London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Thousands of Indonesians have embraced hypnotherapy as a means of addressing personal and medical issues in a manner that moves away supernatural forms of ‘traditional healing’ and towards notions of a psychological self. Such projects of ‘psychological modernisation’ are nevertheless unsettled when patients arrive complaining of supernatural affliction. Hypnotherapeutic principles recommend accepting the client’s reality and working subjunctively within it, yet by doing so one risks being coded as the exactly the kind of traditional healer from which one wishes to distance oneself. Tracing responses to this dilemma within clinical practice, this paper suggests that anthropological theories of ‘symbolic healing’ and ‘subjunctive medicine’ need to be updated to reflect the difficulties certain symbols can present in settings with anxious and fractious relations to developmentalist ‘modernity’.

Speaker

Dr Nick Long

Dr Nick Long is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Alongside recent work on responses to COVID-19 in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand – including co-founding the Care And Responsibility Under Lockdown (CARUL) research collective, he has long-term interests in psychological anthropology and the anthropology of Indonesia. He is currently working on an ESRC-funded study of Indonesia’s hypnotherapy circuit, and won the 2019 Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology for his article ‘Suggestions of Power: Searching for Efficacy in Indonesia's Hypnosis Boom’.

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