Early Experimental LSD Cultures in the Clinic
The MIT Press eBooks November 21, 2023 Magaly Tornay
This chapter examines how LSD was initially used in psychiatric clinics to study and reinforce the boundary between normal and pathological, before becoming a politically subversive substance in the 1960s. The author analyzes early clinical practices of meaning-making around LSD in Switzerland, where psychiatric institutions were involved in both clinical trials and the production process of ergot for Sandoz. The chapter situates this history within the broader context of twentieth-century psychiatry, where categories of normal and pathological became increasingly flexible and disputed, culminating in the antipsychiatry movement.