Psychonauts : drugs and the making of the modern mind / Mike Jay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- author.

Contributor:

Yale University Press, publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Altered states of consciousness.

Psychonauts.

Intellectuals--Drug use.

Intellectuals.

Hallucinogenic drugs--Psychological aspects.

Hallucinogenic drugs.

Physical Description:

x, 359 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven ; London : Yale University Press ; [2023]

Summary:

"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." -- Dust jacket.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-347) and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780300257946

0300257945

OCLC:

1341203965