Critical Doses: Nurturing Diversity in Psychedelic Studies

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to the thematic issue Critical Psychedelic Studies we argue that many and diverse critical analyses of psychedelic cultures and practices are needed to counter the current hype around the biomedicalization of psychedelic substances. The social sciences and humanities offer insights and methods to resist appropriation and to establish community based ethical practices. The assembled articles and book reviews indicate an urgency and vitality of research aimed at growing psychedelic cultures outside the medico-pharmaceutical complex, offering inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Critical psychedelic studies challenge hegemonial or colonizing knowledge practices in historical and contemporary psychedelic discourse. Bringing together insights from the different original contributions we reflect on power relations in the psychedelic revival. In this article we argue against field definitions and in favour of diverse and agile formations of consciousness and praxis. We provide critical ideas for deconstructing both the patriarchal colonial legacies and the contemporary power dynamics focussed on wealth creation that characterize today's psychedelic revival.

KEYWORDS:

• psychedelics
• psychedelic revival
• decoloniality
• biomedicalization
• critical studies
• feminism
• power relations
• hype

The two editors (Christine on the left, Claudia on the right) with vegan food and a local psychoactive brew during a break at a workshop in Leiden on ‘Substance, set, and setting’. Photo credit: Hedwig Hauskeller.

Introduction

There is and has been a rich tapestry of practices with psychedelic substances enacted in different cultures and places for decades, and in some cases for centuries or perhaps even millennia. In recent decades illegality or semi-legality have threatened almost all of them in different ways. Indigenous practices with psychedelic substances have changed in contexts of relentless persecution since the colonization of the Americas. Rave parties and religious or pagan ceremonies are in a similar position of ambiguous (il)legality; often outlawed on paper but lightly policed. Such uses above- and underground are sought out by participants with very diverse aims and intentions, growing from the webs of complex desires and experiences in which we exist as human beings. Human beings seek to experience exuberant happiness of body and mind synchronously with human and more-than-human others, to expand and work on their self, mind, and consciousness. Some wish to experience and form communities through rituals and find aesthetic fulfilment in altered states of encountering nature, the cosmos, and oneself within.

Clinical research on the potential of psychedelics, conducted to help people struggling with trauma, addiction, depression, anxiety, and other states of mental health that are labelled as ‘ill’ or ‘disordered’, represents yet another form of psychedelic practice. A decade ago, the re-emerging field of clinical psychedelic research was struggling to gain scientific legitimacy and procure investments to conduct clinical trials on the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances. This has changed following a few promising research results from small trials (e.g. reviews by Johnson et al. 2019; dos Santos et al. 2021). Not only scientific, but also wider audience publications on the subject in daily newspapers and bestselling books correspond to heightened societal interest. The phrase Michael Pollan Effect came into circulation, marking the perceived impact of Pollan's (2018) bestseller on multi-level engagement with psychedelic practices. Clinical psychedelic research is increasingly better ‘mainstreamed’ – to use the emic term often employed for this process inside the psychedelic research community – and the psychedelic revival is accelerating. For many, this is happening with dangerous speed and in a direction that may increase inequalities that contribute to mental health issues rather than counter them (Devenot 2023). We are witnessing and are part of what may be a bubble of high expectations that might burst and then, as some fear, threaten the psychedelic research field itself (Yaden, Potash, and Griffiths 2022). In contemporary westernized discourse and politics, the biomedical perspective on psychedelics has gained the upper hand and drawn public attention. Now such medicalized use threatens to overshadow and colonize all other uses, transforming psychedelic practices to fit into the dynamics of the medical industrial complex (Hauskeller 2022; Noorani 2020; Richert and Dyck 2020; Sanabria 2021). The resulting disempowerment of subcultures¹ and the re-articulation of many human needs and desires moulded to semi-scientific categories of mental disease are among the prominent reasons why we need diverse critical psychedelic studies.

