Tripping on Mushrooms with Edward Said: The Case for Literary Studies as Holistic Medicine Free

With the publication of Michael Pollan's (2019) bestselling nonfiction book How to Change Your Mind, an awe-inspiring account of the resurgent scientific interest in psychedelic medicines since the late 1990s, the American public became aware of a largely overlooked recent history of attempts by cognitive and neuroscientists, clinical therapists, and psychologists to explore the link between psychoactive drugs and the treatment of long-term forms of mental distress like chronic depression, anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Since this watershed cultural moment, medical practitioners and mental health professionals have ridden the powerful but turbulent wave of a so-called psychedelic renaissance, a term Pollan first used to describe the efflorescence of scientific interest in this subject three decades after Richard Nixon's War on Drugs effectively shut down government-funded research into psycho-active medicines. Today, the scope of this renaissance has vastly expanded, increasingly coming to describe a much wider collective desire to seek out non-ordinary states of consciousness as a potential remedy for, or else alternative perspective on, expanding forms of global immiseration. As a cultural studies scholar who has spent his entire adult life studying how popular culture enters the consciousness of mass audiences and alters their visceral experience of the world, my first thought when I encountered the idea of the psychedelic renaissance was: “But doesn't everybody know? This is what we've been doing in the humanities for more than a hundred years: repeatedly ingesting art, literature, media, and popular culture in order to ‘change our minds’ or alter our consciousness about the human condition.” In other words: the boundless creative products of culture are the humanists’ most potent psychedelic medicines.

Imagine my surprise and perplexity then, at the halting responses of my colleagues in the humanities whenever I explain my current research into the cultural study of psychedelics. Over the past two years, any time I discuss the topic of psychedelic medicine with my peers, I invariably get the same response. Initially, a genuine intellectual fascination, even titillated personal excitement—“I'm so intrigued by the idea of taking LSD or mushrooms,” “I did it once in college but never again,” “What's your experience been like?,” “Is it safe?!,” “So many of my friends say it changed their lives”—followed by a knee-jerk recoil: “But I'm terrified of losing control.” At first blush, my colleagues seem to be talking about a primal fear that taking psychoactive drugs will rob them of their mental or bodily autonomy, as though these chemical compounds could hijack their brain in a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario. To be clear, the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics currently being debated among medical researchers, psychotherapists, and experienced psychonauts (lay psychedelic practitioners) are fundamentally not about losing control of one's basic faculties, but rather about experiencing a level of affective openness profound enough to alter the very underlying assumptions or frameworks that organize one's self-conception (Pollan 2019; Hartogsohn 2020; Letheby 2021; Nuwer 2023). The cognitive philosopher Chris Letheby (2021: 147) underscores this phenomenon when he explains that “the weakening of tacit essentialism regarding the self is therapeutically central [to the positive effects of psychedelics]. On this view, patients and subjects . . . discover new, alternative forms of self-modelling, and the consolidation of these new forms is what the durable ‘resetting’ or ‘rewiring’ of high-level networks amounts to on a cognitive level.” In many psychedelic experiences, then, the individualist framework of control associated with bounded selfhood enabling free will or direct manipulation of one's surroundings is frequently supplanted by a new kind of agency, the freedom to feel more intensely and broadly, alongside the necessity of cultivating skills to withstand and harness the vastly expanded flow of sensation for life-enhancing purposes. With this in mind, over time I've come to realize what each of my interlocuters really means is that they fear being emotionally broken open by a psychedelic experience, accessing a range of feelings so extreme they might release their grip, not on consciousness per se, but rather on self-consciousness, the stringent attention to managing how they appear to others. Put another way, a group of scholars who have dedicated their lives to studying the manifold dimensions of aesthetic experience (the ways that art and culture directly impact the senses and reshape the imagination) and have taught multiple generations of students about anti-essentialism, ideology, and the social construction of identity (all concepts for grasping the world's inherent contingency) are terrified of losing an iron grip on their own unyielding self-image. If that weren't enough, they fear doing so in the face of an experience that puts the subject in direct contact with one of the most viscerally affecting aesthetic events a human being can undergo. Trippy, right?

