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Parapsychology under Socialism: Two Workshops in Erlangen (2025–2026)

Two two-days workshops under the overarching title Parapsychology under Socialism—“Expectations, Ambiguities, and Echoes in Global Esoteric Practice” (October 23–24, 2025, organized by Dr. Anna Ozhiganova) and “Comparative Perspectives on Parapsychology in the USSR and in China (January 29–30, 2026, organized by Prof. Michael Lackner and Prof. Birgit Menzel) —held at CAS-E, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, marked a groundbreaking initiative to examine parapsychology within socialist societies as a coherent field of academic inquiry. Both events brought together interdisciplinary groups of scholars to explore how states, institutions, and the broader public negotiated the boundaries of scientific legitimacy surrounding the paranormal. Taken together, they established a comparative framework for the study of parapsychology across Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China.

The idea of inviting researchers working on the history of parapsychological movements in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union originated with anthropologist Dr. Anna Ozhiganova. After nearly a year of rigorous conceptual preparation and organizational work, she assembled 14 prominent researchers from Anthropology, History, Sociology, and the Study of Religions to collaborate.

At the outset of the first workshop, the influence of different practices on the legitimacy of parapsychology in socialist contexts was examined. Dr. Andreas Anton presented on “Occultism in the GDR? The Paranormal as Heterodoxy of Scientific Worldview,” discussing how paranormal topics were systematically discredited in public discourse within the German Democratic Republic while exploring their hidden significance in GDR society. Dr. Pavel Horák focused on the institutionalization of Czechoslovak Psychotronics (another designation for parapsychology), detailing its emergence after the 1968 invasion and its integration into state-sponsored research. The PhD student Ulrike Lang discussed “Strategic Rationalizations: Yoga, Psychotronics, and the Cultural Imagination of the Paranormal in Socialist Poland,” analyzing the intersection of yoga and parapsychology in a system sceptical of metaphysical claims.



The second panel delved into parapsychological discourses and debates. Dr. Anna Ozhiganova examined “The Construction of the Paranormal in Soviet Media Discussions and Popular Science,” exploring how Soviet journals navigated the legitimacy of paranormal research amid contradictory policies. Prof. Nemanja Radulović presented “Varieties of Parapsychology in Yugoslavia (1945–1990),” highlighting the lack of official experiments while revealing strong individual interest and cultural engagement with parapsychological themes.

The third panel explored international collaborations in parapsychology. The PhD student Viktoria Vitanova-Kerber examined “Suggestology and the West: A Parapsychological Network Beyond the Borders of the Cold War,” discussing Bulgaria’s suggestology as a significant parapsychological network. Dr. Vojtěch Märc contributed with “Pyramid Power to the People: Czechoslovak Pyramidology and Its Global Reverberations,” tracing the global trajectory of pyramid power and its institutionalization in Czechoslovakia.



The fourth panel focused on the impact of state surveillance on parapsychological research. Dr. Monika Bednarczuk presented “Parapsychology between Academia and the Church: The Case of Communist Poland,” revealing the complex interactions between academia, the church, and the parapsychological community under surveillance. Ivan Souček discussed “Psychotronics Under Surveillance: Czechoslovak Secret Police and the Control of Paranormal Research,” analyzing the ambivalent relationship between state security and psychotronic researchers. Dr. Zbigniew Łagosz and Dr. Tomasz Krok presented findings on “The Surveillance Case ‘Esoterists’,” detailing the actions of the communist security service against Polish esoteric circles.

The concluding discussion, joined by anthropologist PD Dr. Ehler Voss, featured his insightful analysis and raised key questions about common discourses in parapsychology under socialism, variations across different socialist countries, and the factors contributing to the renewed interest in parapsychology among contemporary researchers.

At this first workshop, interest in and research on paranormal phenomena in former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe were conceptualized for the first time within a unifying framework, namely “parapsychology under socialism.” The discussion illuminated the distinctive features of studying paranormal phenomena in these socialist contexts while also revealing significant differences between them.