In this introduction to the thematic issue, we argue in favour of creating a rich body of critical analyses of psychedelic cultures and uses across the social sciences and humanities to balance out the overly positive rhetoric of the contemporary biomedical hype discourse. Like other research fields that have been pampered in the context of biomedicalization in recent decades, clinical psychedelic research poses challenges and is not a panacea for societal ills. There are scholarly communities, engaged in critical analysis of the opportunities and risks of biomedical innovations for individuals and societies, who have the methods and knowledge – though sadly at present rarely the research funding – to support a safe and sustainable engagement with psychedelic experiences in different cultures. We think that there is no need to ring alarm bells, nor is there any need for a specific kind of psychedelic exceptionalism that would couch this development as unique. The currency of boom and hype talk around psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy reflects more the well-worn cloak of dramatizing advertising practices to target funders and publics than a sound assessment of the complex realities of societal change. Instead of adding to the boom-and-bust myths that circle the psychedelic research field, we wish to contribute to a better understanding of what constitutes the psychedelic problem complex. The broader perspective this notion entails is growing from a multitude of independent critical studies by scholars in humanities and social sciences who take care to examine practices in depth and thus counteract unjustified hype. There are ethical, political and economic risks to societies if the business model of blockbuster drugs is applied to psychedelic mental health treatments. There are equally risks to people from taking drugs, especially without suitable advice and guidance, and the global psychedelic tourism market is also problematic for many reasons (Molnar 2019).

Critical studies of social and scientific phenomena are often relegated to the humanities and social sciences in subfields such as bioethics. Some scholars are working towards a bioethics of psychedelic psychotherapy (Devenot et al. 2022; Jacobs et al. 2023) or use the label psychedelic humanities (Gonzales Romero 2022; Langlitz 2019) to stake their claim. With critical psychedelic studies, we do not propose yet another discipline or field but a name to help identify specific traits within works that can come from any disciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary background. Creating another field or discipline would not be coherent with the decolonial approach we try to take, insofar as field demarcation is itself a power move to claim authority over a dominion (Hauskeller, Manzeschke, and Pichl 2020). Instead, a decolonial practice can involve bringing together the diverse critical voices that engage in the study of psychedelics to reclaim space that is being occupied by societally more powerful actors for those diverse marginalized psychedelic agents. To this end, all sciences can contribute and the social sciences and humanities do and should continue to be prominent. At present, psychedelic research seems to come out of a phase of hot promise paired with a boom in public and investor interest that may already be starting to wane. Similar situations have shaped other emerging biomedical fields over the past decades and such attention rollercoasters affect all scientists, including psychedelic researchers, whose personalities and values are shaped by the cultures and norms with which they live (Hauskeller 2004). Many observe and articulate resistance to the take-over of psychedelics to be holed up in pharmaceutical company asset baskets and in the neuro- and pharmacological sciences at the expense of subcultural practices and cultural enrichment (Dumit and Sanabria 2022; Fotiou 2019; Hauskeller 2022; Noorani 2020; Gonzales Romero 2023) and at the risk of destroying indigenous peoples’ lives, customs and lands (Celidwen et al. 2023; Umiyak 2019).

Critical research – which takes a normative position, from humanities or social science perspectives, and from different parts of the world – will contribute to a more advanced understanding of the complex socio-economic challenges facing psychedelic practices in the twenty-first century. Heavily among them weigh the moral, political and ethical legacies, the systemic biases and the neo-colonial harms committed in the current push for rapid psychedelic innovation. This thematic issue adds five original articles to the expanding body of scholarly work in critical psychedelic studies. The articles challenge, in detail, different practices and hierarchies of power in psychedelic discourses and practices. They are in-depth studies, some building their arguments on ethnographic fieldwork of ways of knowing and intersubjective practices that are different from our Euro–US-American worldview, such as the work by Valeria McCarroll (2022, in this thematic issue) and Olivia Marcus (2022, in this thematic issue). Other articles use methods of conceptual and historical analysis to critique power moves within the dominant societies and discourses in the current psychedelic landscape (Hauskeller et al., 2022, in this thematic issue; Breau and Gillis-Smith; Webb). The thematic issue also includes reviews of four recently published books on social, historical and philosophical approaches to psychedelics. These books explore key dimensions of practice, ethics and meaning and dilute the singular legitimacy currently awarded to medicalization by the Western industrial apparatus that aims for a controlled and profitable re-release of psychedelics into society.

