Frontiers in Psychiatry
August 2, 2021
Nicolas Langlitz, Erika Dyck, Milan Scheidegger et al.
35 citations
Psychedelics may act as non-specific amplifiers that help people reconnect with their values, or they might specifically promote liberal and anti-authoritarian views, as recent studies suggest. The return of psychedelics from counterculture to mainstream science has diversified their users and uses. This article argues for a moral psychopharmacology that brings pharmacological and neuroscientific research into conversation with historical and anthropological scholarship on the full range of moral and political views linked to psychedelic use. The work highlights the cultural plasticity of drug action and has implications for designing psychedelic therapies, while also questioning whether other psychoactive drugs have similarly rich moral and political dimensions.
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.
Neuroethics
March 16, 2024
Nicolas Langlitz, Alex K. Gearin
26 citations
Psychedelic therapy, which combines psychedelic drugs with psychotherapy, is re-emerging as a potential treatment for mood disorders and addictions. The ethics of this therapy involve not just how psychotherapies change when paired with psychedelics, but how the therapies are shaped by values, norms, and metaphysical commitments. Based on published literature and interviews with seven psychedelic therapists in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia, the article examines patient autonomy, mechanisms of therapeutic action, and which therapies pair best with psychedelic substances. It compares this emergent form of life with ayahuasca use in Amazonian shamanism.
Anthropology Today
May 31, 2023
Nicolas Langlitz
13 citations
As psychedelics move toward market approval in North America and Europe, societies may shift from repression to institutionalized use, joining other cultures that have done so. Anthropology's role in this 'psychedelic renaissance' should extend beyond medical studies into moral anthropology, because psychedelics often induce mystical-type experiences that challenge strict moral orders enforced through disciplinary practices. The article examines how cycles of hype and anti-hype recur with new drugs and questions what cultural consequences widespread mystical experiences might have for contemporary Western societies.
Common Knowledge
September 1, 2016
Nicolas Langlitz
12 citations
This essay, based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research and the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, examines two philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based philosophy of mind uses hallucinogens to operationalize questions about consciousness, contributing to a divide between modern and premodern thought, yet his neurophilosophical reanimation of philosophy as cultura animi bridges to Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy. The sixteenth-century philosophia perennis emerged from a nonmodern philosophy of religion aiming to heal cultural fractures that defined modernity. The essay argues that neurophilosophy and ethnographic studies of consciousness cultures could serve as critical correctives in a contemporary rearticulation of perennial philosophy.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Nicolas Langlitz
10 citations
Psychedelic research has been largely shaped by biomedical science, but it raises questions beyond what labs and clinics can answer. The emerging field of psychedelic humanities examines the historical assumptions, philosophical gaps, and political dimensions of different approaches to psychedelics. Scholars can either evaluate these alternatives normatively or instead increase complexity by opening new perspectives, leaving readers to reduce that complexity in novel ways. This allows practitioners to use or abuse such scholarship for their own ends. The article describes the institutionalization of this work at The New School's Psychedelic Humanities Lab.
November 7, 2012
Nicolas Langlitz
The chapter examines how proto-countercultural experiments in living in Switzerland since the early twentieth century avoided the aggressive confrontations seen in the United States during the 1960s. A government official who oversaw the resurgence of hallucinogen research describes how he came to support this development, situating it within a broader transformation of Swiss drug policy. The competitive advantage of a pragmatic technocracy helped make Franz Vollenweider's Zurich laboratory the most important human research facility in the global psychedelic science network.