Acid RealitiesHow Science Enacts the Psychedelic Experience

Simon Toper

Examensarbete: 15 hpKandidatprogram i kulturvetenskap: xxNivå: GrundnivåTermin/år: Vt 2019Handledare: Thomas BossiusExaminator: Marita Rhedin

ABSTRACT

Titel: Acid Realities: How Science Enacts the Psychedelic ExperienceFörfattare: Simon ToperTermin och år: Vt 2019Institution: Institutionen för KulturvetenskaperHandledare: Thomas BossiusExaminator: Marita RhedinNyckelord: LSD, psychedelic, science, neurotheology, agential realism

SUMMARY: The present work has explored how the psychedelic experience is discursively reproduced in contemporary psychological- and neuroscientific research. In focus was scientific articles detailing experimental human studies with LSD, or comparative studies pertaining to subjects previous psychedelic experiences and psychedelic drug use. Departing from the doctrine of set and setting and Karen Barad’s performative approach to ontology, the emergence of the psychedelic experiences was conceived as entangled with the conditions for its observation. In the context of contemporary psychedelic science, the phenomenon is shown to materialize through quantitative measures of subjective experience and a neuroscientific-psychoanalytical reconfiguration of renowned discourses in psychedelic culture.

1

Table of Contents

Part I – Ascension 31.1 Tune introduction 31.2 Turn ontological questions 51.3 Dropped out 7

Part II – High perspectives 82.1 Recollecting previous trips 8

2.1.1 Doors of Perception and the term psychedelic 82.1.2 In Huxley’s footsteps: eclecticism and interdisciplinarity 9

2.2 About to get real in the field: Barad’s Agential Realism 112.3 The material plane: gathered resources 15

Part III – Exploration 163.1 Quantifying subjectivity 173.2 The entropic brain: dissolving the ego with laws of physics 213.3 Psychosis: the LSD paradox 24

3.3.1 LSD and modern drug discourse 243.3.2 The paradoxical psychological effects of LSD 26

3.4 Huxley’s shadow: utopianism and neurotheology 293.4.1 A higher purpose 293.4.2 Mother nature’s son 313.4.3 Contemporary neurotheology 34

Part IV – Come down 374.1 Conclusion 384.2 Science as ritual and acid agency 40

References 41

Source material 44

2

Part I – Ascension

Somewhat uniquely, psychedelics can be studied at a range of epistemological

levels; from molecular pharmacology to psychoanalytic psychology few topics can

engage scientists from as wide a range of disciplines. This reflects not only the

special research value of psychedelics but also the immensity of the challenge

involved in understanding them.

(Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 4)

1.1 Tune introduction

The cultural incarnations of the psychedelic drug LSD are as vividly kaleidoscopic as the

visions it is known to generate. Because of this it can also be described in a multitude of

ways. Since the swiss chemist Albert Hoffman birthed his “problem child” in 1938

(Hoffman, 1980) the lysergic acid diethylamide molecule – LSD, or simply acid, has been on

its own strange trip throughout the past seventy years; not only lingering in the legacy of 60’s

counterculture, rock and dance music (Bossius, 2003; Lundborg, 2012), or lurking in the

backwaters of debates on drug policy or psychosis (Halasz, 2006; Langlitz, 2013), but also

accompanying phenomena as wide apart as murderous cult sects, CIA mind control

experimentation and Jungian depth psychology (Dahl, 2017; Hill, 2013).

After the acid-freak out of the 60’s, and the wide prohibition of LSD in 1971, the drug

has resided mainly in the underground for the last decades, with the ever drug experimenting

youth, in new agey subcultures, or in the toolbox of artists and secret healers (Lundborg,

2012; Pollan, 2018).

However, recent years have seen a cultural re-emergence of LSD in broader terms. In

popular culture LSD has entered the spotlight via Netflix installments such as Wormwood

(2017) and Bandersnatch (2018), and feature films such as The Sunshine makers (2015) and

Climax (2018), which all weave their plot around the drug. Still an even more prominent

come back, in culture at large, LSD has done, on the one hand as a “smart drug”, and on the

other as an object of research in the field of psychology and neuroscience. Stories on so

called microdosing, the trend of taking small doses of psychedelic drugs (typically LSD or

psilocybin mushrooms) for the purpose of increased mood, energy and creativity, have been

3

viral for a few years now – to the point of it becoming even a natural piece in the middle class

life-puzzle (Garlick, 2019). In parallel, a renewed scientific interest for the therapeutic effects

of psychedelic drugs – the field was blooming in the 1950s-60s before medical research and

psychedelic substances become more tightly regulated – has gained traction, drawing not

only the attention of mainstream media (Aretakis, 2018; Bergstedt, 2016), but also sparking

international conferences and attracting a bestselling author to write a non-fiction book about

it.1,2

Although the new wave of psychedelic science is still in its infancy, a lot of hype is

surrounding the field. When in April 2019 the first formal centre for psychedelic research

was launched at Imperial College in London, Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of research,

commented the opening: “This is a watershed moment for psychedelic science; symbolic of

its now mainstream recognition. Psychedelics are set to have a major impact on neuroscience

and psychiatry in the coming years” (O’Hare, 2019).

However, this renewed “scientification” and “mainstreaming” of psychedelic drugs is

not met with unbridled enthusiasm everywhere in the psychedelic community. Writer and

religious studies scholar Erik Davies – a long standing commentator on psychedelic culture –

has aimed critique at specific aspects of this development, for example that american soldiers

so far are the prime target of MDMA-treatment for post-traumatic disorder, and that

psychedelic science is becoming more entangled with capitalistic interest. More generally,

Davies expresses concern that psychedelic science increased recognition and power could

pose a threat to the diversity of psychedelic culture, and risks blunting its subversive and

transformative edge (Davies, 2012; 2015; 2018).3

The concern expressed by Davies and others in the psychedelic community is surely

to some extent typical for any underground culture about to go mainstream. Most

interestingly though, in the crossfire of this debate on the precedency to define and culturally

configure psychedelic drug use – and the implications of institutionalizing this otherwise

subcultural phenomenon – is situated the unique elusiveness of psychedelic drugs and their

effects. LSD, and the various cultural incarnations it has taken since its conception up until

1 2018’s Colloquium on psychedelic psychiatry held in Stockholm is one of them. 2 Journalist Michael Pollan’s (2018) popular scientific inquiry How to change your mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, was the #1 New York Times bestseller of 2018. 3 Davies sees a parallel in yoga-culture, whose mainstreaming in the West to a great extent has resulted in an equivalent appropriation – now being more of a tool for self-improvement in line with a neoliberal logic celebrating entrepreneurship and productivity, focusing “individual psychological problems rather than broader social conditions” (Davies, 2018).

4

present day – for example “at different times ... thought to cause insanity, cure insanity and

provide a model for insanity” (Halasz, 2006, p. 65-66) – more than anything points to this

indetermination of psychedelic drugs.

While LSD and its relatives (e.g psilocybin and DMT) are generally considered to

profoundly alter cognition, perception and one’s sense of self, generate visions and insights

of both personal and universal sort – not rarely described as mystical or spiritual (Griffiths,

Richards, McCann & Jesse, 2006), the meaning and ontological status – the realness – of this

type of subjective experiences is still a matter of interpretation and debate.

1.2 Turn ontological questions

In the midst of the sea of theories and concepts historically applied to psychedelic drugs (in a

western context), the doctrine of set and setting pervades both institutional research and

psychedelic culture at large, and essentially is an assertion that the drugs’ effects is largely

shaped by the subjective outlook, e.g. attitudes and expectations, of the person taking the

drug (set), and the situation, environment and cultural context in which it is taken (setting).

This intertwining of subject, object and context in the emergence of a phenomenon,

especially in relation to the practices, instruments and discourses of modern science – its

discourse in other words – has been discussed extensively by various post-structuralist and

post-humanist thinkers operating in fields related to cultural studies, such as Michel Foucault,

Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Bruno Latour.

As the scientific fields of psychology and neuroscience are expanding their

explanatory power in relation to psychedelic drugs, a continual discussion is needed on how

it’s specific sets and settings; its ideas, practices and instruments discursively reconfigures

psychedelic drugs and their effects.

One avenue for such a discussion, which the present work will pursue, is to dig into

the direct products of psychedelic science in the form of scientific articles, and examine more

closely the ideas, practices and instruments employed in the formation of psychedelic drugs

and their effects – henceforth referred to as one phenomenon called the psychedelic

experience.

5

The present work’s point of departure is the premise that the ideas, practices and

instruments employed in psychedelic science, through which the psychedelic experience

emerges, is inherently entangled with prevailing discourse in psychedelic culture. Thus what

is explored here is no less than the culturally mediated materialization of the psychedelic

experience in the new wave of psychedelic science – the question at issue being:

Through which ideas, practices and instruments is the psychedelic experience discursively

(re)produced in contemporary psychedelic science? The present work will answer this

question with a two-fold focus:

(1) How are renowned discourses on the psychedelic experiences employed?

(2) How are the demands of rational objective science reconciled with the highly

subjective and elusive aspects of the psychedelic experience, such as transcendence

and spirituality?

Although rooted in the critical tradition of cultural studies, the present work should not be

read as an attempt at disqualifying the theories, methods, results or overall pursuits of

psychedelic science. Indeed, as an aspiring psychologist I am fascinated by the field and

share the hopes that LSD and other psychedelic substances can prove to be useful agents in

future psychiatry, therapy and consciousness-research. Primarily, this thesis is an attempt at

expanding the field of psychedelic science, recognizing that what the field needs is not less,

but more research – especially in terms of diversity and interdisciplinarity. Thus, the ambition

here is to violate the often assumed division of labour, as pointed out by Roddey Reid and

Sharon Traweek in their anthology Doing Science + Culture (2000), whereby “humanities

researchers are critics who write commentaries on art and ideas, while scientists, engineers,

and physicians find out facts about the real world and fix real problems.” (p. 7). In line with

previous cultural studies of science, medicine and technology, this thesis displaces this

division instead relating to the field more freely – seeing cultural studies principally as “a

placeholder for a space of engaged experimentation” (Reid & Traweek, 2000, p. 8)

Following initial academic pursuits into the field of psychedelic science at the

department for psychology, a decade-long personal interest for psychedelic culture, and

numerous psychedelic trips, the direction of the present thesis is perhaps not so much a

choice as the result of “an inevitable drift that [my] own research materials and present

contexts have imposed upon [my] thinking” (Reid & Traweek, 2000, p. 8).

6

Psychedelic drugs have emerged in the West like prisms, constituting intersections of

cultural, spiritual, ritual, philosophical, psychological, and scientific, ideas and practices.