The second workshop, three months thereafter, hosted by CAS-E, was singular in that it opened a conversation across two major socialist countries in Eurasia, China and the USSR, each with its own institutional ecologies, political constraints, and opportunities for parapsychological research and popularization. It brought together multiple disciplines and voices, including historians of science, physicists, anthropologists, sinologists, cultural studies scholars, and scholars close to the research fields under discussion. This constellation allowed comparing not only claims and cases, but also methods, institutions, rhetorics, and the politics of evidence. 

The main participants were nine researchers from China, Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands.

In their presentations, multiple “levels” of analysis, from state-supported or semi-official projects and validation tests to public debates, to historical precedents and longer cultural genealogies came into the discussion.



Two leading Chinese experts on the paranormal in contemporary China, Dr. He Hong from Beijing and Dr. Leping Zha from Wuhan, presented the current state of parapsychology in China, based on their first-hand experiences over almost four decades. Dr. He Hong gave an account of his 25 years of active involvement in scientific supervision and validation of psi in China. From 1995 to 2000, he was the psi group leader at the prominent “507 Institute” (1982–2000), which studied ESP and psychokinesis (PK), which were termed “extraordinary somatic phenomena.” He conducted many psi tests, reviewed the 507 archives, and served as an expert on a state-organized team that implemented officially coordinated national validation tests of psi (1996–1999).



His colleague, Dr. Leping Zha, presented an overview of his involvement in the study of “somatic science” since 1979, which focused on macro-ESP and PK phenomena. He, too, was an active participant in that movement as a research fellow at various state-funded institutions and remains deeply involved in the investigation, experimentation, and philosophical inquiry into parapsychology, as well as UFO-/UAP developments in China. Just like Hong He, Leping Zha currently serves as an advisor to the Commission of Experimental Control of the so-called “Unidentified Human Phenomenon (UHP).”

Two younger specialists in Chinese parapsychology, both PhD students in the field, Yanlin Lu (Princeton University) and Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (University of Cambridge), introduced the history of parapsychology in China, complementing each other well for the period covered. Junqueira traced the beginnings of psychic studies in Republican China around the turn of the 20th century, which then evolved into what became known as “spiritual science,” focusing on hypnosis. The Chinese engagement with psychical research, he argued, must be seen as an interplay between local Chinese interests and a global wave of late 19th- to mid-20th-century movements that denounced Western modernity as materialistic, violent, and dehumanizing. Republican reformers in a China ravaged by foreign imperialism and civil war, lauded psychical research as a scientific means to enhance the Chinese mind by unlocking hidden psychic powers. By this, they believed, China would be saved from the grip of Western materialism and would develop along a path to a superior form of ‘spiritual modernity’ rooted in science, tradition, and mental reality.

Yanlin Lu’s presentation focused on the “somatic science”, a new Chinese scientific and popular movement to legitimize “extraordinary human body functions” which flourished in post-Mao China between 1978 and 1987, despite the official materialist stance. Scientists deployed various strategies to legitimize the quest for the paranormal, such as conducting joint experiments with psychics to prove its authenticity to skeptics, building evidence, and creating an apparatus to give the movement official institutional space (the “507 Institute”). Practice became the sole criterion for testing truth. Somatic science became an extremely popular mass movement until, with Qi Gong practiced by millions, it got out of control and was banned by the party in 1987.

Historical context was then provided by the art historian and sinologist Dr. Lennert Gesterkamp, who discussed the case of Crazy Zhou, the most famous psychic in Chinese official history from the 14th century.

On the second day, the focus shifted to the USSR. Dr. Anna Ozhiganova gave an account of her ongoing research into the understudied depth of the paradoxical status of Soviet parapsychology, which flourished both in official institutions and in the unofficial intellectual milieus. However, in the USSR, a variety of terms were used, differing much from both Western and Chinese terminology in parapsychology. Publications were scattered across a wide range of specialized journals and disciplines; various terms were used, so the field has been barely visible, ignored, and understudied until now. Anna Ozhiganova discussed parapsychology within the framework of cybernetics, which was rehabilitated only in 1962–1963 after being banned before as bourgeois-imperialistic. She showed that this political fact played a key role in the legitimation of parapsychology in the 1960s, a decade when it had been popular in the Early Soviet period. Lifting the ideological ban on the “reactionary pseudoscience” of cybernetics brought a fundamental change across all fields of the natural, human, and exact sciences, as well as in telepathy research, ESP, and PK, and in popular science, which began to flourish again despite harsh criticism.

