Evaluating the role of psychedelic psychotherapy in addressing societal alienation: Imaginaries of liberation

Psychedelics may help generate the perceptual shifts needed to imagine and pursue social transformation under alienating conditions, but their revolutionary potential risks being co-opted by economic structures. They could be instrumentalized to regulate individuals into unjust systems, redirect usage toward productivity, distract from systemic control, turn non-ordinary states into self-care, or commodify psychedelic experience. However, psychedelics also resist co-option by challenging industrial society's assumptions, provoking alternative epistemologies, expanding selfhood to ecological constructions, and offering enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world—potentially sparking the desire for collective emancipation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Questions are currently being posed concerning the implications of the clinical uptake of psychedelics. While enthusiasm surrounds the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and critique surrounds their appropriation to commercial ends, limited attention has been given to the role of psychedelics in generating social transformation. Herbert Marcuse contended radical change requires ‘new imaginaries of liberation’. We consider whether clinical uptake of psychedelics may produce the perceptual shifts necessary to generate social transformation surrounding contemporary alienating conditions. Economic structures contributing to these alienating conditions are highly resistant to change and may neuter psychedelics' revolutionary potential. We illustrate how psychedelics may be instrumentalised: regulating individuals into unjust systems; redirecting psychedelic usage away from therapeutic ends towards productivity; distracting or diverting attention from systemic forms of control; usurping non-ordinary states into the domain of self-care; and fetishistically commodifying psychedelic experience as a consumable. There are, however, reasons to believe that psychedelics, in raising consciousnesses, may prove resistant to co-option. In particular, psychedelics induce perceptual experiences that: challenge the paradigmatic assumptions of industrial society by provoking alternative epistemologies and metaphysics; generate expanded or ecological constructions of selfhood, thereby offering resignifications of meanings, desires, and life potentials; and offer the enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world called for in combating ubiquitous social alienation. In this way, psychedelics may induce the revolution in perception necessary to imagine liberatory potentials and spark the desire for collective emancipation.