Cultural studies, by way of its interdisciplinary and reflexive tradition offers a broad platform

for holistic and eclectic thinking on these ideas and practices whereby not only the modern

divide of academic disciplines, but crucially, the divide of natural and cultural, human and

non-human – which the academic divides largely rely on – can be displaced. This hybrid

multifaceted approach should not be confused with hubris; the present thesis is of course but

one of endless possible diffractions of the psychedelic experience, reflecting not the least my

own particular set and setting.

1.3 Dropped out

There are a wide variety of psychedelic drugs. Beside the classic ones, LSD, mescaline

psilocybin and DMT, drugs such as ibogaine, ketamine, MDMA, 5-MEO-DMT and even

cannabis, are also to various extent considered psychedelics. Additionally, a wide range of so

called “designer drugs” can be deemed psychedelic depending on the specified criteria or

who you ask. Certainly, the psychedelic experience is considered overlapping across different

psychedelic drug. However, the present work will focus on LSD and not dive deeper into

discussions of the chemical and phenomenological similarities or differences of psychedelic

drugs in general, or what in other terms unites or sets them apart as natural-cultural objects.

This limitation was partly born out of the inherent limits of a bachelor’s thesis, but

mainly serves to reflect LSD’s status as the “quintessential contemporary psychedelic” from a

western perspective – as noted by the researchers themselves in one of the examined articles

(Tagliazucchi, 2016, p. 1). Unlike the other classical psychedelic drugs which arguably have

been used by humans for millennia, LSD is a recent invention of western science and as such

is the more obvious target for an inquiry of western scientific reproduction of the psychedelic

experience. Hence, when in the following discussing the psychedelic experience it relates

primarily to LSD. Nevertheless, as the examined research centre and their associates also

work extensively with psilocybin and in their writings usually are referring to the psychedelic

experience more broadly, what is covered here to some extent can also be generalized across

other psychedelic drugs.

7

Part II – High perspectives

2.1 Recollecting previous trips

2.1.1 Doors of Perception and the term psychedelic

When the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz started distributing their new peculiar

compound LSD for research purposes in the late 1940’s they suggested two main applications

– as an adjunct to psychoanalytic therapy and as an instrument for experimental studies on

psychosis, where “The rationale for the former was that LSD could ‘elicit [the] release of

repressed material and provide mental relaxation for anxiety and obsessional neuroses’, and,

for the latter, that it could model aspects of psychosis and facilitate an understanding of its

nature and pathogenesis.” (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1379). From these two strands of research

soon emerged the definition of LSD (and its chemically and phenomenologically related

drugs mescaline and psilocybin) as psycholytic (= mind loosening) and psychotomimetic ( =

mimicking psychosis) (Langlitz, 2013).

The psycholytic and psychomimetic approach to this, for the modern west, new class

of drugs mirrored two contemporaneous trends – on the one hand the dominant

psychoanalytic approach to the human mind and its manifestations, and on the other hand, the

medical fields preoccupation with the etiology of psychosis – a major riddle for both doctors

and psychoanalysts of the time (Langlitz, 2013).

Some researchers in the field early on felt however, from observations of patients and

through self-experimentation, that the experiences evoked by LSD and mescaline did not

seem to quite fit with the psycholytic or psychotomimetic paradigm. After having facilitated a

mescaline-trip in 1953 for the famous writer Aldous Huxley, psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond,

who were working with mescaline and LSD to treat alcoholics, proposed in mail-

correspondence with Huxley instead the term psychedelic (= mind manifesting) for this class

of drugs. As they both saw a potential for psychedelic drugs to generate powerful and

meaningful experiences beyond the pathologizing context of psychiatry, this new supposedly

more neutral term were meant to counter the institutional vibes of the previous terms –

8

recognizing that how one conceives of this class of drugs is bound to shape not only public

opinion, but also how the drugs were used (Langlitz, 2013; Halasz, 2006).

As LSD spread outside the confines of institutional research and the cultural elite into

mainstream recreational settings in the early 1960s, Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954)

– recounting the above mentioned mescaline-experiment and the authors conception of the

psychedelic experience – became highly influential for the emerging psychedelic culture and

coming academic and non-academic pursuits to describe and define the psychedelic

experience.4

2.1.2 In Huxley’s footsteps: eclecticism and interdisciplinarity

While the influence of Aldous Huxley on the discourse on psychedelic experience probably

cannot be overstated, the ideas of other prominent figures such as Timothy Leary, Stanislav

Grof and Terrence McKenna have also been formative. Similar to Huxley’s pursuits, their

writings are typically eclectic, freely moving from first hand impressions of psychedelic

experiences to theoretical reasoning across various fields such as psychology, biology,

religion and philosophy. Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), (co-written with Ralph

Metzner and Richard Alpert), Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious (1975), and

McKenna’s The invisible Landscape (1975) are all example of this sort of writing, and could

be deemed canonical in the genre. Whether or not one should call some of these, often

speculative, books research is of course questionable. Leary’s The psychedelic experience,

probably the least so, since it actually is a handbook for aspiring psychedelicists – as

suggested by its undertitle: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead – and has little

connection to the psychedelic research Leary conducted at Harvard the preceding years

(Pollan, 2018). Grof’s (1975) Realms of the unconsciousness – undertitled observations from

LSD research – is on the other hand a direct result of Grof’s extensive work with LSD-

assisted psychotherapy, and offers both patients accounts of psychedelic experiences in the

therapeutic setting, and Grof’s psychoanalytical theroretization of these.

4 The Doors of Perception (1954) also launched the literary genre of writing a report, often diaristic in style, about a psychedelic drug experience, generally detailing set, setting, drug and dosage. The digital vaults of erowid.com is an immense source of these so called “trip reports” from the grassroots of psychedelic culture.

9

At this side of the millennial turn, a notably comprehensive pursuit in the field is the

ambitious work Psychedelia: an ancient culture, a modern way of life (2012) by Swedish

writer Patrick Lundborg. Over some 500 pages, Lundborg traces psychedelic drug

experimentation and its’ cultural expressions from ancient Greece up to present day. True to

the genre, Lundborg is also highly eclectic (and at times speculative), mixing historical

research, anecdotes and philosophical discussion, with analysis of music, literature and film.

Interestingly, he rejects previous attempts at theorization of the psychedelic experience

through the lenses of for example psychology or religion. Instead he puts forward a

phenomenological method ideally free from theoretical preconceptions, where he prescribes

two of Edmund Husserl's (the father of phenomenology) principles as starting points for a

proper exploration of the psychedelic state:

1. any mental activity such as looking, thinking, imagining, dreaming, etc, is constituted by

three elements: a) the consciousness that is engaged in the act, b) the phenomenon that is

being perceived, and c) the act of perception (seeing, thinking, remembering, dreaming...).

2. there is no qualitative distinction between different types of mental activity, such as

imagining, seeing, remembering, dreaming or hallucinating; nor is there any formal difference

between the thought of something that ‘exists’, such as an apple tree, and something that

probably ‘not exists’, such as a unicorn. (Lundborg, 2014, p. 82)

The first principle, whose three elements should be understood in totality, renders the

distinction between subject and object obsolete if trying to understand the psychedelic

experience – or even consciousness in general. The second principle, in turn implicates that

one cannot, in any meaningful way, separate the “real” from the “unreal”, thus situating the

psychedelic experience at the same ontological level as ordinary perception and

consciousness.

Shane Halasz (2006) thesis LSD: the discourse expanding drug in communication

studies is a more stringent academic research project. Using information theoretical

conceptions of cultural communication, it analyses how the introduction of LSD to a wider

public in North America in the 1960s disrupted modern drug discourse on drug use as a

sickness on both an individual and societal level, instead giving rise to a new form of drug

discourse centred on aesthetic expression and religious experience. Halasz shows that the

communication pattern of the expanded LSD-discourse, differed from modern drug

10

discourse, as the latter was “a discourse by the educated about the uneducated”, i.e flowing

from figures of authority in the medico-legal complex and targeting lower class and ethnic

minorities, whereas LSD-discourse was primarily emanating from white middle class

americans. Furthermore, through her case studies of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, Halasz

makes the point that “Although LSD discourse may have originated in the scientific

community ... the experience was bigger than science; it could not be contained within the

limits of scientific rationality” (Halasz, 2006, p. 92).

Anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz’ work Neuropsychedelia (2013), which combines

philosophical reflection and anthropological fieldwork at the sites of two psychedelic

research teams, explores more closely the limits of scientific rationality in the practices and

reasoning of the scientists involved in contemporary psychedelic science. Langlitz, an

anthropologist also trained in philosophy and medicine – thus moving freely in his work from

ethnographic observations to discussions on psychopharmacology – is a contemporary

example of the interdisciplinarity and intellectual eclecticism still typical for the field. Indeed,

his work more than anything points to the limits of any one discipline to tackle what he

deems the “wild and overly complex neurochemistry of psychedelic drugs” which “escapes

both cultural and pharmacological attempts at controlling their effects” (Langlitz, 2013, p.

22). Langlitz attempts navigating past the dualisms of nature/ culture, soul/ body and mind/

brain specifically with the goal of resolving “the stale standoff between science and

spirituality”. Informed by his field studies, he arrives at a hybrid ontology of mystic

materialism – denoting his informants integration, in their professional and personal life, of

two seemingly incompatible understanding of the psychedelic experience :

“It would be nice”, he told me, “if this so-called mysticism, these ecstatic states, would

not just be simulations, if they would tap something, if hallucinogens allowed us to

penetrate this Platonic world. But I can’t get rid of the doubt that I simply simulate all

this.” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 228)

11

2.2 About to get real in the field: Barad’s Agential Realism

The ethnologist of our world must take up her position at the common locus

where roles, actions and abilities are distributed - those that make it possible to

denote one entity as animal or material and another as a free agent; one as

endowed with consciousness, another as mechanical, and still another as

unconscious and incompetent. Our ethnologist must even compare the always

different ways of defining – or not defining – matter, law, consciousness and

animals' souls. (Latour, 1993, p. 15)

Departing from the implications of Lundborg’s (2014) phenomenological approach – i.e that

any theoretization of the psychedelic experience benefits from abandoning the dualisms of

subject/object and real/unreal – I was intuitively drawn to Karen Barad’s agential realism

theory as it not only displaces these dichotomies, but also deals specifically with scientific

knowledge production. In her major work Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum Physics

and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) she argues for a “posthumanist

performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices

that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism” (p. 135) – resulting

in her theoretical framework of agential realism.