Only second to this puzzlement has been my encounter with the seeming naivete of neuroscientists and medical researchers studying the potentially salubrious benefits of psychoactive substances for treating a panoply of contemporary psychological disorders, including severe depression, PTSD, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and addiction, among others. In November 2021 I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison's first annual Psychedelic Symposium. The two-day conference brought together an esteemed cadre of pioneering, impassioned, and incredibly well-informed medical researchers, clinical therapists, and neuroscientists to present findings from ongoing medical studies and clinical experiences using psychoactive compounds like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or “acid”), psilocybin (or “magic mushrooms”), MDMA (or “ecstasy”), and ketamine to treat chronic forms of mental dysfunction. Sitting earnestly taking notes throughout the first day, I was fascinated both by the repeatedly affirmative results of these various studies—which reported consistent, lasting psychological improvement in a diverse population of clients, among them victims of sexual abuse, opioid addicts, and people with complex PTSD—and by the incredulity of the doctors themselves at the outcomes. One by one, these therapists and scientists describe nearly identical protocols: creating a safe, inviting therapeutic and/or clinical space where a pair of psychotherapists and/or medical practitioners help a client and/or patient through a mind-manifesting experience focused on releasing them from deeply entrenched negative thought patterns. As a humanist, it struck me that researchers’ repeated awe and fascination with psychoactive medicines and their capabilities for dramatic alterations to the human body-mind seemed to overshadow a more pragmatic reality: when you stop treating people like garbage, they begin to heal. Why was this seemingly commonsense assumption so foreign to medical practitioners? Why was it so surprising to these highly educated healers that providing a well-resourced, welcoming environment in which trained professionals guide sufferers of various mental health problems through an emotionally cathartic transformational experience with dignity and care might make them simply feel better? Perhaps this is because of the medical field's obsessive focus on treating the symptoms of mass immiseration, rather than identifying and remedying the root causes of them (Devenot et al. 2022); or perhaps because of the medical model's absurd tendency to conceptually divorce the mind and the body and deracinate both from the social ecologies within which they live, evolve, and thrive (Maté [2003] 2011, 2022; van der Kolk 2014; Menakem 2017). Regardless of the reasons, an epic cognitive dissonance was on display, one that fundamentally implicated the humanities in the future of psychedelic research. It struck me that if medical practitioners were narrowly asking how psychoactive drugs might be used to alleviate the symptoms of acute psychic anguish, a humanist would be compelled, in Edward Said's words, to “widen the circle” of inquiry, asking instead: How might the expanded consciousness occasioned by psychedelic experiences be harnessed to foster the meaningful recognition and prevention of collective mental suffering in the first place?

With some critical distance from these two scenarios, I've come to understand them as emblematic of a loss of common sense in both the humanities and the sciences, a dulling of critical vision especially apparent when one views either field through the prism of psychedelic therapy. On one hand, we see literary and cultural studies scholars who have seemingly forgotten the common knowledge that humanistic inquiry necessarily requires a certain relinquishing of control over one's presumed identity, habits of feeling, ideological beliefs, tastes and preferences, even core values, to imaginatively occupy the multidimensional life worlds, or “alternative identities” that constitute a diverse human experience (Said [2004] 2019: 548). This loosening of the grip on a rigidly defined view of reality and selfhood occasioned by aesthetic experience is what psychedelics can, under certain circumstances, evince in a given subject, granting them access to a broader range of emotions and sensations, a multiplicitous view of their identity, even a sense of their unique place within an interconnected universe. On the other, we have health practitioners who appear ignorant to the practical wisdom that the countless forms of dis-ease that can overtake the human organism, and the variety of pathways to rehabilitation, are necessarily shaped by its environmental surround. This keen understanding of environment in the development or healing of disease is what the theory and practice of psychedelic therapy makes manifest, by carefully selecting or tailoring settings in which psychedelic experiences can have the most potential for long-term positive change on human consciousness (especially as it is anchored to a sensate body) (Leary, Alpert, and Metzner [1964] 1992; Janikian 2019; Pollan 2019; Hartogsohn 2020; Aixalà 2022). All this in the interest of strengthening the human being's ability to psychologically and physiologically regenerate, be acutely responsive to the ceaseless flow of emotion that undergirds its phenomenological experience of reality, and maturely communicate its thoughts, feelings, desires, and needs.

This, I argue, is precisely the lost treasure of the literary and cultural studies classroom, an affective laboratory of the highest order that has, for more than a century, been at the forefront of long-term qualitative experiments in the strategic expansion of the human sensorium for the purpose of broader social transformation. In what follows, I aim to illuminate this frequently misunderstood aspect of humanistic study, namely, its exceptional facility for offering durable and adaptable tools not only for the interdisciplinary exploration of human history, culture, politics, and society in all its dimensions, but also for actually becoming more human, that is, to cultivate curiosity toward, fully inhabit, and exercise the human organism's full range of embodied and cognitive capacities—among them thought and critical judgment, feeling and emotional regulation, expression and articulation, memory and imagination, corporeal action and learning.

