[fyi] MCLC: Hypnotism in China

[Monica Carrico]

Beijos Rui!

mónica [sent from a tiny keyboard] 

> On 15 May 2014, at 22:17, "Denton, Kirk" <denton.2 at osu.edu> wrote:
> 
> MCLC LIST
> From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
> Subject: Hypnotism in China
> ***********************************************************
> 
> 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>.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MCLC mailing list
> MCLC at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/mclc