Barad’s argument derives in great part from her reading of the danish 1900th century

physicist Niels Bohr and his philosophical-physical quantum theories – especially Bohr’s

resolvement of the famous particle/wave paradox of light. The paradox arises from a set of

1900th century experiments in which is was observed that depending on experimental set up,

such as the structuring of apparatuses, light could manifest as either waves of particles. A

paradox for the prevailing Newtonian paradigm, which held energy and matter as mutually

exclusive entities – i.e light cannot be both particles and waves. Furthermore, as the

manifestation of light was dependent on the structuring of the measuring apparatuses in these

experiments, they also called into question the strict materialism underlying the Newtonian

paradigm. The object, and the question of what is could not, it seemed, be separated from the

subject, and the question of how we do when we observe the object in question (Barad, 2007).

Bohr’s solution to this paradox was to abandon traditional notions of objectivity

within the scientific practice as such, while concurrently challenging its ontology, i.e.

12

rejecting the assumption that there is an independent objective reality (for science to uncover)

– and instead assert that “theoretical concepts are defined by the circumstances required for

their measurements” (Apffel-Marglin, 2012, p. 57).

As such, Bohr deems the separation of object and observer as enacted or performed –

what Barad, in her reading of Bohr, calls an agential cut. These agential cuts are always

contextual, i.e they are enacted in the process of observing or measuring a given phenomenon

(Barad, 2007).

Barad extends Bohr’s thinking by invoking Foucault's work on how scientific

apparatuses are operating discursively, in analog with Bohr’s view on scientific measures,

denoting how discourse rather than a representationalist tool is performative. For Bohr and

Foucault alike “discourses/apparatuses are productive of reality, constraining but not

determining particular material-discursive arrangements.” (Apffel-Marglin, 2012, p. 58) –

hereby constituting what Barad calls agential reality.

Barad coins the term intra-action to describe how phenomena come to emerge in this

agential reality, where the prefix intra- refers to the inseparability of subjects and objects as

such – in contrast to the term interaction which presupposes an inherent separateness of the

various subjects and objects which interact.

Thus, in line with Lundborg’s (2012) psychedelic phenomenology, agential realism

states that any phenomenon emerging before us is the effect of an inseparable entanglement

of the perceiving subject, the object perceived, and the act of observation:

That reality within which we intra-act – what I term agential reality – is made up of

material-discursive phenomena. Agential reality is not a fixed ontology that is

independent of human practices, but is continually reconstituted through our

material-discursive intra-actions. Shifting our understanding of the ontologically

real from that which stands outside the sphere of cultural influence and historical

change to agential reality allows a new formulation of realism (and truth) that is

not premised on the representational nature of knowledge. If our descriptive

characterizations do not refer to properties of abstract objects or observation-

independent beings, but rather describe agential reality, then what is being

described by our theories is not nature itself, but our participation within [and as

part of] nature. (Barad as cited in Apffel-Marglin, 2012, p. 59)

By applying Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism to the field of psychedelic science, the

present work forwards an understanding of the psychedelic experience as constituted through

13

material-discursive intra-action – meaning essentially that the question of what is real, shifts

into a question of how it becomes real. This is another way of recognizing the pervasive

relevance of set and setting, as these concepts in analog with agential realism renders the

psychedelic experience, as Langlitz puts it, “a hybrid phenomenon of nature and culture and

both a natural and a human kind.” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 22).

Furthermore, as the present work is especially interested in how psychedelic science

weaves its fabric of realities in regards to the spiritual dimension of psychedelic experience,

Barad’s agential realism enables an open-ended exploration of these aspects, as it displaces

representational materialism and its tendency to disregard experiences and phenomena not

within its rationalistic reach. Anthropologist Fredrique Apffel-Marglin elaborates further on

this in her work Subversive Spiritualities: How rituals enact the world (2012) – stating that

Barad’s work allows for a “re-enchantment of the world.” (Apffel-Marglin, 2012, p. 16):

it allows us to affirm, for example, that the mutually exclusive reality of a unique

God and of many gods and goddesses or spirits does not force us to choose

between them. Instead, it leads us to recognize that different material-discursive

actions – such as enacting rituals, liturgies, reading sacred writings, performing

sacred music and/or dance, ingesting psychotropic plants, and the like – are all

intra-actions that enact different agential cuts and thus different realities. (Apffel-

Marglin, 2012, p. 63)

To Apffel-Marglin, rituals and scientific practices are both “acts of observation” through

which reality emerges. And our entangled involvement in these practices, means that we also

are “epistemologically as well as ontologically involved in shaping reality” (Apffel-Marglin,

2012, p. 62). In turn, we are to some extent responsible for the reality which emerges as a

result of these practices. In other words: “[Agential] [r]ealism is not about representations of

an independent reality, but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities,

and responsibilities of intra-acting within the world.” (Barad as cited in Apffel-Marglin,

2012, p. 62).

Adhering to agential realism means abandoning the notion of science as a practice

uncovering truth and an independent reality. In the present context, it means that the theories

and empirical findings of psychedelic science will not to be evaluated in terms of validity and

reliability – which commonly constitutes the analytical focal points when examining articles

in the fields of experimental psychology and neuroscience. Rather, it means exploring how

14

science material-discursively weaves its particular fabric of realities – herein with regard to

the phenomenon of psychedelic experience. This means looking at which

instruments/discourses are engaged, and how these are entangled, in the reproduction of the

psychedelic experience. It also means looking at which agential cuts are made in the process;

how is the relation of subject and object structured, or more specifically, how are the

scientists’ “act of observation” delineated from the “objects of investigation”, that is the study

subjects, their “mind-brain” and the emerging psychedelic experience.

2.3 The material plane: gathering resources

Whereas Langlitz (2016) work is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted

at two research facilities in the field of psychedelic science, the present work takes as it

material the products of such a facility in the form of scientific articles, published in scientific

journals (e.g Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and Psychopharmacology). Specifically, the

present work focus on human experimental studies with LSD, and comparative studies

pertaining to human subjects’ previous psychedelic experiences or psychedelic drug use in

relation to other subjective factors such as experiences from other drugs, personality and

political views.

As the work on this thesis coincided with the launch of the world’s first formal

psychedelic research centre at Imperial College, London – the research conducted by the

team working at this department became a natural focus for the present work. A set of eight

peer-reviewed and published scientific articles (listed under source material in the references

section), linked to the above research centre, were chosen on two criteria:

(1) LSD was used in the experiments, or the article treated psychedelic drugs or the

psychedelic experience in broader terms.

(2) The article were written or co-written by Dr Robin Carhart-Harris – head of

research at the psychedelic research centre at Imperial College.

Five of the articles were the direct result of a collaboration between Imperial college

and The Beckley Foundation which also has been a major funder of the research and the

15

newly established research centre.5 Two articles were not, at least not explicitly, related to

this collaboration.

The articles forming the material of this thesis are neither exhaustive of the

psychedelic research conducted at Imperial College, nor the published output of Dr Carhart-

Harris. Besides a range of studies using psilocybin, another classic psychedelic drug, seven

other articles using LSD – which also were part of the Beckley-Imperial collaboration – was

for example not examined in the present work. To that extent the articles covered here,

besides meeting the above criteria were chosen due to the author’s previous familiarity with

them. Moreover, the limited range of a bachelor thesis necessitated delimitation in some

form. Though the exclusion of other relevant articles (i.e. which also met the inclusion

criteria) is somewhat arbitrary, the eight articles forming the material herein is hopefully

representative of the research centre’s output.

A few of the eight articles will naturally figure more in the below analysis than other

ones. Especially the article The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by

neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014), which outlines a

theoretical framework figuring heavily throughout the other articles as well (and in

comparison contains less statistical analytical reasoning) has a pronounced presence in what

follows.

5 The Beckley Foundation is a NGO which through funding, collaborations and advocacy seeks to (1) “scientifically investigate the effects of psychoactive substances on the brain and consciousness in order to harness their potential benefits and minimise their potential harms” and (2) “achieve evidence-based changes in global drug policies in order to reduce the harms brought about by the unintended negative consequences of current drug policies.” (“About the Foundation”, 2017)) See link below for more information about the Beckley-Imperial collaboration and a full list of the scientific publications resulting from this collaboration: https://beckleyfoundation.org/science/collaborations/the-beckley-imperial-psychedelic-research-programme/

16

Part III – Exploration

I experienced a dissolution of my “self” or ego

I felt at one with the universe

I felt a sense of union with others

I experienced a decrease in my sense of self-importance

I experienced a disintegration of my “self” or ego

I felt far less absorbed by my own issues and concerns

I lost all sense of ego

All notion of self and identity dissolved away

(Nour, Evans, Nutt, & Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 3)

3.1 Quantifying subjectivity

Different conceptions of hallucinogenic drugs, human beings, and the ontological

make up of the world were also coordinated with the help of self-rating scales. As

tools for the transformation of qualitative experience into quantitative data, they

provided a mechanism for steering clear of ideological conflicts. One might

sympathize or not with the use of psychedelics to model psychoses, with the

comparison of drug intoxication and meditation or with the use of “mysticism

scale”, to rate the effects of a psychotomimetic, but whether or not study results

were scientifically acceptable depended primarily on the statistical significance of

the data. (Langlitz, 2013, p. 157)

The scientific articles examined in the present work are characterized by the use of

psychometric scales. Basically, these are questionnaires containing a set of statements which

are given to the study participants before, during and/or after experiments, and to which they

respond by way of a likert scale (e.g. 1-5) compromising two polarizing judgments such as I

completely agree / I do not agree at all. However a psychometric scale, or instruments as

they are also called, is not just any questionnaire. Importantly, in the scientific context, they

are validated instruments – that is they possess certain psychometric qualities – or in other

17

words, by way of statistical analysis and via comparisons with other established measures,

they have been confirmed to reliably measure what they purport to measure. I will not go into

further details concerning psychometrics as this is outside the scope of the present work.

Even so, the validity of the instruments used in the examined papers, is of minor relevance

from the standpoint of agential realism theory. As described earlier, agential realism

presumes that there is simply no “reality beyond” which an instrument can uncover more or

less truly – rather the instruments measures are intra-actively (in concert with its context,

test-subjects and administrators) (re)producing the phenomenon as it emerges. Thereby, the

psychometric scales, and also the various brain scanning instruments (e.g. MRI and MEG)

used in the examined scientific papers, in Apffel-Marglin’s words, “are productive of reality,

constraining but not determining particular material-discursive arrangements” (Apffel-

Marglin, 2012, p. 58)

The psychometric scale Ego-dissolution Inventory (EDI) plays an especially

influential role in the research examined. It measures the degree of ego-dissolution

experienced during the experimental phase, i.e. when participants are dosed with LSD or

placebo. This scale is actually developed by the research team themselves, a process

described in the article Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution

Inventory (EDI). The EDI consists of eight statements – cited in the beginning of this chapter

– which the participants rated on a scale from 0-100 where 0 signifies “No, not more than

usually” and 100 signifies “Yes, entirely or completely” (Nour et al., 2016).

