From the nineteenth century to the present, yoga—and especially the figure of the yogi—has served as a crucial site for negotiating what counts as “the psychological.” Across colonial encounters, the rise of modern psychological science, new spiritual movements, and contemporary therapeutic culture, yoga has been repeatedly reframed as a discipline of mind: a technology of attention, a method of accessing the unconscious, a means of self-regulation, and, at times, a threat to autonomy itself. This panel examines the modern and contemporary psychologization of yoga, asking how yogic disciplines have been translated into psychological idioms and how those translations have reshaped both yoga and modern notions of subjectivity.
This paper examines the figure of the Indian yogi in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century within the intertwined histories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology. In Western scientific and popular media, Indian yogis and fakirs were repeatedly represented as “mesmerists” (c. 1830-1860s) and later “hypnotists” (c. 1880-1920s), masters of attention and suggestion at a time when science and technology were increasingly revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the mind and will. This paper shows how the extraordinary figure of the yogi was interpreted through the new categories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology, and how the modern Western mind (and self) was understood and enacted through engagement with the yogi. Through the yogi, Western audiences both explored and distanced themselves from the unsettling possibility that the mind is more permeable, the self more suggestible, and the will more limited than the dominant ideal of the rational, self-transparent liberal subject would admit.
This paper analyses a modern genealogy of the fearful constructions of the figure of the yogi by tracing a history of the discourses of hypnotism, brainwashing, and coercive control. It begins with a broad interrogation into how liberal fears of perceived threats to individual autonomy circulate in the United States and India. The author shows how the United States has surveilled the yogi/guru’s powers of mind control, while in Indian electoral politics they are instrumentalized. This paper concludes with the case study of a very real psychosis of an Indian businesswoman who believes herself to be “under attack” from a nefarious yogi/guru who is engaging in “black magic,” showing the intimate impact of such fearful discourses. Drawing on queer theorists who interrogate the affective impacts of fearful discourses, this paper reveals the consequences of the constructed fear of the “dangerous” yogi/guru.
There is a curious trend that appears in the teachings of several prominent twentieth-century gurus: samskaras, or mental dispositions born of accrued from the imprints of past action (karma), are increasingly articulated as residing in the energy wheels (cakras) or subtle channels (nadis) of the visionary yogic body. This is hardly out of step with modern wellness culture, which has long embraced the idea that “the body keeps the score.” But it is fairly unprecedented in pre-modern South Asian sources where such concepts generally represent two parallel, if not directly competing, models. This paper examines the key moments of innovation and synthesis in both South Asian and Euro-American sources that yielded this trend, paying especially close attention to conceptual overlap between the evolving models of Kundalini and the unconscious.
Based on ethnographic “fieldwork” conducted during a 75-hour online course on Indian, or “Vedic” astrology (also called jyotish), this paper explores how astrological thinking among yoga practitioners serves as a contemporary diagnostic language of the self, and notably a hybrid form in which jyotish is refracted through twentieth-century psychological astrology. Rather than relying on the predictive possibilities of a classically-Indic astrology, the version of jyotish taught in this course posits a Jung-inspired worldview where cosmic forces are not agents of change but archetypal energies to be adjusted, strengthened, or stirred. Here, I trace the contours of this hybridized psychological astrology–part Indian, part Jungian, and entirely compatible with the ethos of interiority and self-care that dominates the discourse of the global yoga industry.