Critical studies is a vague term, but central to such studies is the category of power. In this article we discuss some of the power formations and struggles that matter for psychedelics in the twenty-first century, while simultaneously highlighting how the collection of articles and book reviews engages and thematizes them. We attempt a systematic discussion of critical psychedelic studies that weaves threads between the individual articles and book reviews.

The problematic power dynamics actualized around psychedelics are diverse and complex. Some of the unjust structures within the psychedelic revival can be traced back to tensions between powerful operators in international drug or medicine development and regulation and those subjected to their politics. Mark Schunemann describes this central concern of critical psychedelic studies in his review of Beatriz Labate and Clancy Cavnar’s (2021) edited volume Psychedelic Justice. A book about looking ‘at ways in which such intersectional injustices are sustained in contemporary human relationships with psychedelics, harming the poor, women, queer folx, and ethnic minorities. But it also looks at ways in which the reverse can happen: how (1) injustices can become visible through particular relationships with psychedelics and (2) how stronger will and motivations can, even with psychedelics as catalysts, stimulate the structural change to end these injustices’ (Schunemann 2023, in this volume). Societal practices marginalize and hurt in ways that often inflict lasting damage to human beings’ state of mind and health. They thus create the patients for new markets of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The critical questions in this regard then include the following: Will psychedelic treatments be developed with the primary aim of healing those traumatized and wounded in their body-minds? Will interests for huge profits from commerce be offset against ethical and clinical best practice? And moreover, to re-articulate a central concern of anti-psychiatry, will such treatments be calibrated so as to serve the status quo of institutional powers (Hauskeller 2022), or can they contribute to the formation of societies less marked by hate, violence and systemic injustice? We conceive of critical psychedelic studies as characterized by an orientation that is not afraid to engage with such questions and thereby contributes to the understanding and a possible development of political strategies to intervene in oppressive power structures. Such studies may thus be conducted to analyse the ways in which the psychedelic medicine apparatus is entangled with institutional operations that have a history of entrenching injustices and inflicting the suffering that they then profess to alleviate.

To disentangle and disable this web of powerful dynamics will require a different ethic, fundamental political reorientations and alternative community structures, not just a few sessions of substance-enabled insight for both those thriving and those merely surviving in this (dis)order. A wealth of critical psychedelic studies can provide the necessary antidote to the technofix imagination sweeping through the psychedelic research community. Such studies can help us realize that what might appear as one collective trip might be much more diverse and less homogeneous. Ido Hartogsohn’s book American Trip (2020), in which he traces seven versions of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) that made up the collective US-American trip of the 1960s (see the book review by Schwarz in this issue), is exemplary for how the critical examination of psychedelic history can break up dominant narratives about what psychedelics are. Psychedelics were never ‘just’ countercultural, they have always had a multiplicity of potentials. As Hartogsohn shows, psychedelics are malleable substances that morph into different things depending on the set and setting of their use. A revival of critical comparative studies that traces the communalities, contradictions and fights between different (psychedelic) cultures and their socio-psychedelic imaginaries (Schwarz-Plaschg 2022), i.e. their visions for legal psychedelic practices, may help to establish fairer practices, spreading across the Global South and North.

Biomedicine, power and ethics

Two oft-overlooked themes that need to be addressed to work towards more just psychedelic practices are the immoral and violent legacy of colonization in South America and the prohibitions of psychedelic practices since the early 1970s throughout the world. With the phrase Global South and North we have employed a generalist demarcation between parts of the world that is problematic as a dualist distinction. Critical studies of power dynamics in the realm of psychedelics are greatly enriched by focusing more on the impacts of colonialization, which includes the diffusion of laws and drug scheduling systems from the lands of the colonizer into different cultures and regions. This is the theme of ‘Decolonization is a metaphor towards a different ethic: the case from psychedelic studies’ by Christine Hauskeller and an interdisciplinary group of scholars (Hauskeller et al. 2022, this thematic issue). They argue for a wide metaphorical use of the concept of decolonization because the dominant use of the term is US-centric, historically oriented and emphasizes reparations. If decolonization is thus restricted to a quite specific historical context, the concept’s utility is de-politicized; moreover, the narrow use can effectively veil ongoing and newer practices of colonization. For developing a decolonizing ethic the authors suggest drawing on feminist critiques of dualist epistemologies as oppressive power techniques, see for instance Val Plumwood (1993).

