In “Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind” (Yale), the cultural historian Mike Jay argues that the post-1800 use of mind-altering drugs was nonetheless qualitatively different from the experiments of previous centuries. What set someone like De Quincey apart, Jay writes, was that he used opium “as a device for exploring the hidden recesses of his mind,” dosing not merely to self-medicate, or to escape the world, but to access mental spaces unreachable without it. De Quincey was a “psychonaut,” plumbing the depths of his consciousness, embarking on fantastic inner quests. His work, like Davy’s, “marked the beginning of the modern understanding of the drug experience”: a pattern of pioneering inquiry into novel states of mind and the limits of “objective” truth.
Jay is a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and “Psychonauts” is the latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the nineteen-fifties and sixties. The upstarts of the counterculture, Jay notes in “Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century” (2000), had their reasons for claiming to be “the first generation to discover drugs.” But, in doing so, they obscured a culture of psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic experimentation that predated the emergence of “drugs” as a problematic category, and of the “drug addict” as a pathologized type. Recovering that culture requires venturing inside the worlds that each substance opened up. When a psychonaut breathed ether or injected cocaine, where was he hoping to travel?
The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes. By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.