12/20/2023 0 Comments Hallucination experiment4 Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London : Fontana, 1997), p. 189.Their work sought to investigate the effects of psychedelic substances on the human mind, explore whether the experiences induced by them were comparable with psychosis, and how the effects of these drugs could have psychotherapeutic value in a clinical setting. I approach these questions drawing on archival material, published research articles and scientific memoirs relating to research groups working on the psychiatric use of psychedelic substances based in Prague across a twenty‑year period from 1954 to 1974. 3 This paper seeks to situate Czechoslovak psychiatric research during the Cold War in a wider international scientific context. 2 To date, there has been no substantial historical examination of the work of psychiatrists in Communist Czechoslovakia, despite the country having had a long tradition in research in the field from the inter‑war period. There is a developing historical literature on the development of psychiatry in Western Europe and North America, yet we know little of how these new understandings came to shape psychiatric research in the Communist world. See, (.)ġThe mid‑twentieth century saw an abundance of new theories of human behaviour and mental disorder, many of which were inspired by new developments in broader scientific fields, from cybernetics and genetics, to pharmaceuticals and new technologies of psychological testing 1. 3 There has, however, been recent research on medical and scientific fields in the same period.2 To date there have been two articles published on the research, based on follow‑up studies of parti (.).1 The author would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Institute of Histo (.).En dernier ressort, la recherche psychédélique entrait en écho avec les visées plus larges de la modernité socialiste dont le propos était de faciliter le développement du potentiel humain et de placer la science et la technologie au service du progrès social. Ces techniques semblaient en effet offrir une méthode utopique pour revisiter le traumatisme et, in fine, le guérir. L’utilisation de techniques pharmacologiques et psychologiques pour contrôler les expériences vécues à des fins thérapeutiques s’inscrivait dans un programme plus vaste d’amélioration de la subjectivité humaine elle‑même. Le temps (et son expérience subjective) était alors envisagé comme une composante fondamentale du processus psychothérapeutique les chercheurs, dans l’environnement contrôlé de la relation clinique et thérapeutique, recoururent ouvertement aux drogues hallucinogènes afin d’agir sur les souvenirs des patients. Il souligne également la résilience, au‑delà des changements de régime, de la théorie et de la pratique psychanalytiques tchécoslovaques, une résilience dont atteste l’utilisation thérapeutique du LSD en tant qu’accélérateur. Plus précisément, l’article retrace l’histoire des expériences ayant visé à provoquer, à titre expérimental, une psychose en vue d’affiner l’étiologie de la schizophrénie. Ultimately, psychedelic research resonated with broader interests of socialist modernity, which was concerned with facilitating future human potential, and the use of science and technology to further social progress.įondé sur des archives, des mémoires scientifiques et de la littérature secondaire, cet article reconstitue les projets de recherche psychédélique développés à Prague entre 1954 et 1974, tout en situant la recherche psychiatrique en Tchécoslovaquie communiste dans le contexte transnational des sciences pendant la guerre froide. The use of pharmacological and psychological techniques to control experiences from the patient’s history for therapeutic purposes fitted into a wider progressive project for the improvement of human subjectivity itself: they appeared to offer a utopian method for revisiting and ultimately curing trauma. Time – and the subjective experience thereof – formed a fundamental part of the psychotherapeutic process, and the researchers explicitly utilized hallucinogenic drugs to actively manage patients’ memories of their own past within the controlled environment of the clinic and the therapeutic relationship. It traces attempts to induce experimental psychosis as a means of exploring the aetiology of schizophrenia as well as the resilience of psychoanalytic theory and practice in Czechoslovakia, illustrated by approaches to psychotherapy using LSD as an accelerant. Drawing on research papers, archives and scientific memoirs, this paper reconstructs the psychedelic research projects developed in Prague between 1954 and1974, situating psychiatric research in Communist Czechoslovakia within the transnational context of Cold War science.
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