Non-dualist ways of thinking are also powerfully emphasized in the article ‘Mysticizing medicine: incorporating nondualism into the training of psychedelic guides practices’ (Marcus 2022 online, in this thematic issue). Valeria McCarroll speaks from her wealth of expertise in helping clients integrate their psychedelic experiences and describes how the integration process can create an expansive, deeply rooted feeling-knowing of nondualist worldviews. Her examination of the ethical and social value of such a de-centring and confident nondualist outlook pushes strongly against unrealistic normative arguments mobilized by some psychedelic researchers defending a materialist-reductionist worldview (e.g. Johnson 2021). A key question for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is whether it is possible to keep the spiritual, religious and metaphysical views of guides out of clinical practice. After decades of research in the philosophy of science and studies in science, technology and society (STS), the ideology that science and allopathic medicine hold a neutral space beyond metaphysics, social values, norms and interests appears naive and lacking in a critical understanding of the workings of powerful institutions (Gerber et al. 2021; Gonzales Romero 2023). For psychedelic medicine, this means that an implicit separation of the clinic and the rest of life, and of the guide as a plain projective surface rather than a real other, is not only problematic but harmful. McCarroll shows that we should aim for transparency of metaphysical beliefs to foster a genuine therapeutic relationships in the professional training of psychedelic guides, and to ensure the success of treatments.

One major criticism of current research protocols in psychedelic medicine is that they operate without building on established and continuing patient–therapist relationships. Psychedelic use as part of classical dynamic therapies has provided safer environments (see Meckel Fischer 2015). The time a therapy is allowed to take is a major profit concern, and hence study designs are shaped by broader capitalist interests that benefit most from fewer therapy sessions in psychedelic treatment programmes. Human interaction in the form of hours of highly qualified therapists is a major cost factor. But from an ethical and patient-centred perspective, we must question whether this should trump the need for quality care (on phenomenology of treatments, see e.g. Sanchez Petrement 2023). The deficit view of patients denies them conscious and reflective agency, prevents them from being informed and deciding about the metaphysical worldviews offered to them within the treatment setting (we return to the issue of metaphysics later, when discussing the philosophical articles in the issue). The question of how to train psychedelic guides and deal with different ways of knowing in psychedelic integration practices links McCarroll’s article and the piece by social anthropologist Olivia Marcus titled ‘“Everybody’s creating it along the way”: ethical tensions among globalized Ayahuasca shamanism and therapeutic integration practices.’ Marcus and McCarroll contribute to the ongoing debate on the proper training and on trends in professionalization for psychedelic mental health treatments. While McCarroll discusses and promotes the potential of nondual Eastern philosophical and spiritual thoughts for making sense of psychedelic experiences in a Western setting, Marcus explores the meeting of Western psy-disciplines with South American healing approaches.

Drawing on anthropological literature on vegetalismo practices (e.g. Luna 1986; Sanabria 2021), as well as her own extensive fieldwork in Peru, Marcus discusses the tensions between the dominant worldview of biomedically oriented psychedelic psychotherapy and Peruvian vegetalismo shamanism. Marcus illustrates, through examples, the pitfalls of mixing ontologies. She shows ethical consequences in a way that resonates with Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of ethico-onto-epistemologies, a term coined to elucidate the inextricable entanglement of ethics, ontology and epistemology in lived practice, including scientific knowledge production. This example highlights the point that psychedelic studies urgently need more cross-cultural studies on the mixing of ethico-onto-epistemologies from different world regions, and that the success of such therapies possibly depends on this mixing, rather than boundary-establishing ideas of purity. Psychedelics open minds to other ways of seeing and knowing and hence the field should be open to challenging and revising the power hierarchies it unwittingly or consciously enacts. A key challenge of psychedelic experiences is how individuals can turn their gained insights into actual changes in their own lives. In the literature the individualization of experience is questioned, working for instance with groups (Roseman et al. 2021). Olivia Marcus effectively defamiliarizes and re-contextualizes integration practices in psychedelic use based on her observations in Peru. Her article, and that of McCarroll, contribute insights about learning and training to the current debate. Psychedelic experiences can connect knowledges from different ethico-onto-epistemologies; safely and successfully guiding such connective experiences requires an openness to such experiences. Both articles bring to the fore the importance of paying close attention whenever experts from a globally powerful place or from another field enter more marginalized knowledge spaces, carrying with them their own ontologies and worldviews.