Other psychometric scales which across the various articles are used to measure

participants psychedelic experiences include the Psychomimetic States Inventory (PSI) which

measures the degree to which an experience is characterized by psychotic-like features, the

Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire (ASC) which defines various altered states of

consciousness along eleven dimensions, and a specific part of the Mystical Experiences

Questionnaire (MEQ) pertaining to “unitive experience” (Carhart-Harris, 2016; Nour et al.,

2017).

There were also a number of other psychometric scales which were administered in

the experiments. Although these did not aim at measuring the subjective psychedelic

experience per se, but rather the “consequences” of it, for example personality changes, they

can still be seen as intra-actively producing the psychedelic experiences emerging in the

scientific papers by contributing to the set and setting, shaping expectations about the

unfolding trip, or constituting a framework for interpretation of it.

18

As both brain scanning instruments and various psychometric scales are all

quantitatively oriented, the researchers structuring of subjective experiences can best be

understood as a form of measuring subjective experiences. By inter-relating these measures –

usually not comparing the measures of one participants experience with another participants

experience, but comparing the measures of placebo-experience with the LSD-experience of

the same subject, what constitutes the LSD-experience as opposed to placebo, or “normal

waking consciousness”, is hereby “extracted”.

Through these measures, what obviously is constrained, although not determined, is

the form of subjectivity emerging with the LSD-experience. As the researchers primarily

reproduce subjective experience through the devised instruments, there is a narrowing in

play, so that what is reported in the scientific papers is a limited experience, with the focus of

the given instruments used in the study. Surely, from the perspective of the participants, the

LSD-experiences was probably immensely more richer and complex than what shines

through the reductionist lens of the scientists instruments, hence the latter does not determine

the subjective experience per se. Indeed, sometimes the scientists even report on specific

subjective experience which lies outside of what the instruments is intended to produce. Yet

in these instances the subjective experience is not of interest in itself, but rather is reproduced

as a confounder – something which risks disturbing the production of objective data. Equally,

the mandatory rap of demographic variables of the participants such as age and gender is of

interest primarily in the way they risk biasing the results – i.e. the variety of subjectivities not

being random enough to guarantee objective results:

The present study has some limitations. Firstly, the population sampled was fairly

homogenous, which limits the study’s external validity, and thus our ability to

extrapolate to a broader demographic. Specifically, most of our subjects were male,

under the age of 30, and had at least some university education. Over half the

subjects had used classical psychedelic drugs on over 10 occasions. This also raises

the possibility that our subjects’ responses were biased by their familiarity with

reports about paradigmatic features of the psychedelic experience, such as ego-

dissolution. (Nour et al., 2016, p. 10)

Not only does the reasoning above construct subjectivity as something which should be

undermined in the scientific production of the LSD-experience, but it also points to the way

in which prevailing psychedelic discourses shapes this production. Revisiting the concepts of

19

set and setting will illustrate this point. In the study cited above, as is the case with all of the

studies examined here, participants had previous experience of psychedelic drugs, meaning

that their set can be assumed to be shaped by “reports about paradigmatic features of the

psychedelic experience” (Nour et al., 2016, p. 10) – e.g if a subject expect experiencing ego-

dissolution due to a prevailing ego-dissolution discourse on psychedelic experience, then this

person is also more likely to experience that.

A corresponding bias is also apparent in the study design; since some instruments

were administered at baseline (i.e. before the experimental manipulation takes place) or

during/after the placebo trials, which usually took place some days or weeks before the LSD-

trials, it means the character of the instrument informed the participants’ expectations – their

set in other words – for the subsequent LSD-trial.

To exemplify, if a subject receives saline (placebo) injected in his veins, gets his brain

scanned and afterwards is given a questionnaire where he estimates the degree to which his

sense of self was diminished or how much he felt as one with the universe (Nour et al., 2016),

this suggests certain expectations about the LSD-experience which lies ahead, and as such

also shapes to some extent that very experience and the users’ report on it.

It is also worth considering how not only set, but also the setting, in the form of

research facilities and its features, has obvious constraining effects on the unfolding LSD-

experiences. This is best exemplified in the study which used brain-scanning (MEG and

MRI) in the acute phase of the LSD-state and subsequently measured psychotic-like features

of the experience with the scale Psychomimetic States Inventory (PSI). The researchers

themselves, which saw a potential confounding factor here, described it as follows:

Brain imaging environments can be demanding for some individuals, particularly

under the influence of psychedelics. Individuals are known to be especially

sensitive to the environment in which they experience the effects of a psychedelic,

and so the drug plus scanner combination may have contributed to the especially

high PSI scores observed here with LSD. (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016, p. 1385)

The unpleasantness of being in a brain-imaging instrument, and the overall laboratory

environment in general one can assume, thus shapes the LSD-experience – e.g. to some

extent rendering it frightening and psychotic-like.

The instruments used in the studies are furthermore re-configuring the LSD-

experience on another level. As the concept of setting denotes not only the immediate

20

surroundings, but the wider cultural context, it follows that the subjective LSD-experiences

emerging in the examined studies are entangled with prevailing LSD-discourses. Hence, it is

intriguing that the scientists deem participants previous use of psychedelic drugs and thus

acquired beliefs and expectations about the psychedelic experience, a bias. Because how can

a bias such as this possibly be done away with? As the researchers themselves confirms to –

e.g in the citing above – set and setting, including cultural context, are constraining and

enabling factors for the unfolding LSD-experience. Therefore it is hard to imagine how for

example psychedelic naive participants would make any difference as these subjects

obviously still would be culturally informed in one way or another. Even if lacking previous

experience with psychedelic drugs, their set would be informed by prevailing LSD- or drug

discourses more generally.

More importantly, participants will always bring with them a subjective mind (a set)

which invariably will shape their respective experience. In Baradian terms, the phenomenon

of psychedelic experience is entangled with the subject and the “act of observation”, entailing

what Langlitz (2013) deems a “local biological”:

Not only can the interpretations of experimental findings differ according to the

observers’ perspectives and background assumptions. Despite all efforts to

universalize the validity of the facts established in the laboratory, they remain more

closely associated with the conditions under which they were found than many

other phenomena of biological life. The fact that hallucinogens make an organism

more susceptible to its surroundings and the increased impressionability they

induce bring about a situation in which locality and social context are strongly

implicated in the findings of hallucinogens experiments. (Langlitz, 2013, p. 76)

Somewhat ironically, the study LSD enhances suggestibility in healthy volunteers (Carhart-

Harris, 2015) even demonstrates how the LSD-experience is particularly sensitive to

suggestibility, raising the paradoxical question of to what degree the demonstrated

suggestibility effect is an effect of suggestion itself.

21

3.2 The entropic brain: dissolving the ego with laws of physics

For those brave enough, research with psychedelics could herald the beginning of a

new scientifically informed-psychoanalysis that has the potential to influence

modern psychology and psychiatry. (Carhart-Harris, 2014, p. 18)

As previously noted, the Ego Dissolution inventory (EDI), is a psychometric self-rating scale

used to measure the degree of ego-dissolution experienced by research participants in their

psychedelic experiences (Carhart-Harris, 2017). The researchers’ interest in the concept of

ego-dissolution can be traced to a prevailing psychedelic-psychoanalytic discourse

concerning not only the notorious occurrence of this type of experience with LSD but also its

desirability:

The dominant theoretical and therapeutic approach during the early era of

psychedelic research was psychoanalytic. Psychedelics were used therapeutically

under the rationale that they work to lower psychological defenses to allow

personal conflicts to come to the fore that can then be worked through with a

therapist. A related model was that the relinquishment of “ego” enabled profound

existential or “peak” experiences to occur that could have a lasting positive impact

on behavior and outlook. (Carhart-Harris, 2014, p. 3)

In the article The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging

research with psychedelic drugs this psychoanalytic-psychedelic discourse is paired with a

cognitive scientific epistemology which, in the scientists wordings, “(rightly) focuses

phenomena that can be observed and manipulated by controlled experiments” (Carhart-Harris

et al., 2014, p. 4). As the scientists think that psychoanalytic theory “bridges an explanatory

gap that has been left vacant by cognitive psychology.” (p. 4), it follows that they need “to

bring the core phenomena of psychoanalytic theory into an observable space.” (p. 4) This is

where psychedelic drugs come into play, thought to function as an instrument highlighting

psychoanalytic concepts such as the unconscious and the ego.

From a Baradian standpoint, however, this observable space is not so much reached

via psychedelic drugs – “the superhighway to the unconscious” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014,

22

p. 4) – as it is reconstructed, emerging by intra-action of prevailing psychoanalytical-

psychedelic discourse and neuroscientific measures of the brain.

Complimenting the psychoanalyzation of the psychedelic experience as a ego-

dissolving backdoor to the unconscious, is the scientists’ categorization of the psychedelic

experience as a primary state (what Freud would call primitive states) – a category of mental

states defined as “regressive, pre-ego style of consciousness characterized by unconstrained

brain dynamics and cognition.” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 5), which also includes REM-

sleep, early psychosis, and certain spiritual or mystical experiences.. These primary states are

contrasted to secondary states which is the equivalent of ordinary adult waking consciousness

– how we normally experience the world in other words – where the brain is functioning to

“suppress entropy and thus organize and constrain cognition” (p. 7).

The concept of entropy is a crucial link in the scientists re-configuration of the

psychoanalytical-psychedelic discourse and the overall scientification of the psychedelic

experience. Adopted from the quintessential scientific field of physics (or more precisely the

second law of thermodynamics), the concept of entropy not only evokes scientific merit but

more importantly lends itself to measurement – thus bridging the gap between the elusive

psychedelic experience arising in the inaccessible subjective mind and the brain whose

physiology can be measured. Entropy can be described as a form of disorder or randomness,

and hence the second law of thermodynamics can be understood as the universal tendency of

all things to expand towards maximum disorder. However, this process can be more or less

pronounced depending on organizing factors or driving inputs: “In the absence of regular

input the system (i.e. the self-organized brain activity) will inevitable degrade or collapse

towards formlessness or maximum entropy” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 15)

The researchers’ entropic brain hypothesis, thus in short entails that “brain activity

becomes more random and so harder to predict in primary states.” (Carhart-Harris et al.,

2014, p. 17), which is linked in particular to the dissolution of the driving input of the self or

the ego in these states.

