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Nick Long: The hypnotist’s dilemma: mystical recuperation, counterproductive care, and the anxieties of symbolic healing

Date
May 6 , 2025 

Hybrid Med­ical Anthro­pol­o­gy seminar


Please join us for our May LSHTM Med­ical Anthro­pol­o­gy sem­i­nar with Dr Nick Long, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy at LSE.
May 6th 2025, 4pm bst
In per­son at LSHTM – room G41 Kep­pel Street, or Online (fol­low the link above). Please note this sem­i­nar will not be recorded.

Dr Long will be pre­sent­ing “The hypnotist’s dilem­ma: mys­ti­cal recu­per­a­tion, coun­ter­pro­duc­tive care, and the anx­i­eties of sym­bol­ic healing”

Abstract: 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’.

Biog­ra­phy: 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’.