---
title: "Western esotericism and psychology"
chunk: 2/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism_and_psychology"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:59.025054+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Rejected knowledge by academic psychology ===
In this line of analysis, Wouter J. Hanegraaff introduced the notion of rejected knowledge to describe bodies of thought and practice that once claimed rational or scientific legitimacy but were later excluded from academic discourse. The concept provides historians with a tool for understanding why movements such as mesmerism, psychical research, or vitalist biophysics—though not self-identified as “esoteric”—nonetheless display structural affinities with the esoteric field through their use of subtle-force cosmologies, analogical reasoning, and transformative techniques.

=== Psychologization of esotericism (historiographical models) ===
Scholarship has used “psychologization” to describe how esoteric repertoires were reframed in psychological idioms or channelled through therapeutic formats. Wouter J. Hanegraaff proposed a bidirectional traffic—“psychologization of religion” and “sacralization of psychology”—as a lens for modern encounters between esotericism and psychology. Complementarily, long-duration histories of dynamic psychiatry (as theorized by the historiographer of psychiatry Henri Ellenberger) trace continuities from exorcism to mesmerism, hypnosis and the emergence of clinical psychologies, providing a background against which such reframings occurred.
Recent work has refined “psychologization” by distinguishing several modes (e.g., complementary, terminological, reductive, idealist) and by analysing the appeal to a distinct “magical plane” (a separate-but-connected psychic locus) that insulates ritual practice from empirical critique while aligning it with psychoanalytic or depth-psychological vocabularies. These models help to map how actors translate ritual devices into symbolic or therapeutic procedures without presupposing realist–occult claims.

Proto-psychologization in harmonial religion
For clarity, modern scholarship distinguishes between actors’ metaphysical vocabularies and historians’ analytic categories. In this regard, the article follows the usage of harmonial religion (also called harmonialism) as a historiographical label (etic) designating a North American metaphysical ethos (19th–20th centuries) that links mind–body–spirit harmony to wellbeing, encompassing mind-cure/New Thought, breath culture and related esoteric milieux. The label harmonial religion—part of what Catherine L. Albanese terms the broader American metaphysical religion—was introduced in her study A Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007), while Anya Foxen uses harmonialism to analyse Western reimaginings of yoga, respiration, and their orientalisation. Placed within the wider narrative of Western esotericism and psychology, what Albanese terms harmonial religion (and Foxen discusses as harmonialism)—ranging from Swedenborgian metaphysics through mesmerism, mind-cure and breath culture—constitutes a proto-psychological strand of modern esoteric thought. These formations prefigure the twentieth-century “psychologization of religion” analysed by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, wherein spiritual transformation and mental hygiene converge as parallel idioms of self-regulation and correspondence.

== Periodisation of the intersection ==

=== Enlightenment to nineteenth century ===

From late Enlightenment experiments in animal magnetism and guided “somnambulism” to fin-de-siècle debates on suggestion and trance, early interfaces between esoteric repertoires and psychological inquiry unfolded across salons, clinics and séance rooms. Mesmeric practices circulated the idea of an invisible influence acting upon body and mind; controlled inductions and narrative management of altered states provided techniques and cases that would be reframed in medical and psychological vocabularies.
During the early nineteenth century, the Transcendentalist movement in the United States—particularly the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson—absorbed elements of Western esotericism, including Swedenborgian doctrines of correspondences—which interpreted the visible world as an image of inner and spiritual processes—and Neoplatonic conceptions of the "Over-Soul". Scholars of American religion such as Catherine L. Albanese interpret this Transcendentalist synthesis as part of the broader harmonial or metaphysical current that linked moral and mental harmony with spiritual vitality. This intellectual milieu provided a cultural background for later mind-cure and New Thought movements, in which esoteric motifs of correspondence and transformation were increasingly psychologized and reframed as methods of self-regulation and healing.
Within the social worlds of spiritualism and early psychical research, clinicians and philosophers used trance cases to theorise divided consciousness. Pierre Janet’s work on dissociation systematised observations of automatisms (automatic writing, trance speech) as expressions of partitioned awareness, while discussions by William James and Sigmund Freud—both attentive to hypnosis and to hysteria debates—helped normalise psychological framings that did not rely on occult fluids or literal spirit agencies. Case-rich monographs such as Théodore Flournoy’s study of glossolalia and secondary personalities supplied detailed documentation without doctrinal commitments, furnishing materials for theorising imagination, suggestion and divided consciousness in secular terms.
By the century’s end, comparative and indological presentations had begun to recast selected Asian repertoires in psychological or mentalist terms for Western audiences—for example, Neo-Vedantic readings of Raja Yoga within modern interpretations of Yoga—foreshadowing twentieth-century migrations of somatic–attentional techniques into wellness and para-clinical niches.

Tradition interfaces in this period
Mesmerism and induced “somnambulism” popularised controlled trance and supplied early conduits from esoteric milieus to psychological technique (later recoded as hypnosis and suggestion). spiritualism and early psychical research generated case-materials—automatic writing, trance communication, secondary personalities—that fed debates on imagination and dissociation; Flournoy’s monograph is paradigmatic for this descriptive turn. Late-nineteenth-century indological receptions (e.g., Neo-Vedantic, mentalist readings of Raja Yoga) prefigured the twentieth-century translation of body–attention repertoires into secular or symbolic frames.

Institutional and editorial hubs in this period
Venues ranged from salons to clinical theatres (e.g., the Salpêtrière in Paris), while the Society for Psychical Research of London (SPR, 1882–) professionalised report genres on automatisms and trance that fed psychological debates on imagination and dissociation. Book-length case studies—such as Flournoy’s—circulated between séance rooms and clinics, helping to normalise descriptive vocabularies for trance phenomena without endorsing occult realism; sociological models later describe such circulations within a broader late-modern “cultic milieu”.

=== Occultism and comparative religion (late 19th–early 20th centuries) ===