Psychonauts (2023)
It is strange today, in our age of behaviorism and neuroscience, to conceive of a scientist dosing themselves with unknown drugs in order to make valid scientific observation and yet this is precisely what many scientists of the mind did at the turn of the century. That their observations, of their own highly-subjective altered states, became the psychological foundation upon which much of our understanding of the mind rests, is another strange origin that hegemonic Psychology has sufficiently suppressed.
This is the story that Mike Jay lays out in Psychonauts (2023) his engaging social history of 19th century drug exploration. The groundbreaking experiments by Humphrey Davy, William James, and Sigmund Freud, are at once both explorations of novel psychoactive substances, and the exploration of subjectivity itself. The historical arc goes from the fecund research of that scientist getting ripped on pure uncut subjectivity, objectively observing their own subjective state, noticing how they are both subject and object at once—a tradition that lasts well into the 20th century, until the backlash arrives in the guise of behaviorism, in which subjectivity becomes persona-non-grata (because unmeasurable) and the drugs are either criminalized, or industrially produced by Big Pharma as medication. This now happens to be the world we live in, where all psychological problems are a chemical imbalance—as if the human being were a brain in a vat.
The character sheet here is extensive, philosophers, artists, neurologists and poets are making experiments on their own bodies and noting results that are essentially unprecedented. So in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James, based on own his early experiments with nitrous oxide, will invert—or subvert—religious experience into a particular structure that he was able to grasp by the anesthetic revelation; his famous notes on mystical experience were informed—induced?—precisely by his drug-experience.
Freud, likewise, in his early experiments with cocaine, encounters a limit, or borderland, between subject and object, between psyche and soma. In his second cocaine paper, Contribution to the Knowledge of the Effect of Cocaine (1885) after rigorous measurement performed using a dynamometer and neuramoebimeter, on his own body, he will conclude the rather extraordinary finding that the mind is the source of physiological effect. This in turn will become the central tenant of psychoanalysis: the pathological idea. This is a far cry from today’s dogmatic notions of chemical imbalance but the recent findings in psychedelic therapy prove the same: how can LSD cause an effect upon the mind long after LSD has left the body? What remains salient is not the chemical, but the experience.
While many of Freud’s contemporaries would succumb to addiction and death, it is likely that he escaped such a fate due to his own abstemiousness. He had a plaque in his office/laboratory that read "WHEN IN DOUBT, ABSTAIN.” It seems to me that this may be a prototype of what would become psychoanalytic listening in the form of evenly suspended attention.
Jay’s book makes the claim that the novel experiences of a few psychonauts can move a whole culture. The romantic movement was inspired by the tales of nitrous oxide, from Coleridge and Robert Southey. The beatniks likewise were on the standing wave of LSD research in the early 50s and 60s. And the rise of modernism owed no small part to the Club des Hashischins frequented by Hugo, Dumas, Nerval and Charles Baudelaire; together with James’s viral stream of consciousness, that would inform the style of a generation. The book makes a fair argument that, over the last two centuries, it has been figure of the psychonaut who leads first in the avant garde.
William James, Psychonaut,