In this introduction to the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, “Psychedelic Imaginaries,” I make a case that the literary and cultural studies classroom operates as one primary site of collective psychedelic therapy for multiple generations of students—one that simply uses books, movies, music, art, and countless other cultural products instead of psychoactive medicines to elicit mind-altering experiences that can radically reorganize a person's relationship to themselves and a complex world. I begin by unpacking how the constellation of teaching methods that generally define contemporary university courses in literature and cultural studies—anchored by the serial format of weekly group dialogue about the meaning and value of various cultural texts and phenomena—uncannily parallel the various aspects of psychedelic integration, a multifaceted therapeutic practice of synthesizing the intense emotional outcomes of various psychedelic experiences in their aftermath (Bache 2019; Janikian 2019; Aixalà 2022). The clinical psychologist Marc Aixalà (2022: 4) explains, “In the context of psychedelic therapy and the psychoanalytical or neo-shamanic use of drugs, integration is usually understood as the higher-level understanding of the experience and the proper application of the insights and lessons derived from it in our daily lives.” Similar to humanistic education, psychedelic integration is not a replacement for clinical therapy—which deals with the precise assessment of and individual treatment for particular psychological symptoms. Rather it is a structured consciousness-raising practice that provides therapeutic or holistic conceptual tools, language, and frameworks to support one's ongoing explorations of the body-mind and its relationship to a broader environmental surround, which might include ongoing individual psychotherapy, body work or somatic healing, individually tailored exercise and nutrition routines, restorative justice activism, more psychonautical exploration, or whatever. And once again, much like the literary and cultural studies classroom, integration adheres to no singular protocol but many, variously deploying self-disclosure and storytelling, artistic production, journaling, or group dialogue among numerous other modalities for expression and interpretation.

Acknowledging the integrative potential of the literary and cultural studies classroom stands to benefit both the humanities and the evolving psychedelic sciences. The humanities can assert its central role in cultivating lifelong holistic well-being in college-age youth, which translates into communicative, adjudicative, and creative capacities, including learning how to imaginatively incorporate previously “strange or alien” elements of worldly reality into one's experience (4). By spotlighting this long-standing, but almost universally overlooked added value—the simple fact that students frequently feel better about themselves and more confident in their ability to confront the challenges of daily life because of what they learn in the literature and cultural studies classroom—humanities education can continue to reject expedient educational goals, like training obedient members of the professional classes, while claiming for itself an essential role in bolstering the psychological and material flourishing of large swathes of the population during a period of heightened mental distress.

Simultaneously, psychedelic science can regain the common-sense global or systems-level view of the human being as a contingent actor whose thriving depends on a vast network of interconnected variables from the structural to the individual, among them one's social standing, cultural identity, and access to nourishment and education, but also the quality of one's familial relationships and friendships; career arrangements; patterns of eating, movement, and sleep; and tools for managing or responding to stress among nigh-infinite others (Maté [2003] 2011, 2022; van der Kolk 2014). Psychedelic science can also learn from the humanities’ suspicion toward dogma, ideological orthodoxy, and magical thinking (which frequently infect the discourse of psychedelic proselytizers who falsely claim that these drugs will invariably “cure” all human suffering [Devenot 2024]); its attention to the structural determinants of identity, personality, and behavior (which can reject the specious notion that there is a singular or universal psychedelic experience shared by all people regardless of context [Richards 2015; Greer 2025]); and its focus on gathering longitudinal qualitative data from direct classroom experience rather than short-term quantitative data on human growth and change (which can counterbalance psychedelic studies’ questionable tendency to measure the effects of psychedelic therapy by narrowly conceived metrics like coded questionnaires rather than simply listening to patients and clients share their experiences directly [Wright 2022; Nuwer 2023; Devenot 2024]). To do so, however, I suggest that the literary humanities and its practitioners—here broadly construed to include interdisciplinary cultural studies scholars of all stripes—require an institutional and psychological overhaul of their current character. This includes both a radical dismantling and rethinking of the pernicious professional hierarchies of a field supposedly committed to combatting structural inequality while frequently reproducing its worst aspects, as well as a clear-eyed commitment to the individual healing of the highly dysfunctional, insecure, emotionally shut-down personalities that often drive it. If it were to do so, the literary humanities would successfully model in action what it so often aspires to in theory, a genuinely holistic practice of social metamorphosis that regenerates individual body-minds in the very process of remaking institutions and constituting democratic collectivities.

