Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
It is not uncommon on Social Media to find psychedelic scientists challenged about whether they have any personal experience of ingesting the drugs and plants they study. How could they possibly develop an understanding about the true nature of, say, psilocybin or LSD, without themselves delving deeply into their extraordinary, subjective effects? To not do so, the logic goes, is unscientific.
No doubt there’s also an element of wanting to discover if said researchers are ‘on our side’; are they card-carrying members of the psychedelic community—are they trippers? Understandably, for professional reasons, many choose to remain tight-lipped about this question, using the mask of objectivity to shield themselves from accusations of bias. Yet, the question remains.
In 2018, Elizabeth M Nielsen and Jeffrey Guss wrote an article for the Journal of Psychedelic Studies proposing the need to study the influence of first-hand psychedelic experiences on therapists. In it, they ask, ‘Do psychedelic therapists’ personal experience with psychedelics affect the outcomes of the patients they treat and if so, how?’ Put otherwise, is it useful for psychedelic therapists to trip?
While the article’s authors don’t have an answer, they do offer ways of beginning to approach one—mining existing data and setting up a study on working practitioners. This is a laudable research area and would, one hopes, provide some useful information. However, it contrasts markedly with earlier times when, for slightly different theoretical reasons, trying the psychedelic was often seen as an intrinsic part of the deal.
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann and LSD is a famous case in point. After his accidental first dosing, Hofmann took on the task of self-experimentation. And later, when Sandoz Pharmaceuticals began marketing LSD, they suggested it might be useful for researchers to take it themselves in order to garner an understanding of their patients’ mental state, i.e. as a psychotomimetic.
Nowadays, the belief or theory that the psychedelic experience is akin to a psychotic mental condition is far less popular, meaning that tripping is no longer required reading, so to speak, for the wannabe therapeutic empath. Moreover, in an age of complex regulation and corporate insurance, the figure of the intrepid chemist seems rather folkloric and arcane. People like Hofmann or Alexander Shulgin appear to belong to a completely different, even heroic, bygone age.
And, in many respects, they do—but this is not to say that the arguments over self-experimentation don’t stretch back a very long time. For every heroic self-experimenter, there was also a sober, objective researcher who preferred to retain their faculties when mining new knowledge. It is only that now the former has become something more exceptional in public scientific circles.
Yet, as Mike Jay notes of self-experimentation in his new book, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2023), perhaps ‘In the twenty-first century, the time is ripe for its rediscovery.’ Focusing (although not exclusively) on the long nineteenth century, Jay observes that the period’s drug writing feels much more accessible today than it did throughout the late twentieth—a time when self-experimentation with drugs in science was largely erased, and certainly decried.
In times past, there was more genuine scientific, less moralized, debate over the question. When the Royal Society (founded in 1660) adopted the motto ‘Nullius in Verba’, or, ‘on the word of no one’, it ‘placed experiment at the heart of the scientific revolution’. Early members such as Robert Hooke, for example, took this to necessitate self-experiment, and personally tested numerous substances.
Later, for the Romantic ideals of such figures as Thomas de Quincey, writer of the quintessential drug text Confessions of an English Opium-Eater—or the chemist Humphry Davy, who discovered and explored the extraordinary effects of Nitrous oxide—self-experiment took on metaphysical proportions. The mind became an aesthetic vista through which careful (albeit occasionally heroic!) probing might reveal hitherto undiscovered layers of subjective meaning.
However, self-experimentation was not the only approach, and in studying the mind not everyone agreed it was useful. Many people held objectivity as the highest ideal. Notably, Auguste Comte, the French positivist philosopher, argued that the mind examining or contemplating itself was a type of illusion; and his near contemporary physiologists in Germany, argued it might only be usefully studied through the materialist lens of Naturphilosophie—tested by instrumental approaches to the body.
That a plurality of lenses were openly used in the nineteenth century underlines the era’s richness of scientific subcultures fruitfully co-existing (leaving aside limitations then placed on class, race and gender of course). Indeed, in the belief of French physician and hashish experimenter, Jacques-Joseph Moreau, the subjective and objective were very much at work simultaneously in his own self-observations. They quite literally both had a role to play.
In Psychonauts, self-experimentation in the history of science proves an erudite way of re-framing some well-trodden experimenters—Freud on cocaine, Davy and James on gas, Moreau on hashish etc. It brings to light the deeper role of experimentation as it pertains to not only the lives of individuals, but larger questions about ‘the self’ within both scientific and cultural discourse as it waxes and wanes as a concept over the centuries.
Anyone familiar with Jay’s previous works will know he takes great care to bring in forgotten texts and marginalized voices from history, and Psychonauts is no exception. From the black Rosicrucian and hashish experimenter, Paschal Beverly Randolph, to the Irish republican revolutionary Maud Gonne, and the Sufi initiate Isabelle Eberhardt, these figures enrich a history that has affected lives—and continues to do so—throughout the strata of society.
Yet, marginalization is seemingly implicit in modern drug law. One of Jay’s most insightful observations is that the moralized view of drugs, bequeathed by the Progressive Era between the World Wars, was later enshrined in International Law precisely at a moment when popular drug advocacy, often around psychedelics and cannabis, came into full swing—a process that helped lead to drug normalization over ensuing generations.
This is why, whilst a figure like Shulgin might seem slightly anachronistic—in truth, he isn’t. Instead, the laws and institutions of drug prohibition are out-of-step with prevailing attitudes and, as Jay concludes; ‘A post-drug world would need not a new language, but the recovery of an old one.’ It should not be contentious, for anyone concerned, to ask a researcher: Do you trip?
Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale University Press 2023) is due to be published 18 April (US) and 9 May (UK). A book launch will also be taking place at Breaking Convention in Exeter, UK this April.