in Medical Anthropology

This thesis examines the rearticulation of the drug-induced “psychedelic experience ” in the age of cognitive neuroscience. It provides a historical and social scientific analysis of the social and cultural conditions of the most recent transformation of this historically singular form of limit experience along three axes: types of understanding, forms of normativity, and modes of relation to oneself and to others (Foucault). The implication of these social conditions in subjective experience takes a particular form in the case of hallucinogen ingestion: The psychopharmacological effects of these drugs are thought to be highly dependent on a subject’s internal state and expectations and the environment, in which the drugs are taken. The environment ethnographically described in this study is the meticulously regulated space of two neuropsychopharmacology laboratories in Zurich and San Diego that have played central roles in the so-called revival of hallucinogen research since around 1990. The thesis examines the “external conditions ” (Weber) of this