What good are psychedelic humanities?

Abstract

The revival of psychedelic research has been dominated by the biomedical sciences. Yet it raises questions that cannot be answered by laboratory experiments and clinical trials alone. Among these are questions pertaining to the conceptual and practical frameworks that render experimental and clinical findings meaningful. Psychedelic humanities clarify the historical presuppositions, philosophical blind spots, and political stakes of different approaches to psychedelics. In this emergent field, many scholars evaluate such alternatives epistemologically, ethically, or politically. However, they could just as well refrain from offering normative orientation and instead increase the complexity of the observed phenomena by opening other possible perspectives, leaving it to their readers to reduce the resulting complexity in novel ways. This enables clinical psychiatrists, laboratory scientists, and other practitioners to use (or abuse) psychedelic humanities scholarship for their own purposes. The article concludes with a note on the institutionalization of such collaboration at The New School’s Psychedelic Humanities Lab.

Community-based psychedelic integration and social efficacy: An ethnographic study in the Southeastern United States

“…A shortcoming of clinical trials is the difficulty of replicating the effects in non-clinical contexts, with different populations with different mindsets and settings. Langlitz (2023) called attention to "the peculiar cultural plasticity of the drugs' psychotropic effects" (3), as psychedelic experiences are context-dependent and easily affected by and setting (Noorani, 2021;Schleim, 2022). A concern of Noorani, Bedi, and Muthukumaraswamy (2023) is that "the proliferation of psychedelic [randomized control tests] that are currently underway is that they will achieve little for understanding the complex chemosocial properties of psychedelic interventions" (p. 8).…”

“…Humanities perspectives are important in psychedelic research because of their ability to encourage dialog, to ask difficult questions and interrogate basic assumptions about phenomena such as efficacy . Langlitz (2023) argued that philosophical consideration of epistemologies in the humanities can help "sharpen the sense of possibility and expand the imagination of the psychedelic renaissance" (p. 3).…”

Psychedelic Therapy as Form of Life

“…One of them listed the therapeutic bond between therapist and patient, intimacy with appropriate boundaries, and the therapist's authenticity ([92], pp. [55][56][57]. If the choice of psychotherapy was considered part of the therapist's authentic selfexpression, she argued, this common factor paradoxically required a diversification, maybe even singularization of therapeutic approaches, which would be at odds with reliance on a set of best practices identified by a professional body.…”

Cognitive liberty and the psychedelic humanities

“…Psychedelic humanities must consider the ontological turn explained above to overcome some paradoxes attached to the meaning of a key concept: “humanism.” With the help of anthropology, it is necessary to explain the differences between psychedelic humanities and psychedelic humanism. Regarding this issue, Langlitz (2020b) argues that the main difference is that psychedelic humanities do not attribute prime importance to humans rather than the divine or other beings such as animals or plants; in other words, psychedelic humanities do not embrace anthropocentrism.…”

“…To establish a clear difference between both, Langlitz (2020b) analyzed the failure of humanism, especially regarding its narrow scope. To achieve its goal challenged a core belief within humanism, i.e., that only human beings share certain features such as consciousness, agency, choice, responsibility, and morality, even though these capacities can be lost in particular circumstances.…”