Acid Realities. How Science Enacts the Psychedelic Experience

Abstract

The present work has explored how the psychedelic experience is discursively reproduced in contemporary psychological- and neuroscientific research. In focus was scientific articles detailing experimental human studies with LSD, or comparative studies pertaining to subjects previous psychedelic experiences and psychedelic drug use. Departing from the doctrine of set and setting and Karen Barad’s performative approach to ontology, the emergence of the psychedelic experiences was conceived as entangled with the conditions for its observation. In the context of contemporary psychedelic science, the phenomenon is shown to materialize through quantitative measures of subjective experience and a neuroscientific-psychoanalytical reconfiguration of renowned discourses in psychedelic culture.