When the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London was still in existence, it was widely regarded the international flagship of medical history and attracted some of the brightest scholars and students from all around the world. One of the people I met there around a decade ago was Yu-chuan Wu from Taiwan, who was then studying for a Ph.D. with research on the history of neurasthenia.
A while ago I read Yu-chuan’s excellent article “Techniques for Nothingness: Debate over the Comparability of Hypnosis and Zen in Early-Twentieth-Century Japan” (History of Science, 2018, 56:470-96). Understudied religious misgivings by Western medical and psychological critics of hypnotism and psychical research have been fairly central to my own research on European and North American contexts. I was therefore particularly struck by Yu-chuan’s account of orthodox Buddhists interfering in medical and psychological discourses on hypnosis in Japan.
When I was in Taipei end of last year, we reunited over lunch and decided to strike up a collaboration. Yu-chuan kindly supported my plan to spend a month as a visiting fellow at the Academia Sinica in Taipei this May. Sadly, COVID-19 got in the way, and I was forced to postpone my return to beautiful Taiwan to explore cross-cultural comparisons of these themes with Yu-chuan and colleagues.
However, the collaboration was never supposed to be a one-off event, and while we are waiting for the pandemic to pass, we are keen to start consolidating an international network of historians working on similar topics. We therefore welcome others to join us and think about possible short- and long-term projects and funding options for comparative research on the empirical occult in Western and Asian science and medicine. Here are some of the issues we would like to explore:
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
- To what extent did rhetorical patterns in religious critiques of occult phenomena of animal magnetism and hypnosis in Japan and other East Asian countries mirror Western styles of debate? What was unique in these East Asian controversies?
- Apart from controversies over occult phenomena proper, Western debates concerned findings of hypnosis researchers suggesting divisions of the self in mentally healthy persons. Questioning the unity of the self, this literature thus ran counter to traditional Cartesian notions equating the empirical ego of every-day life with the Christian immortal soul, and raised thorny questions regarding free will and moral agency. In what regard did religious authors in East Asia accommodate the empirical and clinical findings suggesting multiple chains of memory and volition in one individual within various Asian religious and metaphysical frameworks?
- To what degree did secular writers in East Asia draw on religiously motivated authors to police metaphysical boundaries of hypnosis, and vice versa?
- What was the role of state and private print media in the dispersion of modernist as well as orthodox religious sentiments seeking to ‘naturalize’ hypnosis and psychical research in East Asia?
- Where there any significant respective political affiliations of supporters and opponents of theologically unrestricted empirical approaches to alleged occult phenomena in hypnosis and related areas?
Using the theme of religion as a way in, we would also like to learn more about broader general issues, including:
- Who were the translators, editors and publishers of East Asian renderings of canonical Western texts on medical hypnosis? How did Asian efforts of science popularization compare with Western examples, and what place did the empirical occult occupy in this literature?
- Western practitioners and historians of animal magnetism and hypnotism have argued that related practises have long pre-dated the ‘discovery’ of animal magnetism by F. A. Mesmer in the eighteenth century. Are there authors who argued for ancient Asian ‘precursors’ of animal magnetism and hypnosis?
- The empirical work and theory of the mind presented by English psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers significantly informed the research programme of ‘founders’ of the modern psychological profession in the West, William James at Harvard and Théodore Flournoy in Geneva. What was the reception of Myers’s writings in East Asian psychology and medicine?
If you are a historian interested in exploring any of these questions in East and South-East Asian contexts (including but not limited to Taiwan, Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines), we would love to hear from you.
Please direct your inquiries and suggestions to:
Andreas Sommer, Ph.D.
Email: sommer@forbiddenhistories.com
Twitter: @Sommer_HPS
