American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century

by Ido Hartogsohn

Overview

How historical, social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, from CIA experiments with LSD to Timothy Leary's Harvard Psilocybin Project.

Are psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cognitive enhancers that spark innovation? Activators for one's private muse or part of a political movement? In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers studied psychedelics in all these incarnations, often arriving at contradictory results. In American Trip, Ido Hartogsohn examines how the psychedelic experience in midcentury America was shaped by historical, social, and cultural forces--by set (the mindset of the user) and setting (the environments in which the experience takes place).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262358941
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	07/14/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	948 KB

About the Author

Ido Hartogsohn is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar Ilan University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Experimental Psychosis Movement
Chapter 2 LSD, the CIA, and the Military
Chapter 3 From Psychotomimetics to Psychedelics
Chapter 4 Experiments In Set and Setting
Chapter 5 Psychedelics, Creativity, and Culture
Chapter 6 Psychedelics Go to Silicon Valley
Chapter 7 The Psychedelic Controversy
Chapter 8 American Trip
Chapter 9 LSD and the 1960s
Chapter 10 The Future of Set and Setting
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Hartogsohn's book is a seminal contribution to his discipline and the larger issue of extrapharmacological factors shaping drug effects."
–Frontiers in Pharmacology

"American Trip presents a timely and invaluable guide to the crucial lessons that twentiethcentury psychedelic history provides for the current psychedelic renaissance, and to using set and setting as a strategic tool for ensuring the healthy integration of psychedelics into society."
– Rick Doblin, Executive Director of MAPS

"In clearly and rigorously exploring the single most consequential idea in psychedelic studies — the notion of set and setting — American Trip not only insightfully reframes the many histories of LSD, but offers a humanistic and reflexive alternative to the often simplistic discourse of today’s growing psychedelic industry."
– Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

"American Trip guides its readers through the reflexive arts and sciences of set and setting used to study psychedelics, beckoning towards an intense pluriverse, full of beguiling guises, strange twists, and thricetold tales.
– Nancy D. Campbell, Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose

"In this landmark book, Hartogsohn enlarges the traditional parameters of set and setting by including the larger socialcultural matrix. This expanded definition provides a more sophisticated understanding of how nondrug factors determine the nature of any psychedelic drug experience."
– Rick Strassman, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of New Mexico School of Medicine and author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule

"American Trip amounts to a sociological enlightenment of our drug culture. Hartogsohn’s vibrant book shows how 1960s America made psychedelics do what they did and suggests that these wondrous molecules will do something altogether different in other times and places.
– Nicolas Langlitz, Associate Professor of Anthropology, New School for Social Research; author of Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain

From the Publisher