Tripping on Mushrooms with Edward Said: The Case for Literary Studies as Holistic Medicine

Abstract

This piece introduces the special issue of SAQ “Psychedelic Imaginaries,” which collates fresh and theoretically sophisticated humanist perspectives on the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Recent interdisciplinary research into psychoactive substances like LSD (or “acid”), psilocybin (or “magic mushrooms”), and MDMA (or “ecstasy”) has repeatedly shown that the therapeutically beneficial aspects of psychedelic medicines—their ability to positively transform human self-perception, reduce anxiety and depression, and incite feelings of intense interconnectedness with the universe—are directly linked to individuals’ complex interpretations of the affective and visceral experiences they go through while taking them. The transformative potential of the psychedelic renaissance may then lie precisely in those aspects of psychedelic experience that are the purview of cultural analysis, a vast field of study that concerns itself with how we interpret and attach meaning to the world (and our gut-level encounters with it). While acknowledging the potential pitfalls of viewing psychoactive drugs as cure-alls for mass immiseration, this special issue explores how psychedelic experience—a multifarious state of being characterized by its extraordinary sensory intensity—might provide one rich, surprising, and unpredictable site for cultivating a vast range of cognitive skills and affective orientations necessary for reframing our relationship to various forms of global catastrophe, from antidemocratic revolutions, to climate change, to the ongoing global mental health crisis. The essays collected consider psychedelic experience as a lived, embodied event shaped by the idiosyncratic contexts of each practitioner's habitus, but also as a widely shared framework for critical thought, a way of seeing the world that opens up new dimensions of creative and political possibility. Thus the “imaginaries” in our issue title refers to the proliferating perspectives, or imaginative viewpoints, that can be taken of psychedelic experience when it travels far beyond the laboratory environment into countless new contexts.