Psychedelic psychodrama: Raising and expanding consciousness in Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath (1973)
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.