Toward this end, I conclude by turning to the luminary literary historian and cultural theorist Edward Said as a case study in both the possibilities for, and current constraints on, the literary humanities becoming an integral part of the broader aspiration toward the comprehensive and sustainable prosperity of our species. In the course of his extraordinary but shortened career, Said invented a dazzling lexicon of concepts for describing and making meaning of the often violently dislocating effects of a globalizing world, including the spread of imperialism and capitalism, competing secular and religious worldviews, the rise of virulent cultural nationalisms, and a fiercely resistant critical spirit that runs through a range of world literatures and cultural theories since the seventeenth century (Bayoumi and Rubin 2019; Brennan 2021). I show how his most enduring concepts—among them the inherent worldliness of cultural production, the value of exile as a critical vantage point, the politically vitalizing potential of traveling theory, and the role of representational politics in shaping collective reality—all correspond to key aspects of psychedelic experience. Consequently, I figure Said as a model of the polyglot, multidisciplinary intellectual—in Jean Houston and Robert Masters's ([1966] 2000: 132) words a “mature intelligent individual with widely divergent interests and talents as well as different special professional training [who possesses] a broad background [in] history, literature, philosophy, mythology, art, and religion”—who promoted what can be retroactively considered a distinctly psychedelic view of humanistic study: anti-orthodox, even anarchic, in its theoretical commitments, deeply attentive to the worldly, embodied settings from which cultural products emerge and collide with the imaginations of countless readers and viewers, committed to radical social change through a willful unsettling of predetermined cultural and national identities, and fiercely loyal to interpretation, or critical reading, as the root of consciousness-expanding encounters with cultural texts. Simultaneously, Said's own life is an object lesson in the failure of humanistic thought to translate fully or smoothly to everyday behavior, habit, and action. Any cursory look at his astonishing but frenzied biography reveals a scholar perennially wracked with self-doubt and imposter syndrome, carrying immense unprocessed trauma from a life lived in exile, maintaining passionate but frequently volatile intellectual and political friendships, and a near-pathological workaholism born of his perpetual sense of inadequacy, a nagging insecurity he maintained from his youth. As a result, Said suffered persistent psychological anguish that appears to have directly affected his health in the last half of his career—first characterized by continual respiratory distress, bouts of chronic fatigue, and later his terminal cancer diagnosis—and prematurely stolen him from his intellectual community (Said [1999] 2012; Brennan 2021). I conclude by imaginatively considering how Said might have benefited from psychedelic therapy and its model of integration, thereby making his greatest intellectual insights not only brilliant thought experiments but also models for living.

Psychedelic Therapy for the Masses

Psychoactive medicines are a constellation of chemical compounds—including synthetically produced substances like LSD, MDMA, and ketamine, and naturally occurring ones like psilocybin and DMT (dimenthyltryptamine) among others—that induce outsize alterations to perception and cognition. In historian Ido Hartogsohn's (2020: 10) words, they are “non-specific amplifiers”—drugs whose somatic effects continually change based on the distinct mindset that a user brings to the experience and the context or setting in which they choose to have it—whose overall outcome is to radically intensify felt or sensory experience. In the introduction to their foundational 1966 study The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, consciousness researchers Jean Houston and Robert Masters ([1966] 2000: 5) listed no fewer than thirty possible disturbances to ordinary cognitive and corporeal experience they witnessed in hundreds of psychedelic drug users, including

Neuroscientists have only recently begun to understand the physiological basis for these effects: the unique chemical structure of psychoactive compounds allows them to link up with a particular serotonin receptor in the brain, one of a class of neurotransmitters that regulate and impact our mood, hormonal balances, and temperament, in the process disorganizing or inhibiting the operation of the “default-mode-network,” a deeply entrenched brain process that allow us to put forward a well-defined sense of self (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014). As Houston and Masters's evocative catalog attests, when the chemical mechanisms that buttress our identity are dampened, a stunning array of responses are potentially catalyzed, including an overwhelming feeling of enchantment with worldly phenomena, such as intensified experiences of, and reactions to, colors, textures, sounds, and smells; an increasingly multiplicitous view of self and others, often described as ego disorganization or expansion; a felt sense of communion with the cosmos; and a significant disinhibition of mental defenses, including rigidly held social mores (Houston and Masters [1966] 2000; Hartogsohn 2020). All these aspects of psychedelic experience encompass the range of phenomena that are the bread and butter of literary and cultural studies, a field of knowledge focused on interpreting the enormous number of ways that our encounters with art or creative expression impact, augment, or reorient the senses, consequently transforming how we meet ourselves, our relational attachments, and our shared planetary existence.