The wealth of different integration practices across cultures can greatly benefit the Western project but with the caveat that we must try to avoid new forms of cultural appropriation and unequal benefits from such cross-cultural collaborations. Mindful of this conundrum, Marcus presents people as experts in bricolage. Bricolage here means a practice of cultural innovation that has its purpose in cultural evolution when cultural appropriation remains power-sensitive and is conducted within a mindset tuned towards intersubjective growth to avoid violence. The way in which words and language affect and shape the current psychedelic discourse is a central topic in the critical studies in this issue, especially key psychedelic tropes such as mind at large or the understanding of mystical experiences that is mobilized in most current clinical trials. We turn to such critiques from the humanities in the next section, after a short reflection on the diffuse meaning of psychedelic.

Turning the critical gaze onto our own words, concepts and ideologies

Psychedelic substances have been called phantastica, hallucinogens, entheogens, psychotomimetics or psychedelics, to name just a few common expressions for these perception-changing types of substances. Although they refer to the same set of substances, these names carry different horizons of meaning: ‘The interpretational frameworks connoted include illusion and divinity, psychology and metaphysics, as well as several modern medical sciences such as pharmacology, neuroscience, and psychiatry’ (Hauskeller and Sjöstedt-Hughes 2022, 2). Nowadays, the term psychedelic – a compound of two Greek words denoting mind or soul and manifesting – is the most commonly used name. But debates about this language and authoritative terminology are still ongoing, pointing to underlying social struggles between different groups with divergent visions (Schwarz-Plaschg 2022). Names carry political as well as societal relevance because they pre-format the horizon of associations. The historic burden of the word psychedelic and the changed collective setting of climate threat encourage some to make the case for a new term, ecodelic, that emphasizes the nature-connectedness aspect of experiences and with it the need for more ecological consciousness that extraordinary experiences can raise (Doyle 2011). For our discussion and the articles in this thematic issue, a sharp spotlight on nature-connectedness would be unfitting, because current practices fuse and exploit many more ethico-onto-epistemologies connected to such experience, substances and cultures of use.

We choose psychedelic because its horizon of meaning carries historical legacies and its vagueness is helpful for sharp and contrasting analyses. As a noun, psychedelic appears to be the name for a category, but it covers a hotchpotch of things including ‘natural’ foods, such as mushrooms, animal and plant extracts and brews, but also laboratory-produced ‘synthetic’ drugs such as LSD, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), psilocybin, and many more. As an adjective, too, psychedelic has a wide range of meanings. It is used to refer to non-ordinary visual and other sensory, cognitive, embodied, emotional experiences. In addition, it is used to identify features of objects from art works, films and virtual reality tech, fashion, furniture and wallpapers, often loosely associated with lifestyles of the 1960s and 1970s. The recent return of the psychedelic requires critical engagement with the 1960s hangover, including the unprocessed fictions and violence that waft through the psychedelic renaissance. The connection between language and psychedelics also figures in Reanne Crane’s review of Buchanan’s Processing Reality, in which Buchanan tackles Whitehead’s philosophical strategy of semantic defamiliarization to generate radically new thought. There is plenty of jargon in current psychedelic discourse, mixing phrases with sanitized or romanticized imaginaries to appeal to and re-validate certain views of interpretative authority of Western ‘psychedelic pioneers.’ Erik Davis critically analyses the biographies and work of several such authors, including Terence McKenna in High Weirdness (Davis 2019), and Hauskeller and colleagues (this issue) refute the trope of Gordon Wasson as discoverer of psychedelic mushrooms.

