Psykets laboratorium : Skildringar av drogexperiment i Weimarrepubliken

Sammanfattning: Psykets laboratorium – skildringar av drogexperiment i Weimarrepubliken investigates texts produced during psychiatric self-experiments with psychedelic drugs in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, featuring the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) as a research subject. In these self-experiments, physicians and volunteer subjects wrote down their experiences of psychotic states that were evoked through the use of psychedelic drugs. In contemporary cultural criticism and philosophy, lively discussions took place about the situation of modern man, of which the project with drug experiments was a part.   The physician Kurt Beringer (1893-1949), based at the Heidelberg psychiatric department, aimed to create knowledge about the psyche through experiments with mescaline, in order to establish boundaries between the normal and the abnormal. Meanwhile in Berlin, the doctors Fritz Fränkel (1892–1944) and Ernst Joël (1893–1929) conducted similar experiments in order to cultivate stronger empathy for mentally ill patients. Walter Benjamin considered the experiments as part of his philosophical writing.This took place shortly after World War I, an event that fundamentally overturned the human self-understanding, and contributed to an epidemic of mental suffering and called for a new understanding of the psyche.    The study show how boundaries between the subject and the object of knowledge is destabilized in several ways through the writings on drugs. Firstly, they depart from the traditional division of Western science between observer and subject, and secondly, they mean that the writer speaks through other voices, different literature, to express his experience. Overall, my study shows how the actors mixed medical and literary understandings and narrative forms to capture an elusive experience.   The mental states during drug intoxication were often characterized by a feeling of separation from the outside world, but they were described in a form of texts that was written collectively, and where one constantly talked through the language of the other in order to convey the private. Literature, psychiatry and philosophy were cited and reused.    The study takes shape at the intersection of the history of philosophy, literature, and psychiatry and is a contribution to an expansive research on overlaps between aesthetic and scientific knowledge formation. It thus sheds light on the overlooked historical exchange between two domains that are often considered separate: literary and scientific knowledge.