For decades, researchers have debated what specific aspect of the psychedelic experience underpins the broader mental benefits they can reap: some claim the healing potential of psychedelics is found in their ability to induce a “mystical-type experience,” or encounter with a higher power, that briefly frees users from the loneliness or isolation of their mental distress (Strassman 2001; Richards 2015; Bache 2019); others argue it lies in the disorganization of the ego, which can temporarily liberate users from limiting self-perceptions or rigid social identities (Carhart-Harris and Friston 2019; Letheby 2021); and yet others associate the mental health benefits of psychedelics with their tremendous enlargement of feeling, which can enliven a depressed, anxious, or traumatized personality to the entire spectrum of their affective landscape including joy, ebullience, compassion, and peace (Nuwar 2023). As a humanist, I have always found these debates befuddling, if not nonsensical. First, because the need to identify a single vector of psychedelic healing reproduces the profoundly limiting logic of the medical model, which is obsessed with finding miraculous quick fixes for treating the common symptoms of dis-ease rather than seeking solutions for its foundational causes (Devenot et al. 2022; Devenot 2024). Second, because reducing the multiplicitous phenomenal dimensions of psychedelic experience to one or another of its many effects is, ironically, very anti-psychedelic in its narrowing of imaginative possibilities for healing and behavioral change. And finally, because the fact that psychedelic experience is heavily shaped by set and setting implies that its beneficial effects could be found in just about any of its sensuous aspects, as long as they are properly integrated with the user's context-specific life experiences (Hartogsohn 2020). Moreover, countless people use psychedelics not to mend specific traumas or liberate themselves from rigidly defended egos but simply to expand their repertoire of capacities to feel, explore non-ordinary state of being, enact religious or spiritual ceremony and rites of passage, or heighten one's senses before engaging in artistic expression, all of which could have salutary effects on well-being unrelated to therapeutic treatment (Shanon 2003; Saldanha 2007; Richards 2015; Dyck and Elcock 2023; Londoño 2024). Thus the reasons people might turn to psychedelic experiences are as diverse as their potential healing mechanisms in therapeutic contexts.

The recent “psychedelic renaissance” then might be understood as a microcosm of one of the longest-standing problems of the modern era: the clash between, on the one hand, an increasingly refined knowledge of the sheer intricacy and contingency of our species’ experience, typified by the push for an integrative medical model that can account for the manifold variables that shape the human organism, and on the other, the manic, self-destructive desire for a singular, all-encompassing remedy to life's inherent unpredictability (an impulse seemingly at full blast in the recent resurgence of global authoritarianism, religious orthodoxy, identitarianism and ethno-nationalism). In the literary and cultural studies classroom, structured encounters with works of art, media, and popular culture become the occasion for contending with, rather than fleeing or railing against, worldly contingency—this includes the awesome diversity of ways that artists, writers, and creative producers render various aspects of the human condition alongside the equally multiplicitous emotional, intellectual, and somatic responses of their audiences. No doubt, the study of literature and culture has been beset by its own orthodoxies—from the New Critics’ dogmatic commitment to studying literary products in isolation from their historical contexts to deconstruction's nigh-religious belief in the endless interpretive possibilities of all discourse. But the field's overriding historical trajectory has been toward better grasping our species’ sprawling heterogeneity as reflected in the diversity of its forms of self-expression, by inventing as many approaches to studying human creative production as possible—and, we might add, in a spirit of curiosity, wonder, and self-awareness. Like the centuries-long global network of psychedelic plant-based medicines, then, works of art and literature disseminated across time and space unsettle identities, activate emotions, elicit a felt sense of communing with a wider, intermeshed social ecology, and have the potential to permanently alter people's mindset. The comparison is not merely symbolic or metaphorical but a corporeal fact, for reading, viewing, and listening and psychedelic experience catalyze the production of elaborate mental representations, which are literally composed of new neural networks firing in the brain (Chatterjee 2013; Letheby 2021; Magsamen and Ross 2023).

