“The Unconscious on Drugs” showcases literary-critical considerations of both historical and emergent connections between psychoanalysis, illicit drug use, and the rapidly burgeoning field of psychedelic psychotherapy. Since at least the eighteenth century, drug experiences have inspired a diversity of experiments with literary form at the limits of representation. Alongside this history of aesthetic experimentalism, the clinical study of drug-induced altered states of consciousness has been a mainstay of empirical psychology, behaviorism, and psychopharmacology. Scholars have largely situated these two histories along parallel tracks: literature belongs to “drug culture,” and the clinic belongs to the history of science, with little overlap. We propose to address this gap by introducing a third term, the unconscious, and by placing the art and science of its elucidation—psychoanalysis—in a contentious conversation with these literary and clinical precedents. Because psychoanalysis emphasizes the radically subjective character of the unconscious, it, too, operates at the outer limits of representation, where language proves inadequate to the experience it aims to circumscribe. Psychoanalysis also bears squarely upon the actual and embodied experience of drug use, including its bizarre phenomenology, notorious ineffability, and seductive appeal. To the extent that this experience is at once intensely and enigmatically meaningful, entrancing and inscrutable, it is desperate for the methods and processes of interpretation psychoanalysis is uniquely designed to enable.
This panel thus addresses several lacunae in the existing scholarship. It foregrounds the subjective meaning at stake in drug-induced altered states and the irreducible distance between this meaning and its scientific objectification; it situates literature as a clinically valuable domain of aesthetic and cognitive experimentation; it conceives of drug addiction in terms that are neither moralistic nor biologically reductionist, but are instead entwined with unconscious fantasy; and it bridges the gap between the critical and the clinical in practical terms that are responsive to emergent exigencies in both domains.
Panelists suggest that literary criticism could benefit from a psychoanalytically-informed, drug-induced dose of the ineffable, that drug research and addiction treatment might be productively transformed by this encounter, and that personal testimonies of drug experiences, so-called “trip reports,” are best considered as works of literature in their own right. Drawing from Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse Figure, Patricia A. Dailey develops a theory of the unconscious as parenthesis: a figuration of intrusion, interjection, or disruption, through which a discourse exceeds its own parameters of intelligibility. This figuration and excess, Dailey argues, are already evident among many of the Medieval religious mystics from whom the contemporary science of mysticism, especially the scientific study of psychedelic experience, borrows its key terms. From another literary-mystical angle, but with a closely related attention to the therapeutic uses of this same contemporary science, Sean A. Witters situates Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly with and against the widespread emphasis on “integration” in contemporary psychedelic psychotherapy. Proposing an alternative, Lacanian conception of integration that encourages an acceptance of one’s incurable incompleteness, Witters rethinks addiction, both as a historically specific concept and a psycho-physiological affliction, neither as an organic disorder nor as a purely social phenomenon, but rather as the trace of an unruly, painful, and unspeakable enjoyment for which neither biology nor culture can account. And Ariel Pickett gathers a number of psychedelic trip reports into a genre of writing whose defining characteristics include synesthetic imagery, temporal distortion, and a proliferation of metaphors that together recast the relation between subjectivity and its narration. Here, drug experience is treated first and foremost as a literary experience, and one that takes place just where psychoanalysis articulates the unconscious, in the disconnects between language and subjective truth.
Panelists will all restrain their remarks to 15 minutes each, leaving ample time for biographical introductions and open discussion. The audience will hear all three presentations prior to this discussion. The presider will keep strict time and moderate the ensuing conversation. The panel incorporates a diversity of voices in the following ways: it includes tenured/tenure track faculty, contingent/renewable faculty, and an advanced Ph.D. candidate; it addresses works of literature addressing the cultural repression of femininity, the stigma surrounding neurodivergence, addiction, and psychosis, and non-Western conceptions of selfhood and cosmos; and it challenges purely positivist conceptions of the drug experience that aim to nullify its cultural, historical, and subjective specificity.