ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Psychological Sciences in East and Southeast Asia, 19th to Mid-20th Centuries

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines the circulation, reinvention, and localisation of the psychological sciences across East and Southeast Asia from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Moving beyond diffusionist models that cast psychological knowledge as travelling unidirectionally from West to East, the four papers foreground the agency and plurality of actors, practices, and epistemologies involved in reshaping notions of mind, body, and wellbeing across the region. Together, they highlight how ideas about the psyche were translated, contested, and embedded within projects of national reform, colonial modernity, and therapeutic experimentation. The panel opens with an exploration of early 20th-century China, where psychical research and hypnotism became entangled with efforts to strengthen the nation through mental renewal, giving rise to a wave of new mind-based therapies. It then turns to the linguistic and conceptual innovation that structured the institutional and intellectual trajectories of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology in East Asia, particularly South Korea. A third paper examines Thailand, showing how Meyerian psychiatry, behaviourism, and mental hygiene were reworked to ‘modernise’ the Thai mind through frameworks of child development, from the interwar period to the early Cold War. The final contribution revisits early 20th-century Japan to demonstrate how hypnosis was reconfigured through bodily disciplines such as breathing techniques, generating alternative therapeutic lineages rooted in embodied practice. This panel challenges Euro-American-centred narratives in the global history of the psychological sciences, highlighting how bodily techniques, linguistic creativity, and political forces shaped their localisation across modern East and Southeast Asia.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Healing Through Trance: Mental Healing and Social Reform in Early 20th-Century China - Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira, University of Cambridge

• Naming the Western ‘Psy’ Sciences in East Asia: Between 精神 (chŏngsin) and 心理 (simni), the Case of Psychoanalysis (精神分析) in South Korea - Jimin Choi, University of Cambridge

• The Making of the 'Modern Child': From a Child of the Future in the Second World War to the Nervous Child in Cold War Thailand - Krittapak Ngamvaseenont, University of Manchester & Chiang Mai University

• From the Hypnotic Ball to Breathing Exercises: The Transformation of Hypnotic Techniques in Early-Twentieth-Century Japan - Yu-Chuan Wu, Academia Sinica