Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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This account calls into question randomized placebo-controlled trials as the methodological gold standard of neuropsychopharmacology. A positivist proposal from the days when anthropology was still a holistic discipline is unearthed and reconsidered in the context of current attempts to move beyond the nature/culture divide: should placebo controls be supplemented by culture controls? Eventually, however, it turns out that the wild and overly complex neurochemistry of psychedelic drugs escapes both cultural and pharmacological attempts at controlling their effects and thereby threatens the global assemblage of contemporary hallucinogen research.
While the experiments at the center of chapter 3 mostly fall into the category of experimental mysticism, chapter 4 contrasts this rationale with experimental psychosis research. As the downfall and reanimation of the hallucinogen model of psychosis had reasons internal to psychopharmacology not covered by the preceding social and political analysis of the 1960s, the chapter adds this historical strand to the narrative. Ethnographically, it looks at model psychosis research through the eyes of a test subject, a theater director, drawing an analogy between the performative character of the experiment in which he participated and the break with representation in modernist aesthetics. In response to the exceeding complexity of the mind-brain, the revived psychotomimetic rationale constitutes an “enactive model” of psychosis that does not aim at a naturalistic depiction of schizophrenia but at a comparative investigation of drug intoxication and mental disorder as two distinct states situated on the same ontological level. They are used to shed light onto each other without one serving as a transparent representation of the other. Thereby, the question of whether supposedly mystical hallucinogen experiences are really psychotic (or the other way round) receives an unexpected answer: in a pragmatist frame of noncontradiction, the hallucinogenic experience appears multifaceted but not plural. It is not simply psychotic or mystical but takes different, practically mediated forms that are partially connected and coordinated through a shared historical matrix.
A discrepancy between experimental psychosis research in humans and animals then takes the reader from Switzerland to California. Chapter 5 relates how one enactive model of schizophrenia, based on the hallucinogen-induced modulation of the startle reflex, grew out of Huxleyan drug mysticism and a fairy tale by Hermann Hesse that was popular in the sixties. The chapter examines the ethics and epistemology of neuropsychopharmacological animal research, especially how scientists deal with the problems of set and setting and nonhuman forms of subjectivity. Difficulties in the translation between human and animal studies uncover a crisis of animal models in psychiatry. At the same time, they point to a molecularization of the differentia specifica of philosophical anthropology and the emergence of a recombinant anthropological form that joins the natural and the divine.
How this mystic materialism was lived and reflected upon by contemporary psychedelic researchers is described in the last chapter. The scientists’ incessant joking in the face of a supposedly unprecedented neuroscientific revolution of our image of humankind reveals the persistence of a dualist anthropology. At the same time, however, some of the actors transvalued monism into biomysticism. In contrast to the neurotheological interest in the biology of mystical experiences discussed in chapter 3, this mysticism of the biological reveres life itself. It is associated with different practices, such as a philosophical quest for “experiential invariants” pursued through systematic self-experimentation, artistic work employing photography to reflect the unity of materiality and spirituality, and the conduct of science not as a vocation but as cosmic play. Through the lives of many of the characters populating this book, the last chapter takes stock of the revival of psychedelic science so far.
The conclusion disambiguates this anthropologist’s cognitive dissonance regarding my materialist persuasions and the spiritual drug experience I had as a young man. Revisiting many insights from the substantive chapters, it moves from ethnography to anthropology and reflects on how the fieldwork in perennial philoso phy previously laid out from a third-person perspective responds to first-person philosophical concerns. For this purpose, this last part of the book reconfigures the chronotope of the contemporary into the perennial. It advocates an anthropological reorientation toward a new or, rather, contemporary form of universality.
1
Psychedelic Revival
HOFMANN’S HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY
13 January 2006. Guided by security personnel, Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, bent by a century to a height of barely five feet, took the stage on crutches. Almost two thousand people rose from their chairs in the Basel Convention Center. Thunderous applause. Dozens of photographers and cameramen—professional and hippie—were jostling in front of the centenarian birthday boy (see figure 1). The LSD Symposium took place in honor of Hofmann’s one-hundredth birthday. But it also served as a fair of the contemporary world of psychedelia, presenting itself in front of two hundred journalists who had come to cover the event. Fragile, but quite sprightly for his age, probably the only person in the hall wearing a tie, Hofmann briefly raised his hand to greet the crowd before sitting down with one of the organizers, a lively and stout middle-aged man with a full voice, president of the Psi Society Basel, a specialist for spiritual healing and otherwise involved in organizing trade fairs for esoterics. He asked Hofmann to tell one more time how he discovered his “problem child” and “wonder drug,” LSD. Hardly a newspaper article or TV program preceding or following this spectacular celebration did not begin its report with this almost mythological origin story.
In the 1930s, the research chemist Hofmann developed new ergot alkaloids for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz. They were meant to stop bleeding after childbirth. Hofmann created a number of derivatives from lysergic acid, the molecular core of ergot. In 1938, he synthesized the twenty-fifth substance in this series of compounds: lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD-25 (after the German Lysergsäurediäthylamid). The substance was tested on animals. They became restless and a strong effect on the uterus was established, but as neither the physicians nor the pharmacologists of Sandoz were particularly interested in the substance, these preclinical trials were discontinued. However, five years later—by now the rest of Europe was engulfed in war—Hofmann (1983: 14) followed what he called “a peculiar presentiment,” a hunch, “that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.” He noted that “this was quite unusual; experimental substances, as a rule, were definitely stricken from the research program if once found to be lacking in pharmacological interest” (14). To make a long story short, Hofmann must have contaminated himself with a small amount of this highly potent substance, and he experienced an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with an intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. Three days later, he conducted a self-experiment, ingesting what he (falsely) believed to be a small dose, and he experienced the first full-blown LSD trip in human history. The reason why this story is recounted over and over again is not the heroism of Hofmann’s self-experiment—self-administration was not uncommon in pharmacology at the time—but his claim to have followed a “peculiar presentiment” when taking the seemingly insignificant compound from the shelf again (see, e.g., Nichols 2006). He discovered its mind-blowing effects accidentally because of a little sloppiness in his usually meticulous chemical bench work.1 This led Hofmann to conclude that he did not find LSD but that it was LSD that found him. It must have been divine providence, not scientific method, admitting us to the enchanted world behind the “doors of perception.”
However, Hofmann, who had had his first mystical experience as a boy walking in the forest, was quick to add that one did not need LSD anymore once the gateway had been opened in one way or another. His greatest hope was that one day state-controlled meditation centers would provide LSD to facilitate the spiritual development of those seeking access to this experiential plane. But, he said, he did not want to be a guru telling others what to do. The organizer closed the opening ceremony by saying, “Dear Albert, you’re certainly the very best example to show that what you discovered is no infernal stuff!” Hofmann was presented with an enormous bunch of red roses. He expressed his thanks by saying that he was particularly grateful for the flowers, as our connectedness with other life forms, including plants, had become more and more important to him in recent years: “The feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological development