Introduction

Since Western science had taken notice of psychedelics in mid-20th century, their therapeutic and societal potential has been valued quite differently. After a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s during which LSD, not subject to any specific restrictions at the time, was primarily used in psychiatric contexts—where it showed considerable promise and was discussed with little controversy—, it entered the ‘Flower Power’ and anti-war movements of the early 1960s and became a party and counterculture drug. In response, the US government under President Nixon declared drug abuse as public enemy number one and initiated a wave of repression, not least geared toward psychedelics, that quickly gained international traction. Scientific research came to a halt, as did public discourse on the potentials and applications of psychedelics. With few exceptions, the therapeutic use of psychedelics went underground. For the generation of therapists affected by this prohibition, this was tantamount to a clearcutting of their legal therapeutic options. All the more surprising was the “psychedelic renaissance” (Sessa, 2017) that began to emerge, first within scientific circles, at the turn of the millennium, then quickly accelerating and gaining popularity. It became widely recognized especially after Michael Pollan's bestselling book How to Change Your Mind (2018) and a Netflix documentary series of the same name, also masterminded by Pollan.

The conditions under which this psychedelic renaissance is taking place, however, are markedly different from those of the first psychedelic phase of the 1950s and 1960s, to which the term renaissance refers in this case. Pro-psychedelic activists no longer confront the powers that be head-on; instead, they have adapted their strategies to existing scientific and legal frameworks and to the neoliberal zeitgeist. Psychedelic therapy has by now become a well-nigh research hype, attracting substantial public and private funding. In Europe and especially in North America, it is drawing significant entrepreneurial interest. Some key substances, such as MDMA and psilocybin, appear to be on the verge of approval in the US and Europe for the treatment of major psychiatric conditions. There are already no legal barriers to the use of ketamine—a decades-old, medically approved anesthetic—for psychedelic therapy, at least under compassionate use and named patient use protocols. The psychedelic landscape, thus, has fundamentally changed within a few years. The countercultural, utopian, and spiritual ambitions characteristic of the 1960s are increasingly coming into tension with the functional logic of pharmacology and health care systems, and with entrepreneurial interests.

Before addressing these tensions, though, I look further back in time, as sensitizations for understanding the current shifts in the psychedelic field can be gained from examining a historical controversy that anteceded some of these dynamics: the debate over animal magnetism and mediumship (‘Mediumismus’) between approximately 1770 and 1900. During this period, mediumship emerged as a “boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989) between secular and religious, scientific and magical, medical and aesthetic interests and groups; it was also in this context that our modern concept of the medium was formed in the first place (Hahn & Schüttpelz, 2009; Schüttpelz, 2012).

Sensitization: A look back on animal magnetism and mediumship

At the beginning of this long century of mediumship, tensions are already evident that resurface in the current debate over psychedelics. Perhaps few figures are more misrepresented by today's medical and psychological history of knowledge than Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who gained fame in the 1770s in Vienna for his practice of animal magnetism (Ellenberger, 1970). As a doctor, he had become familiar with magnetic treatments that were common at the time, but then he sensed—or believed he sensed—that the healing effect was not actually tied to the magnets themselves. Instead, he thought that the entire universe was filled with a ‘vital fire,’ which also extended into human and animal bodies (hence the term animal magnetism) and that people become ill when they are not sufficiently permeated by this universal energy (today, we might say: when the Chi no longer flows). Mesmer believed that he could channel this energy through his bare hands, without direct physical contact to his patients who frequently fell into states of ecstasy and felt spiritually cleansed after the treatment.

Mesmer entirely dispensed with the idea that he would exorcise evil spirits or the devil. The fact that his understanding of animal magnetism was almost antithetical to this becomes particularly evident in his conflict with Father Johann Josef Gaßner, a famous “devil banisher” in southern Germany at the time. Gaßner also elicited cathartic reactions during his exorcisms, but did so within the framework of Catholic exorcism rites and prayers—something that would never have occurred to Mesmer. When Father Gaßner's successes began to unsettle the Catholic authorities, the Elector of Bavaria appointed a commission in 1775 to investigate the events—and Mesmer as a member of it. Before this commission, Mesmer was able to demonstrate that he could induce healing crises just as effectively as Gaßner and that his explanation—attributing the effect to a natural physical force, namely his animal magnetism—was more plausible than attributing it to the exorcism ritual. In the discursive struggle over the causes of the magnetic catharsis, this marked a turning point where the religiously inclined among its proponents started to find themselves on the defensive.

By the late 1770s, Mesmer had become a full-fledged superstar in Paris. Contributing to his rise was his ability to expand his method to a group setting. Mesmer discovered—or believed he had discovered—that the energy he channeled could also be stored. To achieve this, he used a kind of wooden vat, in which he collected the animal magnetic “fluidum” in a mixture of water and iron filings. Wires or metallic rods protruded from the vat, allowing multiple people—sometimes dozens—to be connected to the fluid (Slunecko & Benetka, 2023, 125f). Among those gathered around Mesmer's baquet for séances who were magnetically infused together, utopian ideas of a life in freedom and social harmony occasionally emerged on the eve of the French Revolution—ideas that aligned with Mesmer's revolutionary outlook. However, the scientific community remained skeptical: A commission of the French Academy of Sciences appointed by King Louis XVI was tasked with evaluating Mesmer's magnetic therapy and Mesmer was ambitious or confident enough in his own abilities to agree to this examination. The key moment occurred in 1784 when Mesmer failed to convince the commission of the validity of animal magnetism. None of the Academy members gathered around the magnetized vat felt any effect. Even a patient who was convinced of the procedure couldn't distinguish Mesmer's fluid from ordinary water in a blind test (probably, the first documented in the history of science). Without direct rapport with the therapist, no effect occurred. It was only when the magnetist himself handed the cup with the fluid to the patient that the ecstatic healing trance set in (Schmidbauer, 2012).

From this failed demonstration, a question arises that seems essential for the discourse on psychedelics, too: How to account for effects that only unfold in particular situations and settings or within meaningful relationships? If such qualities are intrinsic to a procedure (be it animal magnetism or psychedelic therapy), its proponents must be utterly careful when facing demands for scientific validation, as long as such validation is equated—as it is the hallmark of experimental science—with decontextualization and impersonalization. Or better yet, as we will see later: proponents of such procedures better themselves take control of the verification process and, consequently, of the kind of decontextualization that goes along with it!

In the figure of Mesmer, we can also feel other tensions that are crucial for understanding the current development of psychedelic therapy. Can this therapy align itself with the “powers that be,” particularly those in science? And related to this question: What is its take on religion? Is the psychedelic perhaps the seed of a (renewed) religion or metaphysics? Mesmer's stance towards religion was, as mentioned, strictly antithetical: He saw himself as an Enlightenment thinker and understood animal magnetism as a natural force, but this is not true for some of his followers, who— like Swedenborg—transformed animal magnetism into a kind of mystical religion. And finally: Does the healing success rest on figments of imagination—on suggestion—, as the commission of the French Academy, without questioning the healing success itself, concluded regarding Mesmer's animal magnetism? In other words, is the subjective component the central agent, or is it a negligible, if not undesirable, epiphenomenon?

The negative verdict of the French Academy of Sciences regarding Mesmer's explanatory model did not hinder the long-term spread of his ideas. His most prominent successor, the Marquis de Puységur, discovered—or believed he discovered—that trees could also be charged, or were already charged, with magnetism and could distribute this life energy. With Puységur, a certain taming of the practice began, replacing the dramatic, ecstatic catharses with “calm crises” or “magnetic sleep.” From there, it is only a short step to hypnosis—a term that may seem to come directly from antiquity but actually first appeared in the mid-19th century with James Braid (1795–1860); Mesmer and Puységur had not yet used it. The central role of rapport in hypnosis, that is, the state of nonverbal connection between the hypnotist and the hypnotized, and the induction of “somnambulistic” states of consciousness for healing purposes are direct inheritances from Mesmer's approach. However, the astrological references that were still present in Mesmer's work were discarded in the development of hypnosis.

Freud encountered hypnosis already in a domesticated form—grounded in psychophysiology (monotonous sensory stimulation causes a lowering of the level of consciousness and, consequently, a reduction in the resistance of the ego-consciousness to suggestions), entirely focused on individuals, stripped of social-utopian connotations, teachable and learnable (i.e., not reliant on charisma)—through Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919), whose book on suggestion (Bernheim, 1889) he translated. During his study stay in Paris in 1885/86, Freud also witnessed the hypnotic trances induced by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893). Eventually, however, Freud turned away from hypnosis which he initially had practiced, opting for a more civilized form, a form better suited to his bourgeois practice, but still involving non-ordinary and at times even trance-like states of consciousness: the transference relationship and its analysis (Slunecko & Benetka, 2023, 134f.). This, too, as evidenced by the centrality of the rapport between analyst and analysand, is still a descendant of Mesmer's practice.

It is thus a relay of techniques, terminologies, and testing events that accompanied animal magnetism and mediumship in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this process, variants of it were developed that could be lastingly institutionalized and, like psychoanalysis, have become and remained part of our therapeutic world. The development trajectory of animal magnetism and mediumship, only roughly and somewhat pointillistically sketched here (for more details, see Schüttpelz, 2012), however, offers more than a general sense of the historical depth from which discourses are charged. As epistemic objects, magnetism and mediumship are close relatives of psychedelic approaches, such that some of the struggles that surround them—the relationship to the religious, the tendency towards decontextualization under testing conditions, the move towards demystification and individualization, and the question of the status of the patient's experience—also sensitize us to the current discoursive battle over psychedelics.

Zooming in

Against this background, I will now subject a segment of the scientific discourse on psychedelics to a much more fine-grained analysis. I thereby draw on material that is more extensively documented in Grzegorczyk (2022) and has also been accessed by Slunecko (in press). The material consists of a cohesive series of highly influential scientific studies from one of the world's leading contemporary research groups on psychedelic therapy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, led by the late psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths. Starting in the late 1990s, Griffiths here initiated a continuously productive research program to study the effects of psilocybin (and later, other psychedelic substances), which has since garnered global attention. At that time, Griffiths was already an internationally recognized expert in the field of psychopharmacology, serving as a consultant to the WHO and the American NIH, with a distinguished track record, particularly in studies on the effects and withdrawal of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol.

Zooming out

What initially had appeared to be a move by a “Shambhala warrior” (Trungpa, 1984) in order to infiltrate psychedelics into pharmacology and through it into the healthcare system has apparently produced counter-effects (as the Luther Bible says, “he who enters danger, perishes in it”). This maneuver has led to the increasing neutralization, spiritual depotentialization, therapeutic containment, individualization, and standardization of psychedelics. Psychedelics have, in this process, and more or less inadvertently, been prepared for medicalization and an adoption into the prevailing healthcare system. The mystical experiences have adapted to the new scientific host culture, first in the form of quantifiable responses to questionnaires, and have then ultimately disappeared into the supplement.

Standardization is a direct result of the pharmacological research logic. This logic, for one, forces researchers to precisely determine the amount of the substance administered. One cannot write in a research report that a subject consumed 20 mushrooms of the genus Psilocybe semilanceata, but must provide measurements, in milligrams per kilogram of body weight, of a precisely defined ‘pure substance’. These pure substances (which, notably, suggest that other forms are impure) are produced in laboratories, shifting control over them from naturalist collectors to pharmacologists, and ultimately to the pharmaceutical industry, and to patent attorneys. Not to be overlooked in this shift is the change at the substance level itself: Unlike pure substances, both wild and cultivated mushrooms contain a spectrum of components, thus a chemical ‘timbre’ whose entourage effects are still largely unexplored.

Related to this, and unlike the use in traditional communities or the practices of the 1960s and the psychedelic underground, the results of today's psychedelic research studies are obtained in clinical settings from carefully isolated individuals who experience psilocybin within a hospital atmosphere—a classic institution of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1973). Traditional healers, in contrast, emphasize that their practice with psychedelic plants and mushrooms cannot be captured in such ‘sterile’ hospital scenarios. They point out the loss of the community-building and spiritual dimensions of the psychedelic experience in such settings, where the impulses for social and ecological engagement and communal renewal inherent in the psychedelic experience cannot unfold. In the clinic, psychedelics encounter epistemological structures that steer them away from a “psychedelic sociality” (Roseman, Preller, Fotiou, & Winkelman, 2022) and toward a resilience, creativity, and flexibility technology that aligns isolated individuals with the imperatives of the prevailing neoliberal zeitgeist, i.e., individualization and responsibilization.

How strongly monetization interests have already grasped the psychedelic realm (with long-term proponents of psychedelic therapies sometimes taking these interests into their own hands and professionalizing at an impressive pace) and how easily countercultural remnants can be combined with fresh entrepreneurial spirit became particularly evident at the recent Psychedelic Science Conference (PS2023) in Denver in June 2023. With its reported 12,000(!) participants, it strengthened the impression of an emerging psychedelic industrial complex that is merely awaiting the final green light in the form of substance approvals by the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) or the EMA (European Medicines Agency).

This is by no means to suggest that such developments are in line with Griffiths' intentions. Indeed, the trend of psychedelic research moving toward clinical studies has also been noted by Griffiths himself (Lawrence et al., 2021). The focus of the present study was on a particular trajectory of his research group, albeit the one with the strongest scientific impact and probably the most direct relevance for monetization. This trajectory, however, by no means represents all ambitions pursued with psychedelics within this group. Rather, the broad range of ambitions, which assemble at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University, has so far ensured the cohesion of the psychedelic as a “boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989), i.e., an object which is part of multiple social and scientific worlds and onto which, hence, discourses from various societal and scientific fields converge, and which is stabilized precisely through this convergence, this discursive tug-of-war.

That Griffiths and his circle have not lost interest in mystical-type experiences shows itself in recent articles (e.g., Barrett & Griffiths, 2018; Griffiths et al., 2018). It appears, though, that these interests are increasingly diverging from clinical studies. This is evidenced by the dynamics of an initiative that has garnered significant public interest in magazines and newspapers like Washington Post or Guardian: In 2015, a study was launched at Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with the NYU Langone Medical Center to investigate the effects of psilocybin-induced experiences on 24 “professional leaders in religion” from various denominations. Though the study was registered as early as 2015 at the NIH for the treatment of religious or spiritual issues (sic!), results have not yet been published in a scientific format. Outside of science, the study has spawned interesting effects, though: Two of its participants have started initiatives to renew their (Jewish and Christian) faith traditions through psychedelic inspirations (shefaflow.org; ligare.org; McCarthy & Priest, 2024).

Strategies for generating and intensifying religious or liminal experiences through psychedelics, as they express themselves in such religious renewal initiatives, do not fit well into the clinical settings of mainstream contemporary psychedelic research. In such settings a tension arises for psychedelic therapy between an enhancement and dramatization of the experience, necessary as it is for a realignment of self- and world-relations and characteristic as it is of rites of passage, and the inherent tendency of the clinic to avoid risk and dramatization or at least make it manageable and reproducible. This tension between enhancing the experience while simultaneously standardizing it also documents itself in the meticulous disclosure of musical playlists that are used in psychedelic research studies — including in one of Griffith's research group (Davis et al., 2021).

In a similar vein, the charisma of the therapist does not fit into clinical scenarios. While almost all Eastern and indigenous traditions emphasize the need for spiritually experienced and charismatic process facilitators to ensure that the uncovering of access to psychic energy or insights does not lead to confusion, clinical studies have so far placed little emphasis on such qualities of the facilitators, not even on their previous psychedelic experience; often, they are described with the not very respectable term ‘trip-sitter’. Just as with the taming of animal magnetism, tendencies towards de-dramatization and standardization are characteristic for the current transformation of the psychedelic.

The most fundamental challenge to its coherence, though, seems to come from the introduction of chemical variants that have effects on neurotransmitter balance and neuroplasticity comparable to those of psychedelics but induce no or significantly fewer alterations in consciousness (Cameron & Olson, 2022; Cameron et al., 2021). These non-hallucinogenic psychoplastogens promise similar antidepressant, anxiolytic, or addiction-reducing effects as their psychedelic counterparts, but without inducing or inviting mystical or particular meaningful experiences and their potential pitfalls. In this case, one could safely forget the subjective, even mystical experience, or what the subject has to report about it. The fuss about set and setting, preparation, and integration of the psychedelic experience would become unnecessary, as would laborious, hours-long ‘trip-sitting’. A path of research and therapeutic practice that began with experience would then only understand experience as a negligible epiphenomenon. It would make little sense to still call these substances ‘psychedelic’; with them, we would be moving towards a purely pharmaceutical psychotechnology.

Where are we now?

Obviously, we are currently witnessing an array of new possibilities, alliances and figurations, of discursive and practical transductions and crossovers, through which the psychedelic is being redefined—and possibly even dissolved. The complex dynamics in which the different derivatives and offshoots of the psychedelic will engage, the economic, social, and political forces they will align with, and the psychedelic futures that will emerge from these interactions, seem more open than ever before: Will it be possible to disseminate psychedelics more widely without them being completely absorbed by the (epistemo)logic of the health care system? Will the legacy of the countercultural psychedelia of the 1960s be abandoned as its last witnesses disappear? Are we—as Aldous Huxley envisioned—witnessing the emergence of a spirituality informed by psychedelic experiences, connected to and compatible with science, a re-connection of humanity with the world? Or, on the contrary, will the technical-clinical and the spiritual-experiential diverge, with the pure technique of trip-free psychoplastogens being used for clinical applications, microdosing to enhance productivity and creativity in the workplace, while the ‘traditional’ psychedelic practice with its emphasis of life-changing peak-events, may find a place in neo-religious movements or high-end therapeutic niches that preserve the luxury of personal meaning-making through psychedelic experiences? These appear to be some of the questions and stakes that will likely continue to be relevant for some time, as controversies of such magnitude tend not to end with one side winning everything and the other(s) completely disappear.

However, the vast majority of scientific research on psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapy is currently conducted within a natural science framework. While it is undeniable that this clinically and increasingly biomedically oriented research is strategically important for the legalization of psychedelics, we should not overlook that this approach tends to medicalize their use and implicitly aligns it with the very power relations and exploitation structures that contribute to the pervasive unease in our current cultural situation (Hauskeller & Schwarz, 2023; Letcher, 2008). This makes it all the more crucial to keep in mind that scientific engagement with psychedelics and psychedelic therapy does not exhaust itself in creating clinical evidence (which, as any evidence, is an evidence for someone), but also encompasses critical social science perspectives, as expressed in the present study.

Conflict of interest

The author received no funding for this research and has no competing interests or financial relationships to disclose.