Empathetic Reform and the Psychedelic Aesthetic: Women’s Accounts of LSD Therapy

Two first-person accounts of psychedelic therapy from the early 1960s, written by women under pseudonyms, show how female authors navigated access to authoritative discourse in mid-twentieth-century life-writing. Constance Newland's My Self and I and Jane Dunlap's Exploring Inner Space use realistic description to connect readers to their drug experiences while employing metaphor to make familiar worldviews seem strange. By alternating between reader recognition and estrangement, the authors cultivate empathy as a tool for reform, challenging conventional literary and scientific narratives and creating new representational space for altered states of consciousness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Both written under pseudonym, Constance Newland’s My Self and I (1962) and Jane Dunlap’s Exploring Inner Space (1961) are firsthand accounts of psychedelic drug use taken in therapeutic research settings that demonstrate how women’s access to discursive legitimacy was negotiated in mid-twentieth-century life-writing. Newland and Dunlap use realism to connect readers to their psychedelic subjects, while estranging readers’ familiar worldviews through metaphor. Through reader recognition and estrangement, Newland and Dunlap develop readers’ empathy as a reformist tool to challenge standard narratives of literature and science and carve out new representational space for alternative states of consciousness.