In ‘Nested hermeneutics: mind at large as a curated trope of psychedelic experience’, Adrian Webb presents a detailed hermeneutic analysis of how another oft-referenced author, namely Aldous Huxley, went about his work. Huxley’s (1954) book, The Doors of Perception is among the most quoted works in psychedelic discourse that is describing what psychedelic experiences are like and what they do. We come to wonder how much the scientific language used today, in concepts such as neuroplasticity, self-loss, and opening-up to exceptional experiences is affected by the invented epistemology of the mind promoted by Huxley in Doors of Perception. Webb’s careful examination of the corpus of ideas used by Huxley shows that he has misrepresented the ideas of others. Henry Bergson’s notion of a mind at large is badly misunderstood and the ‘quotations’ from C.D. Broad’s work are referenced with errors that are serious misrepresentations. Building on Webb’s analysis in the logic of our argument, one might say that Huxley has curated the shoulders of the philosophical giants he then claims to be standing on. He creatively moulded their arguments to suit his purposes as a journalist – and that with huge literary success. For those who are sensitized to the wrongs arising when authority is claimed through false nested hermeneutics, the dominance over a horizon of imaginations and interpretation that misrepresentations can hold is cause for worry. Webb’s article is allowing us to start questioning Huxley’s status as philosophical authority in psychedelic discourses. Transferring Webb's approach into the contemporary psychedelic revival sensitizes us to critically scrutinize the underlying assumptions and framing power of Michael Pollan's (2018) popular journalistic bestseller and his Huxley-like effect on the positions of psychedelic scientists towards sociopolitical processes outside of their scope of expertise (Schwarz-Plaschg 2020).

How we make sense of psychedelic experiences via scientific approaches is discussed systematically by Andy Letcher (2013). He notes that ‘Bergson, railing against the psychometric testing of his day, thought experience to be pure quality, not something that can be measured or quantified’ (246) and that we ‘cannot say anything about the manifest content of psychedelic experiences but perhaps it is possible to say something about the hermeneutic process by which that content is made meaningful’ (248). Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith offer an in-depth analysis of the religious imagery that has become part of the fabric of questions that frame and create meaning. The measurement of emotion is to be achieved through a psychological questionnaire, the metaphysical experience questionnaire (MEQ) invented by Walter Pahnke (1963) in the 1960s. Pahnke fittingly tried and tested it on theology students, but in one of its transformations it is still commonly used today: when patient-participants are requested to fill it out as part of reporting on a trip in the context of a clinical trial. Breau and Gillis-Smith’s article ‘Psychometric brahman, psychedelic science: Walter Stace, transnational Vedanta, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire’ is another case study in nested hermeneutics. It considers the intellectual fashions of the mid-twentieth century and shows how the philosopher Walter Stace developed a religious concept of mysticism, mixing different religious traditions with a specific historic Americanized Brahmanism. This then is translated by Pahnke into questions on a psychometric measurement tool without intellectual critique. That this ideologically biased MEQ is still being used in contemporary clinical research is quite striking; this discussion may help to lessen its influence in shaping the interpretation of psychedelic experiences, especially when a conceptual frame for such interpretation is offered through institutions that present themselves as rational, beyond religious and societal ideology. We hope that these analyses raise awareness and critical reflection on concepts and ethical methods of referencing and constructing frameworks for exceptional experiences.

Ideologies and power struggles over discursive authority

The critiques of Aldous Huxley and the two Walters, Pahnke and Stace, both show the powerful effects of artfully produced universality created by blending out differences of history, culture and power differentials within the contexts from which they draw. Huxley and Stace use classical patriarchal methods of power by situating themselves as authority, void of self-critical analysis regarding their methods and motifs. Feminist and decolonial scholars immediately recognize the posturing that is, sadly, still effective. At this point critical scholars must ask who benefits from nurturing these elements of discourse that are patriarchal and colonizing. Can contemporary researchers avoid gaining weight, unity and credibility from being connected to past clinical research with psychedelics, influential names in Western philosophical and religious thought and some grand concepts such as mind at large and supposedly trans-religious, perennial mysticism? From our standpoint, the issue at stake is not that we see the formation of a Western field of expertise with a long and rich tradition and pedigree but rather that it is made to appear as independent and (better) alternative to indigenous and other subcultural knowledges and practices.

