Empathetic Reform and the Psychedelic Aesthetic: Women’s Accounts of LSD Therapy
Configurations December 1, 2014 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0002
Summary
Constance Newland’s My Self and I and Jane Dunlap’s Exploring Inner Space are accounts of psychedelic drug use in therapeutic settings that illustrate how women navigated legitimacy in mid-20th century writing. Both authors employ realism and metaphor to engage readers, fostering empathy and challenging conventional narratives in literature and science, thus creating new spaces for alternative consciousness representations.
Study at a glance
| Key finding | Newland and Dunlap use their writings to challenge standard narratives and create representational space for alternative states of consciousness. |
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Abstract
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 subjects, while estranging readers’ familiar worldviews through metaphor. Through reader recognition and estrangement, Newland and Dunlap develop readers’ empathy as a reformist tool to challenge standard narratives of literature and science and carve out new representational space for alternative states of consciousness.