A Psychology of Ghosts: The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond

Abstract

The afterlife is currently being psychologised on a global scale. Based on a comparison of recent transformations in the reality of ghosts in eastern Indonesia and in contemporary Hollywood ghost series, this paper explores the links between spirits and changing conceptions of self in a global world. In Indonesia, ghosts are becoming traumatised, while in the West spirits increasingly struggle with emotional problems. In different ways, the paper suggests, spirits are becoming implicated in the globalisation of an interiorised and psychologised understanding of what it means to be human. As humans are encouraged to think of themselves as psychological beings, human spirits and ghosts are reinvented in a variety of ways—East and West. I argue that, ironically, it is the very hegemony of the powerful discourses and institutions that drive the globalisation of a psychological understanding of the self into ever more contexts and locations that is leading to these new forms of re-enchantment. The new kinds of ghosts that are currently emerging in the folds of global governmentality do so, it would seem, not in spite of the power of governmental reason, but by virtue of it.