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Accepted Paper:
Hypnosis, care, and collective responsibility: pursuing middle-class dreams through hypnotherapeutic socialities in contemporary Indonesia
Nicholas Long
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
While middle-class Indonesians use hypnotherapy to support such goals as optimising workplace efficiency or maximising educational attainment, the self-theories underpinning their practice lead to the emergence of subjects who differ markedly from conventional portraits of neoliberalism.
Paper long abstract:
Since the early 2000s, Indonesia has witnessed a surge of middle-class interest in ‘Western-style’ hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy has not only been embraced as a clinical practice but is also widely used in non-clinical spaces such as schools, offices, and family homes. This paper explores the reasons behind these developments, asking why practices such as ‘hypnoteaching’ and ‘hypnoparenting’, which are typically viewed with alarm in Euro-American settings, should be so readily embraced in the Indonesian context, and elucidating the individual and collective identities that emerge as a result of their institutionalisation.
From the perspective of the self-theories circulating amongst Indonesian hypnotherapists, there is nothing inappropriate about hypnotherapy’s incursion into the intimate relations of schooling or family life – a reaction that makes most sense in contexts where the decentring of self-control elicits a sense of ‘agency panic’. Instead, hypnoteaching and hypnoparenting are seen as more deliberate and controlled versions of the relationalities and influences that shape subjectivity on an everyday basis. Hypnotherapy discourse highlights how selves are vulnerable to the words of others, and dependent upon others for care and therapeutic support. Equally, it underscores the consequentiality of everyday speech, aiming to produce subjects who are mindful of the ways they contribute to symbolic environments through which others must move. Thus even as hypnotherapists see themselves as vanguards of collective action to secure prosperous national futures in a time of globalised neoliberalism, hypnotherapy generates subjects whose attention to their responsibility for each other differs markedly from conventional anthropological portraits of ‘neoliberal subjectivity’.