Pscyhotropisms
It continues to astonish me that the word psychedelic was invented only seventy yeas ago by two dudes in correspondence. How could this word, that now possesses its own culture and an entire genre of style, together with a sordid cultural history, and that seems as old as time, have just been made up? But so it is. The psychiatrist Humphry Osmond proposed in rhyme in a letter to Aldous Huxley in 1956: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.”
The translation from the Greek still rings true in a philosophical sense: to show the mind—or mind-revealer, if you prefer—and which fits in nicely when, later on, Stanislaw Grof described psychedelics as a microscope or telescope for the mind. Psychedelic is certainly the most handy word for these potent substances but these days I find the word a bit stale and inadequate, not to mention highly stigmatized. I am of the strong opinion that psychedelic art is, for the most part, horrible, and these bad-aesthetics have glommed on the term psychedelic and so given it the taint of raw kitsch. Likewise the high-weird seventies have imbued the word psychedelic with some rather unsavory elements, MK Ultra not least among them.
The medicine women I have worked with refuse the word psychedelic and its attendant cultural language—such as tripping, or set and setting—on the grounds, I think, that this is the language of empire and erases a far older tradition. This makes sense to me, but I would also note that I am a child of empire and cannot so easily scrub my mind of colony. I grew up in psychedelia, so to speak; for example, I first learned of LSD from the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamondsfrom Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) which was one of the first cassette tapes I owned when a child.
In short, the word psychedelic is, as they say in my field, overdetermined, and I would prefer not to use it, if I can help it, although that is difficult.
Tryptamine is the most technically accurate name, referencing as it does the molecular structure common to psilocin, DMT, LSD, mescalin and so on. This term also complicates our project as the term also classifies melatonin and serotonin respectively and so scrambles the borders between exogenous and endogenous; tryptamines occur both within and without the body. This molecular structure likewise proves the rather profound relations between the world of molecular biology and the extreme limits of the psyche, where a baroque alkaloid key fits with impossible precision into our neurochemical tumblers. A question to stump jurisprudence: how is it that DMT, an endogenous tryptamine that is produced naturally, not only in human brains, but in nearly all living creatures, is a also a schedule one substance, the possession of which, in NYC, will get you sent to Rikers? By this definition, the brain itself is psychoactive (and illegal).
The term tryptamine is given extra elan by the DIY biochemist Alexander Shulgrin, the “godfather of ecstasy” who, with his wife Anne, synthesized a staggering 150 novel compounds in their garage, and who co-wrote the now legendary TiHKAL, a cute acronym meaning Tryptamines I have Known and Loved (1997). Anne Shulgrin was a pioneer in deploying MDMA as therapy.
As I have written about before I think the term Hallucinogen should be banned outright.
I remain indifferent to the term entheogen, and I do not use it. If “psychedelic” is overdetermined, entheogen is determined right out of the gate by having that “theo” right there in the middle of it. Why, pray tell, must we pre-mix god into these limit experiences? As I understand it this is an attempt to re-capture the psychedelic experience from a gross and godless hedonism and to return the practice to a religious or sacred setting, that is, to re-institute the ancient practice of eating the god—or, as we are familiar with today, the eucharist.
But this leads me to the rather gnarly idea at the heart of my project and which can be summed up under my own invented term: psychotropism; noun: a metaphor that is psychoactive. The common eucharist, as it is practiced in church every Sunday, whether Catholic or Lutheran, is a fine example of a psychotropism in action, where the body and the blood, in the form of wafer and wine, administered by a priest or pastor to a congregation in a smokey dark chapel, is as I see it, mind-altering, in a very literal sense; in other words, it’s trance inducing.
Of course, the name that science has for this phenomena is the placebo effect. The psychedelic tryptamine, known likewise as the super-placebo, pushes the psychotropism out to its radical limits, where what is traditionally known as the set—in set and setting—is the set of metaphors, the fantasies, that you bring to the limit experience, both conscious and unconscious and that are then amplified. In this experience one becomes overwhelmed by one’s own inscription; and yet it is also possible in this moment to re-inscribe a fantasy and that is why tryptamines have therapeutic potential.
The terms psychedelic, tryptamine, hallucinogen and entheogen are psychotropisms in their own right, each with the power to determine in advance a psychoactive experience. It is probably the case that the feelings induced by any psychoactive substance, whether coffee, vodka, or Adderall, is greatly effected by its own set of cultural metaphors; coffee is a culture just as much as it is a chemical agent. A history of the psychotropism oceanic feeling would be illuminating in this regard. This history would trace the oceanic metaphor from the American transcendentalist Emerson, to Nietzsche, Spielrein, Rolland, Freud and so on, continuing all the way to its present use in psychedelic research under the name boundlessness. How does this metaphor determine in advance the feelings induced by these novel compounds?
And yet psychotropisms are not confined to acid tabs and sugar pills, but are probably ambient in language itself. This I think, is what Freud means by the “magic of words,” mentioned in the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis: “Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power.” My understanding of this is that, on the one hand, a metaphor, or set of metaphors, has the ability to radically alter, or enhance, the manner in which we perceive what would otherwise be obscure (this maneuver is what Freud calls endopsychic perception), and on the other hand, the more woozy implication is that daylit reality, as we know it, is a but fabric woven of psychoactive metaphors (the symbolic), and which is an old gnostic and kabbalistic idea, as in the quasi-gnostic opening of the Gospel of John: “…in the beginning was the word…”