The formation of this paradigm, in which the subjective reports of ego-dissolution as

measured by the Ego-dissolution Inventory, are inter-related with the degree of entropic brain

activity as measured with via brain scanning instruments, is enacting the agential cut between

subject and object. The subjective mind and its experience of ego-dissolution is separated

from the object, the brain, and the measure of entropic activity. Formulations such as

“psychedelics are capable of providing major new insights into the nature of the mind and

how it arises from brain activity“ (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 17) and “The intention is to

23

offer a comprehensive account of how psychedelics alter brain function to alter

consciousness.” (p. 4), enacts a casual relationship where (objective) brain activity precedes

(subjective) mind phenomena.

From a Baradian standpoint, this enactment of distinctiveness – as opposed to an

entanglement of mind and brain – is devised particularly through the material-discursive

production of the respective instruments measuring the mind and the brain. Thus, in the

scientists reproduction of the psychedelic experience subjectivity is not only constrained, as

discussed above, but also detached – distinctively preceded by brain activity.

Unsurprisingly, through this detachment and constrainment of subjective experience,

the entropic brain hypothesis, enables a way to quantify the psychedelic experience, and in

turn scientific qualities such as generalizability and predictability – hereby reproducing the

psychedelic experience as a (neuro)scientific phenomenon. By focusing on LSD’s patterning

of neural activity, the notorious unpredictability of psychedelic drug-effects is side-stepped,

and the otherwise ruling concepts of set and setting is overruled by a more fundamental

principle about the brains’ entropy. At the same time, by enacting convergence of the

psychedelic-entropic brain, with other so called primary states such as psychosis and spiritual

experiences, the (neuro)scientific-psychedelic discourse is expanded – the psychedelic

experience is enacted as an epistemological device promising to further our scientific

understanding of these other “mind mysteries” and even consciousness itself.

3.3 Psychosis: the LSD paradox

3.3.1 LSD and modern drug discourseThe film Climax (2018), starts off with a crew of dancers throwing an after-party following a

rehearsal. After a short introduction to the mix of young dancers who are chatting, drinking

and showing off their dance moves over a throbbing base, the joyous atmosphere fades. One

after another the dancers starts feeling uneasy, and speculations arise that someone have

spiked the sangria with LSD. What then follows is nothing less than a nightmare – a

voyeuristic downward spiral of insanity and violence where paranoid assaults, suicide,

incestuos desises, people setting each other on fire, a kid being locked in to the central power

24

cabinet (for his own safety), and a range of other “freaked out” behaviors are displayed. The

film ends with a group of policemen and paramedics arriving at the scene, finding most of the

dancers dead, badly injured, sleeping, or manically laughing, crying or dancing. One dancer

is seemingly well off however, and in the very last scene, she is exposed as the one who

spiked the Sangria – she sits in her bed, a copy of Stanislav Grof’s LSD psychotherapy (1980)

lying at the floor beneath her, as she drops what one can infer is LSD into her eye.

With the current revival of psychedelic science, the psychotic effects of LSD as

expressed in Climax, remain a central obstacle to overcome, if the field is to prosper and its

objective of establishing psychedelic treatment in psychiatry is to be realized. The psychotic-

psychedelic discourse obviously has its roots in early LSD-research and the defining

psychotomimetic paradigm – which still has its followers in contemporary psychedelic

science – but it is also related to what Halasz (2006) calls modern drug discourse which

reproduces the phenomenon of drug use as a legal-medical matter; a criminal behavior and an

addiction, a threat and a disease, for the individual but also for society as a whole6. Unlike

other drugs, Halasz (2006) argues, LSD when popularized in the 60’s, quickly transgressed

this modern drug discourse by expanding the discourse about itself, leading to a multiplicity

of aesthetic and mystico-spiritual discourses.

Yet, in parallel with these alternative discourses, LSD has effectively remained

associated with modern drug discourse, yet somewhat erratically so, especially in the research

context, as “LSD, at different times, was thought to cause insanity, cure insanity, and provide

a model for insanity” (Halasz, 2006, p. 65-66). Likewise Langlitz (2013) traces how the

psychotomimetic paradigm historically has gone in and out of fashion in the field of

psychedelic science.7

It follows then, that the psychotic-psychedelic discourse emanating from the papers

examined in the present work is somewhat ambiguous; at times adhering to the

psychotomimetic paradigm and at other times displacing it – while primarily

neuroscientifically reconfiguring it serving the purpose of untangling psychedelics from

modern drug discourse.

6 Halasz (2006) work is drawing on an North American context. For a discussion on the evolvement and reproduction of a corresponding modern drug discourse in Sweden, see Magnus Lintons Knark (2016).7 Langlitz’s Neuropscyhedelia (2013) offers a more thorough discussion of the conception, demise, and rebirth of the psychotomimetic paradigm

25

3.3.2 The paradoxical psychological effects of LSD

Even though the research team examined in the present work is not experimentally working

with the psychotomimetic paradigm, i.e. using the LSD-experience as a model for psychosis

to better understand the latter (and in turn advance new treatments), the examined papers are

referencing the paradigm and elaborate hypothesis related to it. In particular, they address

“the apparent paradox by which the same compound can be both a model of, and yet a

treatment for, psychopathology” (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1380).

The article The paradoxical psychological effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)

(2016) reproduces the above cited paradoxical effects of LSD by demonstrating that 75

microgram of LSD given to 20 healthy volunteers produced “high scores on the PSI, an index

of psychosis-like symptoms.” in the acute phase, yet “Increased optimism and trait

openness”, and no changes in delusional thinking, two weeks later (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p.

1379).

As the above indicate, the psychedelic-psychotic discourse is no exception in the

general re-configuring of the psychedelic experience as a quantitative-statistical matter.

Psychometric scales, for example Psychotomimetic States Inventory (PSI) and Revised NEO

Personality Inventory (NEO-PI), were used to measure subjective experience in terms of

psychotic-like symptoms, personality, optimism and delusional thinking, at baseline, after the

session, and at a follow up two weeks later.

As discussed above the psychedelic-psychotic discourse is a pervasive one, which by

way of its entanglement with modern drug discourse, extends even beyond the confines of the

scientific psychotomimetic paradigm. Not the least is it forwarded in pop-cultural LSD-

narratives such as Gaspar Noé’s Climax (2018), and in sensational media reports (Gayle,

2015).

The scientists’ quantitative measure of psychotic-like symptoms can be seen as way to

counter the pervasiveness of the psychedelic-psychotic discourse. The Psychotomimetic

States Inventory (PSI) consist of the six dimensions; delusional thinking, perceptual

distortion, cognitive disorganisation, anhedonia, mania, and paranoia – a

compartmentalization which in itself serves to deconstruct the psychotic-psychedelic, pinning

down the opaque concept of psychosis to more concrete terms. Furthermore, as “Participants

were asked to complete the questionnaires with reference to the peak subjective effects of

LSD (i.e. when the effects were most intense) or with reference to how they generally felt

throughout the day – e.g. if they did not notice any effects.“ (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1382)

26

the psychotic-psychedelic is also contained temporally – transient as the LSD-experience in

general.

A more striking displacement of the psychedelic-psychotic-discourse is enacted by

putting forward scientific narratives which relatives it or stands in stark contrast to it and its

entanglement with the modern drug discourse:

Case reports of persistent psychological problems apparently precipitated by a

psychedelic have considerable potential to excite alarm. However, such cases are

rare and largely restricted to recreational use. Evidence does not support the view

that psychedelics are harmful to mental health. Indeed, to the contrary, two recent

population studies found decreased rates of suicidality and psychological distress

among persons reporting previous use of psychedelics and no evidence of any

increased rates of mental health problems. Similarly, large meta-analyses of

controlled research have found that cases of mental health complications following

exposure to a psychedelic are extremely rare (i.e. <0.1%), even in vulnerable

populations (i.e. <0.2%), and are rarer still if volunteers are properly screened.

(Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1380)

By furthering the above scientific research showing psychedelic drugs are not likely to cause

mental health problems, to the contrary even lowering risks of such problems, the pervasive

medial-medical and pop-cultural psychotic-psychedelic narratives are challenged. A

corresponding dynamic, i.e where the psychotic is displaced by contrary “positive effects”, is

enacted also in the study results:

Based on the PSI results, one might infer that participants’ acute LSD experiences

were dominated by unpleasant psychosis-like phenomena; however, this was not

the case. Some volunteers did show frank psychotic phenomena during their LSD

experiences (e.g. paranoid and delusional thinking) but at the group level, positive

mood was more common. (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1384)

Still the paradox effectively remains – how can it be explained that participants display

psychosis-like symptoms yet the experience in general is being dominated by positive mood?

Following their neuroreductionist (brain activity preceding mind phenomena) approach, the

scientists’ resolution is to posit “a more fundamental action of psychedelics that can explain

both effects” (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1386):

27

It may be that what underlies both facets of the psychedelic state and can resolve

the ‘valence paradox’ therefore, is this principle of increased cognitive entropy.

Accordingly, we predict that disordered or entropic cognition is a more

fundamental characteristic of the psychedelic state than either positive or negative

mood. (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1386)

Hence, the psychotic-like aspects of the psychedelic experience is being separated from the

phenomenon – it may well be that LSD occasions psychotic-like symptoms, but in the

scientists reconfiguration this is not inherent to the experience itself, but rather a reaction to

it; a question of how a subject attributes the more fundamental effect of increased brain

entropy and associated mind phenomena such as ego-dissolution, altered perceptual

processing and heightened emotional lability.

By separating entropic brain activity, corresponding mind phenomena, and the

subjective interpretations of these phenomena, the entropic brain hypotheses, reconfigures the

psychedelic experience, rendering it less pervasively entangled with the opaque phenomenon

of psychosis, and more so with its corresponding neural action (serotonin receptor (= 5-

HT2AR) stimulation), valence-neutral mind phenomena (e.g. ego-dissolution) in the acute

phase, and therapeutic effects in the long term:

Informed by neuroimaging studies with psychedelics, 5-HT2AR stimulation is

associated with unconstrained brain network dynamics and the characteristic

‘entropic’ quality of cognition in the psychedelic state. [..] it is hypothesized that

an acute ‘onslaught’ or ‘blast’ of 5-HT2AR stimulation, via the action of a

psychedelic, has a residual influence on brain network dynamics and associated

cognition. 5-HT2AR stimulation is described as having a ‘loosening’ or

‘lubricating’ influence on cognition and this is hypothesized to be conducive to

improved psychological wellbeing. (Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 1386)

The enactment of psychedelics as cognitive lubricants loosens their entanglement with

modern drug discourse. In the scientists account, psychedelic drugs are mainly not evoking

disease (i.e. addiction and psychosis) and societal crisis, but quite the contrary, summons

well-being and potentially the resolution of psychopathology. Taking a psychedelic, it seems,

is no longer about losing one’s mind, but about loosening it, and crucially that is not a bad

thing.

