Mental Magic vs Mentalism

Today's topic comes as a request from Shawn Mullins who asked to hear my thoughts on the difference between mental magic and mentalism.  That's a complex question, and is still argued to this day but here are my thoughts.

At its simplest, the differences are in primary in presentation and semantics.  I don't mean semantics in arguing over whether something is stealing or borrowing or whatever.  I mean the semantic definitions of a genre.  As an example, horror as a genre has a syntactic and semantic definition.  The syntactic would be it's thesis.  For horror, the definition I tend to agree with is, "Normalcy is challenged by the monster."  That is the point of all good horror movies and stories where the monster is anything that confounds our reality while also representing something that we have repressed.  The semantic definition however is made of the sensual trappings.  Full moons, fog, ancient castles, haunted houses, bones, wolves howling in the distance, a sense of dread, isolation, etc.

Mental magic still contains many of the sensual trappings of conventional magic and is typically used to introduce some variation into an act.  Mentalism on the other hand tends to have a lot less glitz and glam and a good act focuses on doing one thing (i.e. mind reading).  Mentalism works best when it stands on its own, rather than being used to supplement magic.

A typical magic act with a splash of mental magic might have a mind reading effect with cards at the end.  A key card location perhaps.  It's used as a bit of spice to create a bridge or finale.  Nothing wrong with that.  In fact, it can be very effective.

But mentalism is seldom so diverse.  You don't try to sweeten a Q&A act with metal bending.  You do one thing, and you do it well.  On top of that, it's typically very implicit.  There are exceptions of course, but for the most part mentalism tends to be a very implicit experience.  This is part of the appeal however.  It gets under your skin in a very unique way.

To sum up, mental magic has more of the material trappings of a conventional magic act and is typically used as a way to enhance and vary up an act while mentalism is implicit and subtle and tends to focus on the presentation of a single concept standing on its own.