'Psychedelic Selves': Neoliberalism, Neuroscience, and the British Psychedelic Renaissance

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The 21st century has brought with it an Anglo-American 'Psychedelic Renaissance', apsychopharmacological and cultural re-fascination with psychedelic drugs centring on their potential totreat psychological pathologies such as depression and ADHD. The hypothesis of my project is thatbehind the narrative of psychedelic medicine today lies identifiably neoliberal and neuroscientificassumptions regarding the Self, namely that via consumption of pharmacological agents one canimprove oneself or contribute better to society, and the interacting idea that they act on a Selfexclusively located in the brain. Its aim is to historicise this paradigm in the British context, from the endof the counterculture up to the present (1974-).My project departs from a historiography that hitherto has focused on earlier chapters in psychedelichistory, namely the initial incarnation of psychedelic therapy in the 1950s (Melechi, 1997; Dyck, 2008),and the countercultural drug use that led to its criminalisation (Lee and Shalin, 1985; Grunenberg, 2005;Roberts, 2012). Secondly, it departs from a purely scientific literature on the psychological prospects ofpsychedelic therapy today (Halberstadt et al., 2018). Departing from these lines of enquiry, my proposedresearch hopes to historicise today's reinvigorated medical interest in psychedelics, with attention to theconfiguration of the Self it promotes.I aim to answer various questions. To what extent did the language of drug-users, activists, politicians,and scientists around psychedelics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries indicate a shift towards aneuroscientific/neoliberal Self? To what extent did the historical flux behind the meaning of the term'psychedelics' underwrite shifts in the understanding of the Self and psychedelics?