theory behind the phenomenon
of “rapport” and heightened suggestibility—that the hypnotist is able to
introduce and foster sensuous illusions to the mind of the subject and the
hypnotized, to his own astonishment, will experience a hallucinatory
rapport with hypnotist’s suggestions? Or does it illustrate the ambivalent
politics of the hypnotically generated hallucination as a locus of drift?
The notion of induced sleep as an artificially aroused state more awake
than the waking one problematizes the boundary between reality and
illusion. Hypnotism, as the technique of inducing nomadic visual and
auditory hallucinations, is applauded here for offering at least a fantasy
of sensorial experience of the modern, a fantasy that resists the stable
geopolitical arrangement. If our objective is not to “diagnose” cuimian
but rather to understand what was in hypnotism that appealed to so many
Chinese commoners and elite intellectuals, and the historical and
intellectual conditions for such appeal, isn’t the utopian desire it
mobilized as important, if not more so, as the “scientific” or theoretical
rationality that it claims to rely on or aims to validate?

To account for the “tangled plurality” of concepts, statements, stories,
and images in fiction, philosophical texts, psychological studies, popular
manuals and textbooks, newspaper reports and advertisements, and political
theories, etc.—that is, to analyze, as Foucault has suggested, “the
interplay of their appearances and dispersion”—I believe, is more
productive than merely prove or disprove the extent that cuimian complied
with the accepted scientific norms of the time. To go beyond the
anachronistic characterization one often finds in the study of the
“pseudo” and map this system of dispersion that characterizes the
widespread engagement with hypnotism in early twentieth-century China, I
find the notion of “vernacularization,” which Professor Andrew Jones has
admirably elaborated in his recent study (Developmental Fairy Tales:
Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture), very helpful. Instead
of single-mindedly attempting to separate fiction from truth in the claims
and practice of the “pseudo,” it might be more productive to examine the
layered process of vernacularization through which the transposed
knowledge of the “pseudo” acquired meaning locally: cuimian in modern
China, as a vernacular of the “proper” form of “scientific” knowledge from
Western metropolises and their academic institutions, was further
vernacularized through diverse popular channels including pamphlets,
illustrations, journalism, and fictions. Rather than testing the
widespread engagement with hypnotism in early twentieth-century China
against certain intellectual or institutional limits of “scientificity,”
one needs to explore the ways in which scientific pretensions function
within that discursive formation as a “field of knowledge” where different
subjects take positions. From the self-styled vanguards, dressed in
Western suits, who claimed to hold the miraculous cure for the spiritual
and bodily ailments of the nation, to spiritualists who used hypnotism to
communicate with the dead, and to urban magicians who magnetized flying
beauties in amusement halls for entertainment, we are confronted with a
field of “diffractions” that do not simply constitute gaps or
discontinuities extrinsic to the system of distribution through different
social spheres and domains of application, but rather characterize its
unity.

So, I am interested in the ways in which the social and cultural context
conditioned the specific forms that the local dissemination,
appropriation, and institutionalization of hypnotic thinking assumed. To
track the movement of hypnotic knowledge as it crossed a variety of
disciplines, media, and forms of cultural production, penetrated different
social spheres, and was appropriated and transformed, is also to study the
“economy of discursive constellation” to which it belonged. By so doing,
we will be able to move beyond the boundaries of the “pseudo-” or “quasi-”
discipline with scientific pretensions and enter a whole field of
relations that constituted its discursive practice. The travels of the
hypnotic thinking, both across nations and across genres and media, make
it manifest that there is more to understand what was in the “pseudo” at
one particular historical moment that appealed to many Chinese
intellectuals and commoners, and what fantasies and desires it mobilized,
than to merely diagnose whether it is “scientifically” sound.

Tie Xiao
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Indiana University
tiexiaotie at gmail.com
Image: “Animal magnetism: The operator putting his patient into a crisis.”
From E. Sibly, A Key To Physic and the Occult Sciences, 1814. Source: Wiki
Commons 
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animal_magnetism,_1814.jpg>.