28

3.4 Huxley’s shadow: utopianism and neurotheology

3.4.1 A higher purpose

The Sunshine Makers, a documentary from 2015 (available on Netflix), tells the story of how

two Americans in the 1960’s set out to produce and distribute millions of LSD-doses,

convinced – following their own LSD-experiences – that this would cause a revolution of

people's consciousness and in turn society itself. The documentary portrays its protagonists

Tim Scully and Nicholas Sand as “oddballs” more or less. Indeed, risking life-time prison

sentences for the purpose of trying to “turn on the world” is a rather odd quest one might say.

However, beside chronicling the cat-and-mouse hunt of legal enforcers trying to catch the

duo, the film also deals with the LSD-zeitgeist of the 60’s, revealing that the ideas of Sand

and Scully were not that odd after all, i.e. at the time they were not the only ones thinking the

new remarkable drug LSD could catalyze a revolution of people's mind and in turn society at

large. The case of Timothy Leary and his message to American youth to “tune in, turn on,

drop out” is probably the most (in)famous example of this utopian discourse.8

Langlitz (2013) more specifically traces the utopian discourse in psychedelic culture

to Aldous Huxley and his defining utopian novel Island (1962) - in which the psychoactive

drug moksha play a central part. The novel is considered a counterpart to Huxley’s dystopian

Brave New World (1932), in which the psychoactive drug soma plays an equally important if

altogether different part:

Whereas the superficial cheerfulness induced by soma is the outcome of a “holiday

from the facts”, a purely subjective sense of happiness ignoring the subject’s actual

situation of repression and alienation, the happiness and insight provided by

moksha are presented as genuine. Their truthfulness consists in a correspondence

with both the paradisiacal social life described in Island as well as with a spiritual

reality transcending individual psychology.

(Langlitz, 2013, p. 5)

Huxley wrote Island – which for the counterculture of the 60s became “a utopian blueprint

for a psychedelically enlightened society” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 8) – following his own drug

experiences with mescaline and LSD – as chronicled in the equally formative book The

8 See Halasz (2006) for a thorough discussion of Leary’s impact on LSD-discourse.

29

Doors of perception (1954). A book which not only is one of the most influential trip reports,

but also by way of Huxley’s reducing valve theory, ignited the discourse on the psychedelic

experience as enabling perception free from the narrowing demands of ordinary

consciousness, in other words, perception of an undistorted or “ultimate reality” – a discourse

inherited by the entropic brain hypothesis as outlined above. The reducing valve theory was

informed by Huxley’s comparative studies of religious experience detailed in his book The

Perennial Philosophy (1945), in which he argued for the existence of a “transhistorical and

transcultural core of all religions” corresponding to a “divine Reality underlying the

phenomenal multiplicity of the world” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 7). Huxley’s experience with

mescaline – which he called a “mystical experience” – not only confirmed for him his belief

in a divine Reality, but crucially psychedelic drugs now made it readily available. A missing

link had been found which could provide a cornerstone for a spiritually revived utopia as

exemplified in Huxley’s Island.

In contrast to the contemporary society of the 1950s where the

“psychopharmacological revolution” meant a rising use of various drugs for performance-

enhancing, euphoric or tranquilizing effects – thus evoking the role of soma in Brave New

World – Huxley, through Island and The Doors of Perception, advocated for a sacramental,

yet also scientifically informed, use of (psychedelic) drugs (Langlitz, 2013). In Island,

Huxley thus invented the discipline of neurotheology which studied “the relationship of

physiology and spirituality” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 6). A discipline which of today no longer is a

futuristic vision, as the advancement of brain-scanning techniques has implicated what

Langlitz calls a “quest for the neural correlates of a universal spiritual experience” –

manifest not the least in the neuroscientific study of meditation and psychedelic states

(Langlitz, 2013, p. 8).

In the articles examined in the present work, Huxley’s shadow is omnipresent. While

the entropic brain hypothesis is a direct neuroscientific reproduction of Huxley’s reducing

valve theory other reproductions of Huxley’s ideas are more implicit. For example the notion

that psychedelic drugs ought to be used in a proper way, i.e with a “higher” purpose than just

getting high:

Human research with LSD was brought to a halt in the late 1960s due to political

pressure, motivated in part by reports of adverse psychological reactions among

people using the drug improperly [emphasis added]. Ironically, however, at the

30

same time, reports of therapeutic success in the treatment of various psychiatric

disorders were beginning to amount (Carhart Harris et al., 2016, p. 1380)

By inference, the proper ways of using psychedelics is with a therapeutic – or rather a

spiritual-therapeutic – intent, as we shall see. A discourse which by riffing on the

diametrically different role of drugs in Huxley’s novels Island and Brave New World, sets

psychedelic drugs apart from other drugs.

3.4.2 Mother nature’s son

As noted earlier when discussing the article The paradoxical psychological effects of LSD,

the scientists take effort to wrestle away from the public conception of LSD as a instigator of

psychosis – as such, in line with modern drug discourse, posing a threat to both individual

and societal welfare (Halasz, 2006). From an ethical perspective it is obviously not

acceptable (nor viable given today’s ethical committees) to conduct studies where human

subjects are given LSD if the above “public conception” holds sway. Likewise, LSD’s illegal

status (which of course mirrors this conception) complicates the legit availability and

production of the drug, handling procedures, and thus increases the overall cost for LSD

research.

With this in mind, it might seem like the article Psychedelics, Personality and Political

Perspectives (2017), was written largely for ideological reasons – to counter the psychedelic-

psychotic public conception and its entanglement with modern drug discourse, and instead

forward the Huxleyan conceptualization of psychedelic drugs as spiritual-therapeutic tools

and utopian vehicles.

The article presents data from an online survey of 893 individuals, pertaining to their

use of psychedelic drugs, cocaine and alcohol, along with measures of personality, political

perspectives, and so called nature-relatedness. The scientists were interested in seeing if

certain drug habits were associated with certain personality traits, political perspectives, and

way of relating to nature, given that other studies have indicated that “individuals who use

classical psychedelics may score higher in assessments of confidence and optimism than

those who do not, and may place increased value on spiritual/mystical beliefs, as well as

concern for others and nature/the environment” (Nour, Evans & Carhart-Harris, 2017, p.

182).

31

They also administered the Ego dissolution Inventory, retrospectively one could say,

as participants were asked to complete it with reference to their most intense psychedelic

experience – i.e to what degree were participants egos dissolved during their most intense

psychedelic trip. The rationale here being that:

Ego dissolution is related to the experience of awe, which occurs in response to

“stimuli that are vast, that transcend current frames of reference, and that require

new schemata to accommodate what is being perceived” . It has been suggested

that self-transcendental experiences such as awe have the potential to catalyze

psychological change within an individual, and may increase prosocial behavior

and ethical decision making by shifting attention away from one’s individual

concerns and towards the larger entities that an individual is part of. This shift in

attention, if sustained, naturally resonates with egalitarian political views,

increased feelings of connectedness with the natural world, and increased tolerance

for others’ viewpoints. (Nour, Evans & Carhart-Harris, 2017, p. 188).

As the researchers themselves note, the study has some limitations, especially in regards to

the participant sample, which in general were young, well-educated, politically liberal men,

who had numerous previous experiences with both psychedelics and cocaine. Nevertheless,

the scientists “found a significant association between psychedelic use and both liberal (left-

leaning) and libertarian (anti-authoritarian) values.”, as well as between psychedelic use and

nature-relatedness and the personality dimension openness (Nour, Evans & Carhart-Harris,

2017, p. 187).

It is apparent that the article Psychedelics, Personality and Political Perspectives in a

similar fashion as the previously discussed article The paradoxical psychological effects of

lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) (2016) loosens psychedelic drugs entanglement with

modern drug discourse. On the one hand by forwarding various supposedly positive effects

on individuals, and on the other by dissociating psychedelic drugs from other drugs. Starting

by citing other studies which have concluded psychedelic users show more concern for others

and the environment, and values financial prosperity lower, compared with users of

amphetamine, cannabis, or heroin, they then extend this dissociating discourse by way of

their own study results (see above), whose “pattern of associations is unlikely to be driven by

illicit drug use in general, as it did not extend to cocaine use” (p. 189). In other words, it is

32

specifically the use of psychedelic drugs which is associated to liberal and libertarian values,

nature-relatedness and openness.

The choice of cocaine as a drug for comparison is of course not random, although

framed somewhat casually:

In addition to collecting information on lifetime psychedelic use, we also collected

information on naturalistic use of cocaine and alcohol, allowing us to test the

specificity of the relationship between psychedelic use and political perspectives,

personality traits, and nature relatedness. (Nour, Evans & Carhart-Harris, 2017,

p.183).

In the article Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-dissolution Inventory

(EDI) (2016), which also uses alcohol and cocaine for comparison, this choice is also

motivated rather casually, in this case alcohol and cocaine “were chosen because of their

widespread availability and use in Western societies.” (Nour, Evans, Nutt & Carhart-Hariss,

2016, p. 2) Yet, one of their hypothesis for this study entails that “experiences occasioned by

classical stimulant drugs, like cocaine, are in some respects antithetical to the psychedelic

experience, promoting ego-inflation rather than ego-dissolution” (p. 2) – a hypothesis which

was also confirmed by the results of the experiment.

A critique of both these studies is that not only the psychedelic experience is shaped

by set and setting, but reasonably, the concepts to some extent likewise apply to experiences

of alcohol and cocaine. In Baradian terms, the experience of these other drugs are also

material discursively reproduced. The scientist touches on this by noting “the possibility that

our subjects’ responses were biased by their familiarity with reports about paradigmatic

features of the psychedelic experience, such as ego-dissolution.” (Nour, Evans, Nutt &

Carhart-Harris, 2016, p. 10). Crucially however, they do not extend this reasoning to alcohol

and cocaine, asserting for example that the association of ego-inflation and cocaine use,

might be inflated by participants familiarity with a prevailing discourse on cocaine as a ego-

inflating drug. One can assume that they refrain from such reasoning as it would challenge

their ongoing dissociation of psychedelic drugs from other drugs, a discourse which

reproduces the psychedelic experience as unique, and antithetical to other common drug

experiences, furthering LSD as a moksha of our times; therapeutic, awe-inspiring and even

utopic.

33

The article LSD-Induced Entropic Brain Activity Predicts Subsequent Personality

Change (Lebedev et al., 2016), in a way, also furthers the idea of the free and open-minded

psychedelicist by showing that one dose of LSD led to an increase of research participants

personality domain of openness (as measured with the psychometric scale NEO-PI). It thus

replicates the findings of previous studies that psychedelic drugs seem to render people more

open-minded, even over time (MacLean, Johnson & Griffiths, 2011).

