History of the Human Sciences
January 1, 2010
Nicolas Langlitz
32 citations
Despite hopes and fears that brain research would eliminate subjectivity and replace folk psychology with a neuroscientific worldview, that cultural shift has not occurred. Based on nine months of fieldwork in a psychopharmacological laboratory studying hallucinogens since the 1990s, the paper examines how subjective experience remains central as both an epistemic object and a practical problem. In neuroimaging studies seeking neural correlates of drug-induced altered states, test subjects' introspective accounts are crucial. Researchers' own firsthand knowledge of the drugs' effects, though absent from publications, is key to conducting experiments. The psychedelic experience often draws scientists into the field and shapes their self-image and way of life, showing the persistence of the subjective in contemporary neuropsychopharmacology.
History of the Human Sciences
January 1, 2010
Eugene Taylor
10 citations
William James defended personal consciousness throughout his career, declaring in his 1890 "Principles of Psychology" that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness and that the thinker is the thought. While writing that work, he investigated a dynamic psychology of the subconscious, which became central to his 1902 Gifford Lectures, "The Varieties of Religious Experience." This represented his clearest statement on his developing tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism, asking whether a science of consciousness is possible.
History of the Human Sciences
July 1, 2017
Marcia Holmes
9 citations
In the mid-1960s, popular ideas about brainwashing shifted dramatically, reflecting Anglo-American developments in mind science and mass media. The 1965 film The Ipcress File exemplifies this shift: its brainwashing sequence uses flashing lights and electronic music synchronized to the rhythm of brainwaves. The article traces how the film's quest for cinematic spectacle drew on cybernetic science, multimedia design, and modernist architecture—developments that also influenced the psychedelic counterculture. Interposed between mind control, psychological science, and media was a vision of the human mind as a 'cybernetic spectator': a subject who scrutinizes how media and sensory demands affect consciousness and seeks to consciously participate in and guide this mental conditioning.
History of the Human Sciences
December 1, 2019
Charlie Williams
7 citations
John C. Lilly, a neurophysiologist whose papers are held at Stanford University, wrote a classified paper in the late 1950s proposing that his research on sensory isolation, brain electrostimulation, and brain mapping could enable 'push-button' control over human behavior and even 'master-slave controls directly of one brain over another.' Though he aligned this work with Cold War military aims, Lilly later became a counterculture guru, arguing that the same techniques—psychedelics and isolation tanks—could be used for personal liberation rather than brainwashing. This article examines the relationship between brainwashing science and psychedelic mind alteration, showing how paranoid ideas about mind control shaped Lilly's research trajectory.
History of the Human Sciences
February 1, 2025
Matthew Perkins-McVey
The promise of the Prozac era has not been fulfilled, with fewer effective new medications reaching the market and rising demand for better treatments. In response, controlled psychedelic therapy has seen renewed optimism, reviving the old idea that intoxication resembles psychosis. This article questions the conventional narrative that the concept of 'model psychosis' emerged in the mid-19th century, instead tracing its deeper historical roots. Examining Moreau de Tours's 1845 'hashish madness' and Emil Kraepelin's study of 'artificial insanity' in the 1880s-90s, the author argues that intoxication represents an originary conception of madness.
History of the Human Sciences
December 1, 2021
Sophia Satchell-Baeza
Jane Arden's 1973 film The Other Side of the Underneath adapts her radical feminist play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches. The all-female cast re-enacted personal and archetypal situations using autobiographical material gathered from group therapy sessions led by the director, during which psychedelic drugs were consumed. The article situates Arden's performance approach within psychodrama, focusing on how psychedelics helped unleash performers' repressed feelings of trauma, rage, and desire, harnessed into a dynamic performance mode amplifying cathartic possibilities of women's speech. The author argues that Arden's pursuit of consciousness liberation through psychodrama and psychedelics aligned countercultural and radical feminist tactics for unraveling repressive social conditioning.
History of the Human Sciences
January 1, 2010
Thomas Sturm, Falk Wunderlich
Kant's views on consciousness, the mind-body problem, and psychology as a science differ fundamentally from current debates about a science of consciousness. He did not use consciousness to mean phenomenal qualia, addressed the mind-body problem in terms of substances rather than mental properties, and saw the key to a scientific psychology as quantification, not mechanistic explanation. This illustrates how philosophical problems and concepts can shift dramatically despite surface similarities.