This essay explores how psychedelic experiences are expressed in literature and how readers and viewers experience these aesthetic forms. The author connects psychedelic aesthetics and theories of affect, cognitive science, and systems thinking to argue that psychedelic aesthetics offer affective maps that lead readers through imaginal landscapes of sensation and feeling that open up moments of...
Both written under pseudonym, Constance Newland’s My Self and I (1962) and Jane Dunlap’s Exploring Inner Space (1961) are firsthand accounts of psychedelic drug use taken in therapeutic research settings that demonstrate how women’s access to discursive legitimacy was negotiated in mid-twentieth-century life-writing. Newland and Dunlap use realism to connect readers to their psychedelic...