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

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.

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Abstract

Jane Arden’s debut feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1973) is an adaptation of the radical feminist play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches (1971). In both the play and the later film, the all-female cast re-enact personal and archetypal situations using autobiographical material, which was collectively gathered from group therapy sessions led by the director. Psychedelic drugs were also consumed during the group therapy sessions. In this article, I will situate Arden’s distinct approach to performance in the film within the framework of psychodrama, focusing specifically on the role that psychedelic drugs play in unleashing performers’ repressed feelings of trauma, rage, and desire; these emotions are harnessed into a dynamic mode of performance that amplifies the cathartic possibilities of women’s speech. The film’s heady brew of radical feminist politics, group therapy, and countercultural self-actualisation is both challenging and contentious. I argue that Arden’s pursuit of consciousness liberation through psychodrama and psychedelics—in other words, through ‘raising’ and ‘expanding’ consciousness—is best understood as a concerted attempt to align countercultural and radical feminist tactics for unravelling repressive forms of social conditioning.