To expose such discursive strategies of silencing and sidelining, scholars in psychedelic research would do well to turn towards critical perspectives on the methods and practices of science that have been developed in the philosophy of science and STS studies. A foundational approach has been presented in Ludwik Fleck’s (1935) critique of what he termed ‘thought collectives’ in the medical community, of which he himself was a member. Such thought collectives are characterized by their ideological ‘thought styles,’ akin to what today might be more colloquially termed groupthink. Fleck’s study was a first indication of our understanding that critique of ethico-onto-epistemologies is fostered through cooperation across disciplines. What is constitutive of critical studies in this vein is their willingness to turn the critical gaze on their own thought styles with their particular blind spots and to remain open to challenging influences from other thought collectives.

Current psychedelic research claims that healing with the use of these drugs is linked to the neuroplasticity they cause in the brain. A whole set of tropes and ideas about the untapped potential of the human mind and ideologies of cognitive enhancement is connected to this. Given the pride of the psychedelic community to be thinking outside of conventional boxes, accusations of groupthink in psychedelics discourse appear more ironic than usual, albeit they are unsurprising, given that the forces shaping emergent scientific domains encourage ruthless self-advertising to gain influence regardless of the scientific field in question. The same holds for the interdisciplinary field of STS that has picked up steam since the 1960s and is now institutionalized in many universities and research institutes all over the world. Claudia Gertraud Schwarz interweaves her two-year trip to study psychedelic research in Boston while visiting one of these places, the Harvard STS Program, with her reading of American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century, a book Ido Hartogsohn wrote during his stay at the same programme. Recognizing the difficulty and ultimate inability to strictly disentangle her own experience from the writing of the review, Schwarz re-enacts the central tenet of STS regarding the social embeddedness of knowledge production. Consequently, her book review breaks the boundaries of the genre and brings in her own painful subjective experience of exclusion from said programme for speaking up about the gendered injustices produced by the blind spots of its thought style. The question that forms the red thread of her review is how we can critique something that is harming us while we are dependent on it to sustain ourselves and build our professional career.

Given the strictures and power distribution in current psychedelic research, it appears challenging to turn the critical gaze at problematic power structures within this space. Many clinical psychedelic researchers have been part of rave and religious communities using psychedelics, and some even openly profess to believe (sometimes through their own example, see Hart 2021) that responsible substance use can enhance lives and lead to human flourishing. Yet, the paradigms of scientific measurement and the appropriation practices that they entail are not seriously challenged from within this scientific space, where many are working to make the science better through interdisciplinarity (Breeksema and van Elk 2021; Mollaahmetoglu et al. 2021; van Elk and Fried 2023). Because psychedelic researchers often have a peculiar involvement with the substances they study, an illusory neutral position of false objectivities and abstractions must be avoided and the strong case for situatedness of knowledge production is obvious (Haraway 1988). This then entails, for ethicists, fighting for access to the commons and elevating marginalized and silenced voices.

This brings us to the last two book reviews in this thematic issue and again to the topic with which we started this introduction. We began with an emphasis on the much wider knowledge and experience contexts of psychedelics, which include historico-political, socio-economic, and aesthetic and ethical dimensions, in addition to natural scientific and medical interest. The universe of human, plant and animal life and what the sciences have to say about it can be mobilized and philosophy is among the disciplines speaking to many of them. This is a viewpoint taken by Andy Letcher, in his review of the volume Philosophy and Psychedelics, Frameworks for Exceptional Experience, edited by Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (2022). Tapping into his aforementioned work on understanding psychedelic experiences, he notes, following his reflections on each individual chapter: ‘It should be clear by now that psychedelic experiences can be ghastly, noetic, astonishing, or just plain weird. They can result in empty platitudes or speculative metaphysics; rampant capitalism or revolutionary zeal. … we are only now beginning fully to plumb the depths of psychedelic phenomenology and to explore the wider societal, cultural, and philosophical implications. So, while it’s premature to answer the question of what to do about the woo, this pioneering book very much points us in the right direction.’ (Letcher 2023, in this issue).

