Inventing Experience: Medieval, Psychedelic, and Postmodern
South Atlantic Quarterly April 1, 2025 Patricia Dailey
Literary experience and psychedelic experience share a common structure of displacing, suspending, and refiguring reality. Medieval literary forms such as the dream-vision, the journey, and the psychomachia offer transformative spaces akin to those produced by psychedelics. Understanding this filiation helps explain why narrative plays a crucial role in psychedelic therapy as an integrative practice. The essay argues that affiliating psychedelics with literary and poetic language provides a richer critical vocabulary for describing psychedelic therapy and its mechanisms.