Primetime hypnotic tele-healing with Anatoly Kashpirovsky

In 1988, Anatolii Kashpirovskii, a trained psychiatrist with twenty years of experience in mental hospitals, reinvented himself as a guru capable of healing masses of patients from all ailments through the power of hypnosis. After a series of such successful sessions in halls and on Ukrainian republican television, in October 1989 Kashpirovskii started conducting his seances on Central Television, for “two hundred million viewers” (as he asserts in the episode from which this excerpt is taken), every two weeks at 10pm, immediately after USSR’s flagship nightly newscast, Vremia. Though his fame would wane a few years later, at the time Kashpirovskii became a household name throughout the USSR, along with another tele-spychic, Allan Chumak, who preferred to work in the mornings (see Artifact #00122).

On the one hand, it might seem a bit odd that Kashpirovskii famous tele-healing psychic sessions appeared on a television programme overseen by a Party ostensibly fully committed to atheism and the scientific method. On the other hand, the present excerpt gives a good sense of how this was possible. Each show would open with thirty minutes of written and oral testimonies from audience members who have been healed from cancer, multiple sclerosis, heart conditions, speech disorders, scars, etc. by Kashpirovskii’s televised interventions. As the guru made clear, these testimonies were themselves a part of the seance, but the centerpiece took place at the end, which was essentially a guided meditation with elements of hypnosis. During the course of this meditation, as well as elsewhere, Kashpirovskii repeatedly notes that what he is doing should be studied, that it bears a real medical force, that his televised “psychotherapy” makes it possible to “influence” people who do not have access to a live psychotherapist. In the present excerpt, which comes at the end of the session, Kashpirovskii notes the wide effect of his power, and finishes with the claim that “all of this is just the beginning; soon this will be a part of our everyday life, it will help our people [narod] become healthy, to revive itself spiritually, to a certain degree.” And it is this claim that explains where Soviet psychics fit vis-a-vis Perestroika television. They presented their work as only vaguely spiritual, as a matter of “cosmic reason,” but also as an empirical fact worthy of further study, further mainstreaming. Kashpirovskii presents his seance as yet another kind of “new thinking” made possible by Perestroika. In late 1989 the USSR is in a spiritual crisis, an economic crisis, and also very obviously a health crisis, as his audience makes clear. The whole country is in need of salvation by all possible means, and through all forms of increasingly uncensored speech– and televised psychic sessions for the masses seem to be a natural fit for this disposition.