The topic of psychedelics and philosophy is also taken up in another book reviewed in this thematic issue. Being a philosopher, a psychedelic user and an addict is the topic of John Buchanan’s (2022) autobiographical book on philosophy and psychology Processing Reality: Finding Meaning in Death, Psychedelics, and Sobriety. The book serves as an excellent example for how disclosing one’s psychedelic experiences can be important to convey one’s cognitive and humanist evolution. In her beautifully written review titled ‘Passageways through process philosophy: panpsychism in practice,’ Reanne Crane praises Buchanan’s ‘genre-defying confluence of rigorous metaphysical interpretation and intimate confessional memoir’ (Crane 2023, this issue). She emphasizes his critique of Western interpretations of Buddhism and other metaphysical systems that prioritize unitive experiences and oneness rather than tending to the multiplicity of existence. For Crane, Processing Reality makes a sharp case for combining biographical and philosophical reflection with experiential methods from, among others, transpersonal psychology, to open up possibilities for the co-existence of interconnection and diversity as an alternative to the alienating prison of the individualizing modern world.

This thematic issue on critical psychedelic studies illustrates, on the one hand, the acceptance that we cannot fully withstand the powers that be and, on the other hand, the fact that the genuine scholarly spirit of producing better knowledge together is able to provide a variety of non-mainstream viewpoints that can enrich the co-shaping of the psychedelic revival. We have brought together examinations that bridge the methods and knowledge produced in the social sciences and humanities to contribute insights that matter for our critical analysis of psychedelic spaces in contemporary society. Inter-, multi-, and cross-disciplinary studies and expertise of psychedelic practices around the globe are needed to reflect on the current hype around mind-expanding substances in the Global North. They thematize the violence inherent in capitalist appropriations, and in the prioritization of the medical over all other uses in which psychedelics could contribute to globaldelic understanding and perspectives. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews is an ideal home for this thematic issue.

Acknowledgements

The contributions to this thematic issue were collected from two conference panels organized by the editors at two different conferences of the Society for Social Studies of Science as well as a call for papers. We thank the authors for their excellent contributions and the peer reviewers who helped to achieve this, often with very short turnaround times. We also thank the editors of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, especially Dr Tara Mahfoud, who provided reliable upbeat support throughout and helped us carry this thematic issue over the line when that line was redrawn earlier than we all had expected.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Hauskeller

Christine Hauskeller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. She holds an M.A. in Philosophy, Sociology and Psychoanalysis (University Frankfurt on Main) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Christine studies constellations of knowledge and power, of epistemology and ethics. Her expertise and research bridge across ethics and political philosophy to philosophy of medicine and the life sciences. She especially advances methods and concepts developed in Critical Theory and Feminism. She founded the Exeter transdisciplinary research group psychedelics studies. Recent publications include The Matrix of Stem Cell Research (Routledge 2020) and Philosophy and Psychedelics. Frameworks of Exceptional Experience (Bloomsbury 2022).

Claudia Gertraud Schwarz

Claudia Gertraud Schwarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Austria. She holds an M.A. in media studies and a doctoral degree in sociology (both from the University of Vienna). Claudia's research focuses on the sociopolitical dynamics and ethical dimensions of (re-)emerging scientific fields and technologies, the role of psychedelics and other healing modalities in society, gender studies and feminism, and the entanglements of science, spirituality, and art. She also works as science communicator and seeks to change society for the better through her activism such as the #WeDoSTS movement that she started in the field of Science, Technology, and Society studies.

Notes

1 We use the term ‘subcultures’ to refer to cultural hierarchies within countries of the Global North and hierarchies between cultures that are upheld via colonial structures globally.