Again, in perfect complement to Anna Ozhiganova’s paper, Dr. Svetlana Tambovtseva introduced a peculiar Soviet example of utopian or fringe science, which also points to similar post-Soviet projects. In her talk “When Alphabet Generates Energy,” based on anthropological fieldwork, she discussed Soviet theories of energy imagination (so-called torsion fields), amateur grassroots linguistics, their popular appeal, and references in the sci-fi novels of the Strugatsky brothers.



In his contribution, Dr. Gerhard Mayer, an expert on parapsychology from the Institute for Frontier Studies of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg (IGPP), opened up perspectives for both historicizing parapsychology in the two countries and for applying a comparative perspective. He reminded us that in the USSR in the mid-1970s, psi was still officially criticized as a form of ‘mysticism’, one of the worst ideological buzzwords, but there was a change towards the end of that decade. He called for consideration of the cultural conditions of the paranormal in both societies, with distinct theoretical and methodological frameworks, and emphasized that the humanities should be the primary disciplines for studying this topic.

Finally, the young Chinese parapsychologist Yuan Jin, PhD student from Northampton University, who also works for the British Parapsychological Association and currently teaches Transpersonal Psychology online to Chinese PhD students from Russia, where he lives, brought the topic to the present. As a wanderer between the two worlds, he gave an insider account (on Zoom) of the ongoing fluidity of Russian-Chinese exchanges and engagement under the current geopolitical conditions.

The participants’ vital engagement culminated in the final discussion, which was also followed by some in Russia and elsewhere on Zoom. The following questions were addressed: Where are the limits to human potential?  What status of reality is attributed to paranormal phenomena in which culture, society, and in which period? Where is academic research done in both countries, in which disciplines, natural sciences, humanities, psychology, and further education? What role does AI play in the field now? And what can Western countries learn from the parapsychology in socialist countries?

Commonalities were found in both socialist countries that, in the longue durée, despite the Marxist-Leninist materialist ideology, occult practices and beliefs have survived. In both the USSR and China, there was an interest in and use of the paranormal for political control and military purposes. Similar was also the paradoxical politics towards both research and mass popularization of paranormal phenomena. There were believers and skeptics in both governments. For the most part, phenomena and experiments with the paranormal were not rejected, but mass popularity was allowed only to a certain extent. In both countries, parapsychology was, for a certain period, built as a kind of extraordinary science, with transnational relations and contexts with other socialist countries as well as with scientists in Western countries.

But striking differences could also be outlined. Due to different cultural traditions, there have been different approaches to illness and healing in China and the USSR. The prominence of self-experimentation and personal experience, i.e., the empirical dimension and the emphasis on education and self-education, might also be a feature more developed in the Chinese than in the Soviet field dealing with the paranormal. According to Hong He, research in the USSR was much higher than in China, which he attributed to the social poverty of the population and the low quality of the medical system in his country. Both Chinese experts concluded that most of the experiments they had to validate could be proven to be fakes or pose serious challenges. However, there were cases of truly inexplicable phenomena. And approaches to explain these scientifically, so Hong He would have to be found in the generalized quantum field.


Both workshops focused on how knowledge is authorized, contested, and translated—especially under conditions in which ideological frameworks, scientific norms, and social hopes collide. And this places their topics within a promising research agenda to be pursued.




OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Anna Ozhiganova, Birgit Menzel (February 26, 2026). Parapsychology under Socialism: Two Workshops in Erlangen (2025–2026). New Age in Eurasia. Retrieved May 17, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15rok


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