Inventing Experience: Medieval, Psychedelic, and Postmodern

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.

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Abstract

What kind of experience is “literary experience,” and what might it have in common with psychedelics? This essay exposes a poetics of experience embedded within psychedelics and shows its common ground with the literary space of a poem in the Middle Ages. While writers like Aldous Huxley have often appealed to the precursor of the medieval, this essay takes a different turn. By looking at the co-substantial way in which reality is displaced, suspended, and refigured in a different register, the author proposes to show how literary works like the medieval “dream-vision,” the “trip/journey,” or “psychomachia” promise spaces of transformation and alteration akin to those in psychedelics. By thinking through the filiation of psychedelic experience with literary experience in general, in both medieval and postmodern senses of what that entails, we may better understand why the role of narrative in psychedelic therapy becomes so crucial in terms of an integrative practice, as well as what poetics in medieval and psychedelic contexts have in common. Affiliating psychedelics with the language of literature and poetics, this essay argues, also provides a richer critical language for psychedelic therapy and its mechanisms.