The discourse emerging through the examined articles whereby psychedelic drugs

become devices for shaping individuals according to certain presumably desirable traits and

ideologies is not new. Writer Henrik Dahl (2017) states that “Today’s psychedelic movement

is still very much linked to (and seen as a continuation of) the early counterculture” where

“the latter has become the blueprint that most psychedelic manifestations follow.” – which

seems to be the case of psychedelic science as well.

Yet, in the face of this one must remember as Dahl notes in his essay pertaining Alan

Piper’s work (2015) Strange Drugs make for Strange Bedfellows: Ernst Jünger, Albert

Hofmann and the Politics of Psychedelics, that “psychedelia past and present also consists of

characters with conservative, right-wing, even far-right, views.”, thus contradicting the

discourse on psychedelics as a liberal (left leaning) and libertarian (anti-authoritarian) utopian

devices.

3.4.3 Contemporary neurotheology

According to one prominent if dated definition modernity is constituted by a

unidirectional transition from religion to science. At first glance such secularization

seems to inform the current psychedelic revival as well. After the failure of Leary

and other psychedelic evangelist to defend the consumption of psychedelic drugs in

the name if religious freedom, it is no coincidence that the attempts to re-legitimate

their uses in the west ... have taken the route of science, not religion.

(Langlitz, 2013, p. 17)

While the article Psychedelics, Personality and Political Perspectives (2017) discussed above

can be read as a distinct reproduction of a Huxleyan discourse on the unique character of

psychedelics, and a imperative to use them for a “higher” spiritual-utopic purpose, a

complimenting neurotheologic discourse on psychedelics is more widely reproduced in the

examined articles. It entails that the psychedelic experience overlaps substantially with

34

spiritual experience, phenomenologically and psychologically, emanating from a shared

biology of certain brain activity patterns – which can be revealed through neuroimaging of

the psychedelic state and spiritual states respectively.9 A cornerstone in this discourse is the

notion that a high dose of psychedelic drugs “reliably induce profound spiritual experiences

in healthy volunteers that are effectively indistinguishable from spontaneously-occurring

spiritual experiences” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 14). Huxley’s perennial philosophy –

his idea that there is a transhistorical and transcultural core for all spiritual experiences – is

here evoked. Unlike Huxley though, the scientist refrain from explicitly pairing the unitary

consciousness arising with the psychedelic experience with direct perception of a divine

reality. Yet, alongside a straightforward neuroscientific representational ontology, in which

mind phenomena are mere projections of “underlying mechanics”, i.e (real) biological neural

events, they also enact a more vague ontology:

in profound spiritual experiences the complex multiplicity of normal consciousness

collapses into a simpler state where a sense of an all-encompassing unity or

“oneness” with others, the world and/or “God” is felt. ... there is a collapse in the

most fundamental dualities of consciousness (i.e., self vs. other, subject vs. object

and internal vs. external) in the unitive state. Moreover, ... reports of unitary

consciousness are consistent throughout the different religions—emphasizing its

universality and cultural independence. (p. 15)

This neurotheologic discourse is furthermore entangled with the psychoanalytical-

psychedelic discourse, as the unitive state and its collapsing of subject/object, self/other, is

linked to the dissolution of the ego (discussed above) and what Freud calls a oceanic state or

oceanic feeling:

Our present ego-feeling is (...) only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing feeling, which (early in development] corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world. [...] the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe—the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the “oceanic feeling.” (Freud as cited in Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 15)

9 The scientific article Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness (Millière et al., 2018) deals more specifically with this paradigm. However it was not included in the material of the present work, and thus will not be discussed further here.

35

It is not quite clear from these passages whether the ego-less “unitive state” – emerging in

spiritual- and psychedelic experiences alike according to the scientists – corresponds to a

true perception of the world as it really is in the Huxleyan sense or if it only is just a feeling

of such. This raises the question of whether the scientists are perhaps intentionally ambiguous

in regards to this topic. While a passage as the one below could be taken to underscore a

Huxleyan ontology, i.e psychedelic drugs offers a direct true experience of an ultimate or

divine reality, it also fits neatly in a neuroreductive framework where experience of

sacredness and altered reality are basically projections of neural firings:

Indeed, one explanation for why some people celebrate and romanticize the

psychedelic experience and even consider it “sacred”, is that, in terms of criticality,

brain activity does actually become more consistent closer with the rest of nature in

this state i.e., it moves closer to criticality-proper and so is more in harmony with

the rest of nature. (p. 15)

This tendency to enact two parallel, it could seem mutually exclusive ontologies, is according

to Langlitz (2013) telling for psychedelic science. He traces a corresponding conflict in his

field-work at a Swiss psychedelic research facility, where his informants, i.e scientists

working in the field, exhibit a will to believe in the very realness of the ultimate or divine

reality as perceived in spiritual and psychedelic states, yet surrenders this desire faced with

the limits of their scientific paradigm: “It can’t be established in natural scientific terms. And

even if you could translate it into natural scientific language, you still wouldn’t know if the

brain didn’t simulate all this.” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 229). Thus, “the basic question”, as another

of Langlitz informants calls it, of “whether these states open something up” (p. 228), remains

largely unanswered by the rebirthed psychedelic science and its neuroscientific paradigm.

It makes sense then that while the research team examined in the present thesis does

not shut Huxley’s doors of perception to the divine reality, they are generally more concerned

with a more “modest” quest of enacting the realness of the psychoanalytic concept the

unconscious. Accordingly, it comes as no surprise that they reproduce Huxley’s coining of

the term psychedelic – a word generally translated as “mind-manifesting” – in psychoanalytic

terms, in their view denoting “psychedelic’s ability to make manifest latent aspects of the

mind” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 3) – i.e the mind which is to manifest is the unconscious

mind. Interestingly, Langlitz (2013) points out that such a reading is rooted in

“contemporaneous psychoanalytic or “psycholytic” applications” (Langlitz, 2013, p. 7) –

36

precisely the institutional discourse which Huxley wanted to displace by naming these, at the

time novel drug-experiences, psychedelic. Rather, “the mind that was supposed to manifest

itself in these experiences”, Langlitz writes with reference to Huxley’s novel Island, “was not

that of the person taking the drugs, ... but a cosmic mind, which the more confined individual

psyche was then able to commune with” (p. 7).

Similarly, the scientists’ assertion that “Jung’s account of the “collective”

unconscious fits comfortably with the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience.”

(Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 14), can be seen as an expression of their discomfort with

enacting the divine as distinctively real. As the collective unconscious refers to

“psychological remnants of our phylogenetic ancestry” (p. 14), it allows the divine, and the

psychedelic experience, to be contained within the human psyche and its corresponding

neural networks:

The brain is inherited from its ancestors; it is the deposit of the psychic functioning

of the whole human race. In the brain, the instincts are preformed, and so are the

primordial images which have always been the basis of man’s thinking—the whole

treasure-house of mythological motifs. . . Religious symbols have a distinctly

“revelatory” character; they are usually spontaneous products of unconscious

psychic activity. . . they have developed, plant-like, as natural manifestations of the

human psyche. (Jung as cited in Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 4)

The scientists’ neurotheologic discourse avoids explicit discussion on the ontological status

of the psychedelic experience. Instead, by evoking Freud’s oceanic feeling and Jung’s

collective unconscious, it serves to make the exploration of the psychedelic state from a

psychological and neuroscientific perspective all the more legitimate.

37

Part IV – Come down

The future is going to spin faster and wilder, of that we can be sure. If you don’t

like acid, rest assured you’re not going to like the future. Now, more than ever

before, we need to gear our brain to multiplicity, complexity, relativity, change.

Those who can handle acid will be able to deal more comfortably with what is to

come. (Timothy Leary cited in Halasz, 2006, p. 97)

4.1 Conclusion

The present work has explored how the psychedelic experience as a phenomenon is

reproduced in the new wave of psychedelic science. This was done by examining closely the

discourses and instruments employed in scientific articles, detailing experimental human

studies with LSD, or comparative studies pertaining to subjects previous psychedelic

experiences and psychedelic drug use. The research was conducted at the department for

psychedelic research at Imperial College, London – a frontier in the field of psychedelic

research.

In the examined articles the psychedelic experience to a great extent is materialized

through a set of renowned, but scientifically reconfigured, LSD-discourses. By

neuroscientifically rewiring the prevailing psychoanalytical, psychotic, spiritual and utopian

threads in psychedelic culture, entangling them in the fabric of entropic brain activity, a

neural pattern is weaved which on the one hand is neurotheologic in its reach – bridging

neuroscience and religion – although leaving, perhaps intentionally, ambiguous the

ontological status of the divine reality emerging in this weave. On the other hand, the

psychedelic experience manifests through the entropic neural pattern as psychologically

liberating; ego-dissolving, cognitively loosening, and thus therapeutic, but also potentially

utopic, as it is hypothesized to shape its subjects as anti-authoritarian/libertarian, left-

leaning/liberal and nature-relating.

This neuroscientification and psychologization of the psychedelic experience is in

some sense demystifying, as certain elusive aspects of the phenomenon inevitably is

38

shrunken when appropriated by a neuroreductive discourse which contains the perceptions of

divine and ultimate realities inside our neural circuits. By positing that neural activity

precedes mind phenomena, neuroscience cast these percepts as mere projections, thus

diminishing their realness. Likewise, when the psychoanalytical-psychedelic discourse

reduces the unitive state to a liberating feeling as the ego dissolves, or mystical visions to

reflections of primordial images stored genetically in our “collective unconscious”, the

ontological status of the psychedelic experience is constrained and confined to the mind.

However, it might also be the case that, psychedelic science’ pursuit to expose the

neural and psychological mechanisms of psychedelic- and spiritual experience, will result in

an enchantment of scientific practice itself, recognizing as Erik Davies comments the

rebirthed field, that the sacred is not going to go away – but rather what we are seeing is a

novel entanglement of science and spirituality:

As such, neuroscience might be seen not as eviscerating traditional accounts so

much as weaving them into more multifaceted and open-ended meshworks, where

social, cultural, and even cosmic frameworks interlock with neural and biological

one. ... For although traditional numinous accounts might not survive the encounter

with neuroscience intact, they are far more likely to be transformed by that

encounter than destroyed by it. (Davies, 2012)

It is important to note though, that the hope for the psychedelic experience to retain

irreducible spiritual connotations in the face of what Davies (2012) denotes “the imperialistic

desire of neuroscience to dominate and recode”, is seemingly rooted in a trust to some

inherent spiritual property of psychedelic drugs – in other words, that they reliably give

access to “liminal realms where mystical, paranormal, synchronistic and visionary

phenomena hold sway” (Davies, 2012). While this is a widespread idea in western

psychedelic culture dating back to Huxley’s early defining psychedelic experiments – and as

shown above, an idea at least ambiguously also enacted in contemporary psychedelic science

– there is reason to trip forward with caution.

