Paper short abstract:

When Ericksonian hypnotherapy is practiced in a developmentalist postcolonial context (Indonesia), it loses its capacity to accommodate certain unexpected forms of speech. 'The unexpected' can then render patients ambivalent towards hypnotherapy and therapists pessimistic about national development.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Indonesian Board of Hypnotherapy was founded in 2002, well over 24,000 citizens have trained as hypnotherapists, the vast majority of them aspiring to use their knowledge to serve their communities, contribute to national development, and be leading vanguards of the Jokowi government's proposed 'Mental Revolution'. Despite these noble intentions, however, hypnotherapists are often figures of great ambivalence. On the one hand, they are viewed ambivalently by the public, who suspect that hypnotherapy's apparent secular modernism may in fact be a front for sorcery. On the other hand, their own enthusiasm for transforming the Indonesian mindset can easily give way to a sneaking suspicion that the Indonesian population may in fact be irredeemably 'backward'.

This paper argues that both forms of ambivalence are consequences of unexpected twists and turns in therapeutic dialogue, the unsettling effect of which relates to the specifically Ericksonian character of the hypnotherapy taught by Indonesia's major hypnosis associations. Erickson argued that the most powerful way to reconfigure aspects of a patient's subconscious was by 'accepting and utilising' their core beliefs. In developmentalist contexts such as Indonesia, Ericksonian hypnotherapy is consequently haunted by the possibility that a patient's core beliefs will be 'backward', a possibility which can lead to forms of unexpected therapeutic speech that threaten the reputations of hypnotherapist and patient alike. Differences in political economy, and in resultant forms of subjectivity, therefore lead the very semiotic ideology that rendered Erickson's approach so effective in the United States to compromise its efficacy in Indonesia.