In my own research, I have found that culture's ability to fundamentally change not only the way people think about the world but also the ways they act within it seems directly tied to repeated, collective dialogue with others regarding their affective experiences with various works of art, literature, or popular culture (Fawaz 2022: chap. 4, esp. 343). In these exchanges, interpretations or competing perspectives on works of art multiply, circulate, and inspire others, traveling to new contexts and influencing both how people make meaning of and behave toward various aspects of their own lives—in other words, it's not watching a movie or reading a novel alone that tends to make someone commit to practicing anti-racism, travel to a new country, join a queer political action group, or pursue psychotherapy, but rather the repeated act of talking about its visceral impact over time with friends, family, coworkers, or strangers. Today psychedelic integration is being theorized and practiced as a therapeutic version of this kind of cultural phenomenon, a multimodal practice of processing one's psychedelic experience with others hours, days, even weeks after the initial trip (or “reading” experience as it were). As Aixalà (2022: 24) explains, during “integration sessions, different interventions are carried out. These include validation; the possibility of a detailed retelling of the experience; the exploration of the possible meanings attributed to the content of the session; . . . the processing of difficult emotions . . . ; or working with existing cognitive development dilemmas among others.” Integration is, then, an interpretive practice that grounds psychedelic experience in everyday life by setting down a blueprint for how that experience might influence, effect, transform, or simply inform future thought patterns and behaviors for the better. The key elements here are (1) an unusually intense or affecting aesthetic encounter that jolts one out of habituated thought patterns, (2) a deliberate framework for discussing, interpreting, and integrating the experience, (3) the exchange of experiences, and perspective on them, in a welcoming setting, and (4) the repetition of this practice across time to turn thought into action.

This is a crystalline description of the literary and cultural studies classroom at its best, a continuous, ethically framed social experiment where professors share with students a multitude of human cultural products that elicit unpredictable emotional reactions, which then become the focus of sustained classroom conversation. As in psychedelic integration,

Regardless of specific facilitation style, this is at base what one does over and over in literature and cultural studies courses: read, view, listen, talk, write and reflect, go back to living, repeat. And just as “integration has to do with the creation . . . of [cognitive] structures at a higher logical level” for making meaning of the psychedelic experience, classroom dialogues are shaped by various frameworks for understanding cultural phenomenon (45). These can include theories of social construction; ideology critique; queer, feminist, critical race, disability or transgender studies; psychoanalysis; the study of affect and emotion; Indigenous worldviews and so on—though no approach needs constrain the movement or evolution of thought in any given classroom setting. Moreover, our conversations deploy a range of practices, from freewriting to group conversation, from drawing to collage, from the Socratic method of questioning to collective interpretation, from creative writing assignments to multimedia production. The key is that we do this practice repeatedly over time, encoding a multiplicity of feeling states, analytical frameworks and methods, and ways of communicating our ideas and affects as an ongoing organic part of everyday life.

From this perspective, the current psychedelic renaissance offers a provocation for humanists to revivify an earlier model of seeing the global flourishing of the human organism as involving physiological, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions considered an integral part of an interdependent whole. In Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (2023), literary theorist Kevis Goodman deftly shows how, in eighteenth-century Europe, a holistic medical theory of pathology emerged that understood physiological health as essentially tied to a person's environmental milieu, or “encompassing round”; any body-mind dysfunction was understood to be rooted in multiple, interlocking, distant causes (like colonialism or the reorganization of the British countryside) frequently external to, but collectively impinging on, the subject. Goodman expounds:

In this framework, a key element of healing involved altering an individual's relationship to aesthetic life, including exposure to “great” art, literature, music, and theatre or else travel to new environs; it was thought that manipulating these variables could catalyze not only changes in mindset but also shifts in the actual structural organization of a given life, by literally compelling people to move their bodies and imaginations to new fictional and geographic locations (fancy reading by the sea anyone?). By recovering the interwoven relationship between medical pathology and the study of aesthetics as the interdisciplinary science of reading or interpreting the “encompassing round,” Goodman inadvertently offers a prehistory to contemporary holistic medicine.

Today the mechanistic view of the human body as a series of discreet parts detached from consciousness that came to eclipse this earlier holistic model has been forcefully rejected by a wide range of emergent scientific fields, including Psycho-Neuro-Endocrine-Immunology (which studies the reciprocal impact of communication between the nervous and immune systems and the brain), neuroaesthetics (which explores our brain's reactions to art), and psychedelic science. These subfields of integrative medicine collectively reanimate the eighteenth-century conceit of the environmental surround and its critical role in the making or unmaking of disease—only now, we are armed with a vast wealth of scientific knowledge about the physiological bases of feeling, how the body responds to its environment through affect and sensation. Contemporary holistic medicine experts like Bassel van der Kolk (2014) and Gabor Maté (2022), and neuroscientists like Andy Clark (2023) and Robin Carhart-Harris and K. J. Friston (2019), show how the persistent suppression of feeling—in pervasive forms of people pleasing, conflict avoidance, anticipatory emotional control, and numbing behaviors like addiction, dissociation, and obsessive compulsion—is a dysfunctional by-product of the human organism's highly refined ability to anticipate and defend against negative affects or psychological harm. This defense mechanism frequently backfires, chronically flooding the body with stress hormones or fostering rigid neural patterns that, over time, can lead to autoimmune disorders, cancers, and catastrophic mental health crises. Instead of seeing these disturbances as mechanical failures of the body, integrative medicine seeks out both ancient and novel techniques for interrupting the habituated protective systems that lead to disease, in part by allowing the body to feel more freely—like meditation and breath work, yoga, acupuncture, and psychedelic therapy—while arguing for the necessity of society-wide changes to a toxic late-capitalist culture that encourages the performance of inauthentic emotional expression for monetary gain, social approval, or status (Maté 2022). Precisely because literary and cultural study explores the worldly terrain of human creative expression, this emergent holistic view of our species’ soundness demands a central role for humanities education in the future thriving of an emotionally regulated (not managed), creatively flexible (not optimized), expansively sensate (not numbed), and continually healing (not perpetually traumatized) populace.

