Psychonauts : drugs and the making of the modern mind / Mike Jay.
| Contents | Prologue: Before drugs -- Part I. The new accelerator: drugs and mental enhancement. The elixir of life -- Prosthetic gods -- Part II. Beyond the veil: drugs and the limits of consciousness. A world of pure experience -- The unseen region -- Part III. Saturnalia of the senses: drugs and the creative imagination. Tales of the hashish eaters -- Extasia, fantasia and illuminati -- Part IV. Lost and found. A sin, a crime, a vice or a disease? -- Twice-born -- Epilogue: After drugs. |
| Abstract | A provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Source of description | Description based on print version record. |
| Issued in other form | Print version: Jay, Mike Psychonauts New Haven : Yale University Press,c2023 9780300257946 |
| ISBN | 9780300271515 (electronic bk.) |
| ISBN | 0300271514 |
| Standard identifier# | 10.12987/9780300271515 |