Speaker
Tal Davidson, History & Theory of Psychology
Title
Situating LSD in the History of Psychology through the life of Betty Eisner
Abstract
After a 40-year moratorium on hands-on research, psychology has reprised its interest in psychedelic drugs. Nonetheless, in order to study drugs like LSD and psilocybin, current researchers have to contend with substantial social and legal resistance. As a popular but fractured entity, the psychedelic studies community lives in constant reference to its history, a golden age of LSD research that made critical contributions to the understanding of neuroscience, psychosis, and alcoholism in the 1950s. As the field of psychedelic studies increasingly relies on this historical narrative, my broad project is to nuance the notion that psychedelic research was once mainstream. In my thesis, I will do this by reconstructing the history of Betty Eisner, one particularly productive psychedelic psychotherapist active between the 1950s and 2000s. Eisner pioneered “psycholytic therapy,” a revised form of psychoanalysis wherein clients were given small doses of LSD to reduce ego defenses and facilitate their access to repressed traumas. I visited Eisner’s archive at Stanford University to retrieve unpublished manuscripts, correspondences with fellow psychedelic psychologists, and interactions with various psychology ethics committees. In this presentation, I will exhibit a selection of documents that situate Eisner’s work in relation to the work of her peers in LSD research, and to the ethical and intellectual currents that were occurring in psychology at large.