As an agential realist perspective rejects altogether the separation of subject and

object, it renders the spiritual quality of psychedelic experiences neither an inherent property

of the drug nor a situational antecedent reinforced by the drug. Rather, the spiritual realm is

material-discursively produced in agential intra-action of subject and object. In the context of

psychedelic science it entails that study participants and scientists, theories and instruments,

39

mind and brain, set and setting, drugs and doses, humans and non-human entities, are all

entangled in the production of the various realities manifest as the phenomenon of

psychedelic experience.

4.2 Science as ritual and acid agency

The present work has shown that Aldous Huxley’s early conceptions of the psychedelic

experience are lingering still in contemporary psychedelic science. 65 years after he opened

the Doors of Perception for an emerging psychedelic culture, his reducing valve theory,

perennial philosophy and neurotheology continues to guide the scientific exploration of the

psychedelic experiences. On the one hand it points to the relevance and usefulness of his

ideas. One the other hand this points to the power of one person with great influence and

outreach (in this case a famous writer), to inscribe his or her observations and ideas into the

continued reproduction of psychedelic experiences.

Apffel-Marglin (2012) emphasizes that Barad’s agential realistic framework “shows

that reality emerges from “acts of observation” and different realities precipitate from

different acts of observation.” (p. 15). Typically these are various scientific practices, be that

neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, or cultural studies, but also – crucially to Apffel-

Marglin – “Rituals are more akin to these acts of observation than to many other things, and

share with them a capacity to precipitate reality, a reality that includes non-humans and other-

than-humans” (p. 15). Moreover, just like the neuroscientific experiments are carefully

orchestrated, calculated and repeated with the aim of separating objects and subjects, i.e.

extracting objective data in the midst of subjective variance, “Rituals, in their typically

iterative or repetitive forms, achieve a stabilization of particular agential cuts.” (p. 15).

Given this overlap – through which both scientific practices and rituals constitute

performative “acts of observation” co-producing reality, denoting the psychedelic scientific

practice as a form of ritual is a way of recognizing, as Langlitz (2013) remarks, and as shown

in the present work, that “the neuroscientific revitalization of psychedelia has not purged the

investigated drugs from mystical connotations. Theological questions and spiritual

experiences continue to serve as a moral motor of the ongoing revival” (p. 17). Furthermore,

it connects psychedelic science with various other instances of psychedelic practices, both

those which are more intuitively conceived of as ritualistic, e.g. ayahuasca-ceremonies,

healing-sessions, festivals and raves, but also other “acts of observation” of the psychedelic

40

experience, such as recreational trips. It means, as Apffel-Marglin (2012) notes in regards to

phenomena arising with scientific- and ritualistic practices, that: “Like in the phenomena of

waves and particles, neither is truer or more real than the other. Rather, they constitute

complementary moments of reality, as it were.” (p. 63).

In the context of psychedelic science, the careful orchestration of various psychedelic

experiments and the development of a therapeutic paradigm – a healing ritual – where

psychedelic drugs are taken in a purposely decorated room, and subjects lie down blindfolded

on a bed while listening to specifically curated music overwatched by a psychedelic

therapist/scientist, renders the latter a sort of psychedelic shaman (Kaelen et al., 2015).

It remains somewhat opaque what psychedelic realities these shamans are in the

making of – i.e how the psychedelic experience is to evolve with the rising scientification and

psychologisation of it. Nevertheless, as psychedelic science is becoming more and more a

key outlet for the reproduction of the psychedelic experience, it should be noted that what it

claims to be real or true in regards to this state, cannot be separated from its particular “acts

of observations”. Consequently, with the current dominant scientific approach follows a great

deal of responsibility to reproduce psychedelic realities not only akin to a psychiatric and

scientific agenda, but which are also valuable to the larger psychedelic culture.

On the other hand, following Barad’s reasoning, it must also be remembered that

agency is always relational. Barad’s recognition that universe always “kicks back” in our

efforts to define and understand it, is another way of saying that matter and reality(-ies) are

dynamic (Barad, 2007). A notion mirrored in Halasz (2006) characterization of LSD as a

discourse-expanding drug – refusing to be contained in a pre-given modern drug discourse.

Likewise, the catch-phrase you don’t find acid, acid finds you and the agency of the molecule

it evokes, can be interpreted as a way of saying, that we to some extent do not shape the

psychedelic experience, it shapes itself, and it also shapes us.

41

References

About the foundation. (2017, May 15). Retrieved from

https://beckleyfoundation.org/about/the-foundation/

Apffel-Marglin, Frederique, & Apffel-Marglin, F. (2012). Subversive Spiritualities:

How Rituals Enact the World. Cary: Oxford University Press.

Aretakis, L. (2018, October 22) Den psykedeliska forskningen söker nyckeln till våra

medvetanden. Retrieved from https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/bocker/den-psykedeliska-

forskningen-soker-nyckeln-till-vara-medvetanden/

Barad, Karen Michelle. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and

the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Bergstedt, T. (2016, June 2). Hjärnforskare: “Psykedeliska droger kan hjälpa mot

depression”. Retrieved from https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/psykedeliska-droger-kan-

forandra-varlden

Bossius, T. (2003). Med framtiden i backspegeln : Black metal- och transkulturen :

Ungdomar, musik och religion i en senmodern värld (Skrifter från Institutionen för

musikvetenskap, Göteborgs universitet, 74). Göteborg: Daidalos.

Dahl, H. (2017, October 12). Apolitical Pharmacology: From Altruism to Terrorism

in Psychedelic Culture. Retrieved from http://www.oaktreereview.com/apolitical-

pharmacology-from-altruism-to-terrorism-in-psychedelic-culture/

Davies, E. (2012, November 2) Return trip: A new generation of researchers is

heading into the weird world of psychedelic drugs. It could change their minds. Retrieved

from https://aeon.co/essays/new-psychedelics-research-is-on-a-knife-edge-of-meaning

Davies, E. (2015, March 5) The Future of Psychedelic Discourse. Retrieved from

https://techgnosis.com/the-future-of-psychedelic-culture/

42

Davies, E. (2018, September 25) Capitalism on Psychedelics: The Mainstreaming of an

Underground. Retrieved from https://techgnosis.com/capitalism-on-psychedelics/

Gayle, D. (2015, November 10). Nick Cave's son took LSD before cliff fall death,

inquest hears. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/10/nick-caves-

son-died-from-fall-after-taking-lsd-inquest-hears

Garlick, H. (2019, May 3). 'It makes me enjoy playing with the kids': is microdosing

mushrooms going mainstream?. Retrieved from

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/03/psychedelic-drugs-women-taking-tiny-

doses-hattie-garlick?ICID=ref_fark)

Griffiths, R., Richards, W., McCann, A., & Jesse, U. (2006). Psilocybin can occasion

mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual

significance. Psychopharmacology, 187(3), 268-283.

Halasz, S. (2006). LSD: The Discourse-expanding Drug, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Calgary.

Hill, S. J. (2013). Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian Depth Psychology

and Psychedelic Experience. London: Muswell Hill Press.

Hoffman, A. (1980) LSD: My Problem Child – Reflections on Sacred Drugs,

Mysticism and Science. United States: McGraw-Hill Book Company

Huxley, A. (1932). Brave new world. London: Chatto & Windus

Huxley, A. The Perennial Philosophy (1945). London: Harper & Brothers

Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception. London: Chatto & Windus.

Huxley, A. (1962). Island, A Novel. London: Chatto & Windus.

43

Langlitz, N. (2013). Neuropsychedelia, the revival of hallucinogen research since the

decade of the brain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Lundborg, P. (2012). Psychedelia. Stockholm: Lysergia

Lundborg, P. (2014). Note Towards the Definition of a Psychedelic Philosophy. The

Fenris Wolf, vol. 7. Stockholm: Edda Publishing

Maclean, K., Johnson, M., & Griffiths, R. (2011). Mystical experiences occasioned by

the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness. Journal

of Psychopharmacology, 25(11), 1453-1461.

Millière, R., Carhart-Harris, R., Roseman, L., Trautwein, F., & Berkovich-Ohana, A.

(2018). Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1475.

O’Hare, R. (2019, April 26). Imperial launches world’s first Centre for Psychedelics

Research. Retrieved from http://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/190994/imperial-launches-worlds-

first-centre-psychedelics/

Piper, A. (2015). Strange Drugs make for Strange Bedfellows: Ernst Jünger, Albert

Hofmann and the Politics of Psychedelics. Invisible College Publishing

Pollan, M. (2018). How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. London: Penguin Press.

Reid, R., & Traweek, S. (2000). Doing science + culture. New York: Routledge.

44

Source material

Carhart-Harris, R. L, Kaelen, M, Bolstridge, M, Williams, T. M, Williams, L. T,

Underwood, R, . . . Nutt, D. J. (2016). The paradoxical psychological effects of lysergic acid

diethylamide (LSD). Psychological Medicine, 46(7), 1379-1390.

Carhart-Harris, R., Kaelen, L., Whalley, M., Bolstridge, G., Feilding, A., & Nutt, D.

(2015). LSD enhances suggestibility in healthy volunteers. Psychopharmacology, 232(4),

785-794.

Carhart-Harris, R., Leech, R., Hellyer, P., Shanahan, M., Feilding, A., Tagliazucchi,

E., . . . Nutt, D. (2014). The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by

neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8(1), 20.

Kaelen, M., Barrett, F., Roseman, S., Lorenz, L., Family, R., Bolstridge, N., . . .

Carhart-Harris, D. (2015). LSD enhances the emotional response to music.

Psychopharmacology, 232(19), 3607-3614.

Lebedev, Kaelen, Lövdén, Nilsson, Feilding, Nutt, & Carhart‐Harris. (2016). LSD‐

induced entropic brain activity predicts subsequent personality change. Human Brain

Mapping, 37(9), 3203-3213.

Nour, M., Evans, L., & Carhart-Harris, R. (2017). Psychedelics, Personality and

Political Perspectives. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 49(3), 182-191.

Nour, M. M., Evans, L., Nutt, D., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2016). Ego-Dissolution

and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI). Frontiers in Human

Neuroscience, 10, 269.

Tagliazucchi, E., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Orban, C., Muthukumaraswamy, S., Murphy, K., . . . Carhart-Harris, R. (2016). Increased Global Functional Connectivity Correlates with LSD-Induced Ego Dissolution. Current Biology, 26(8), 1043-1050.

45