ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Healing Through Trance: Mental Healing and Social Reform in Early 20th-Century China

• In Event: Psychological Sciences in East and Southeast Asia, 19th to Mid-20th Centuries

English Abstract

Originating in late 19th-century Britain, psychical research is a discipline concerned with the scientific investigation of exceptional abilities. Promising to extend the boundaries of science beyond the material realm, the field garnered the attention of leading scientific and intellectual communities worldwide. Its introduction into China in the early 1900s coincided with a period of dramatic social upheaval. As the nation teetered on the brink of collapse, Chinese intellectuals increasingly argued that national salvation required sweeping reforms, foremost among them, the reconstruction of the Chinese psyche. Within this turbulent context, hypnotism, a method that would eventually become nearly synonymous with psychical research, quickly captivated Chinese reformers. They viewed it as a simple, cheap yet effective tool for modernising the nation from within, asserting that material progress was meaningless without a corresponding mental and spiritual renewal of the Chinese people. By the early 1920s, the widespread enthusiasm for hypnotism and the healing potential of trance states spurred the (re)invention of a wave of mental therapies that positioned treating the mind as essential for both individual and social wellbeing. Many of these practices came from Japan, Europe, and the United States, and ranged from phrenology, autosuggestion, and electrotherapy to new meditation and breathing techniques, martial arts, and touch therapies. This paper explores the political and therapeutic appeal that hypnotism, altered states, and new mind-based therapies exerted over early 20th-century Chinese elites, highlighting their lasting impact on Chinese conceptions of health, spirituality, and the mind-body relationship.

Author

• Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira, University of Cambridge