“We Argue in Theory for What in Practice We Never Do”: The Need for Healing in the Humanities

Under the conditions of extreme physiological and psychic stress occasioned by compounding global catastrophes like de-democratization, environmental collapse, and rampant xenophobia, the humanities classroom has become one of the most sought-after spaces for emotional wellbeing and uplift outside the psychologist's office. With university mental health resources taxed to their limit, undergraduate students frequently stream into humanities courses for a variety of reasons far beyond covering college or major requirements. These include gaining a better understanding of complex current affairs like global racism and income inequality, movements for gender and sexual freedom, and the so-called culture wars; seeking out course assignments that allow them to exercise their imagination through analytical and creative writing, multimedia production, and verbal presentation; or simply finding an educational space where they can freely talk about their favorite media and popular culture in a setting where their perspective is valued. Needless to say, this work could happen in every wing of the university. Yet, in my experience, faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (or STEM fields) have largely absolved themselves of pedagogical responsibility for students’ psychological welfare, their slate of courses functioning primarily as factory-like preprofessional incubators for future science and tech laborers armed with a tightly defined range of specialized skills that presumably reap major financial benefits. I have often wondered what goes on in the minds of my colleagues in STEM at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who recently argued for the elimination of our college's two-course literature requirement for undergraduates. Who is the idealized student these professors conjure? A laser-beam-focused machine, moving robot-like through a never-ending series of computer science and organic chemistry courses with no meaningful interpersonal skills in the hopes of coding themselves into wealth and prosperity on a dying planet? (This expedient mindset sadly infuses a variety of psychedelic research studies, which hope to locate a single psychoactive chemical cause of improvement in mental health that can be easily synthesized and administered as a quick-fix drug likely worth billions.)

I have been teaching advanced cultural studies courses for nearly two decades, and I have met scores of STEM majors: trust me when I tell you, they are not okay. With the exception of a handful of geniuses preternaturally gifted in technical and/or scientific skills, many begrudgingly pursue STEM education under pressure by their parents or a tech-obsessed society. They tend to be overworked, sleep deprived, emotionally fragile, even suicidal. Their course work in the STEM fields—focused on high-stakes test taking and technical lab work overseen by emotionally disengaged, workaholic professors—frequently leaves them feeling small, lacking in self-confidence, and devoid of comradery with their peers (who are their constant competitors). Moreover, the very skills they learn in STEM are geared toward professionally reproducing the expedient, use-driven or mechanistic view of science and technology that underwrites social media addiction, consumerism, and endless forms of optimization—the same contemporary realities that have made us all perpetually exhausted and miserable. Many of these students seek out humanities courses in their final years of school eager for relief from the mind-numbing tasks of coding, exam taking, and preparing solutions in monotonous lab environments. When I taught an advanced cultural theory course titled “Psychedelic Imaginaries” in fall of 2022, numerous STEM majors signed up. Many later explained to me they were desperate to find a class that could bridge their studies in biology, chemistry, and neuroscience with a growing personal interest in their own mental health. Encouraged to exercise new skills in a playful, creatively expansive learning environment where we render a kaleidoscopic picture of human consciousness, these students frequently have epiphanic moments of clarity about their intellectual and professional goals, including growing to value a more well-rounded view of human flourishing. But they also experience vertiginous identity crises previously held at bay in a three-hundred-person organic chemistry lecture hall, that become yet another emotional responsibility of the humanities professor to address.

When I've mentioned these struggles to my STEM colleagues, they either respond with naive ignorance to their students’ distress or utter contempt, presuming that questions of psychological well-being are beyond their pay grade; this, even as they are helping form citizens more likely to experience disastrous yet preventable early-midlife crises, painful divorces, unfulfilling careers and years of therapy to unravel the sources of their life-long depression and self-loathing, rather than invent the next great energy-saving technology or multimillion-dollar app. Consequently, while STEM receives skyrocketing university and grant funding, draws increasingly more majors, and garners cultural cache as the area of study fit for making high-earning science and tech workers, the humanities becomes shouldered with an unfathomable number of other essential social responsibilities while being structurally underfunded and intellectually denigrated. In the humanities, we not only have to teach millions of youth how to read, write, and verbally communicate with some modicum of intelligence (a task of such monumental importance to societal functioning that it could effectively be the sole purpose of all universities), but also teach them about the cultural, social, intellectual, and political history of humankind; introduce them to the world's incredible social diversity and cultivate their skills for negotiating difference; teach them essential multimedia literacy; and help them develop emotional intelligence, good judgment, and basic interpersonal skills, not to mention grapple with the existential question of what it means to craft a meaningful life.

One might be tempted to ask, How can the simple act of engaging with and talking about art and culture possibly accomplish so many tasks? The answer, as the great literary theorist Edward Said stressed throughout his career, lies in the practice of reading, the never-ending work of interpreting or making meaning out of cultural texts and the social worlds from which they emerge. The humanities offer a psychedelic (i.e., multiplicitous and mind-manifesting) encounter with human cultures while helping students develop original, historically informed interpretations of them. Interpretation places agency in the reader's ability to form a distinct perspective on the materials they encounter; but that perspective can emerge only if students develop a mature understanding of their own inner life, including why they incline toward certain stories, genres, or styles of writing; how they react in their body to various aesthetic phenomenon; and what hopes or dreams they have for their future. This thoughtful, curious, and open-ended exploration of interiority actively works against the self-loathing, imposter syndrome and lack of confidence so many students feel by teaching them to see their own unique worldview as having meaning and value. Thus Said ([2004] 2019: 532–33) argues: “Only acts of reading done more and more carefully, more and more attentively, more and more widely, more and more receptively and resistantly . . . can provide humanism with an adequate exercise of its essential worth.” As a parallel, scientific studies of psychoactive substances recurrently confirm that the positive long-term effects of these medicines lie precisely in the interpretative work conducted after the event of taking them, which, as we've already seen, involves individually and collectively attaching meaning to the content of each user's psychedelic experience. With this in mind, one can easily revise Said's statement in regard to psychedelic integration: “Only acts of [integration] done more and more carefully, more and more attentively, more and more widely, more and more receptively and resistantly . . . can provide [psychedelic therapy] with an adequate exercise of its essential worth.” In both the humanist and psychedelic modalities, healing is understood not as the ultimate “cure” for, or expedient treatment of, individual psychic or physiological symptoms, but rather as a comprehensive form of self- and world-retrieval, the reconstruction of one's place in our shared universe through the active and ceaseless interpretation of it (Maté 2022).

In the last decade, a slew of brilliant, historically and theoretically dense analyses of the literary humanities have debated the merits, pitfalls, and potential future purpose of the field (North 2017; Guillory 2022; Robbins 2022; Castronovo and Hutner 2022). Though frequently underscoring the political mandate of literary and cultural studies, including the field's necessary participation in the project of dismantling unjust structures of oppression and training critical members of a democratic society (projects I wholeheartedly endorse), few if any of these texts identify the potential long-term psychological and material health benefits of humanities education writ large as part of their inherent value. These might include a greater ability to regulate one's emotions through the meditative practice of reading or sustained reflection on one's emotional reactions to art and culture; the psychological capacity to deal with contingency by encountering competing points of view in the classroom; the improvement of one's self-confidence through the practice of putting forward original interpretations of media texts; the power of social belonging forged through the camaraderie of collective dialogue and meaningful group work; and attentiveness to the structural conditions that enable or inhibit human flourishing gleaned from studying the historical origins of identity, group belonging, and hierarchies of taste and value.

Anyone who has spent time in a humanities classroom, however, intuitively understands that all these potential positive outcomes of the learning environment are utterly contingent on the psychological health of students, which hinges on the classroom being a space that can provide a dynamic and flexible container for their whole being. After all, when students are wracked with anxiety, low self-worth, insomnia, and thoughts of self-harm, they literally cannot focus on the words on a page let alone craft an essay, drop in to office hours, feel confident enough to intervene in class discussion, or even show up to class prepared. Working against this trend, a holistically minded pedagogy actively seeks to highlight and amplify the most life-enhancing qualities of humanities education. This might involve incorporating meditation and emotional regulation exercises into the classroom environment; honestly and playfully conversing with students about the importance of good sleep, eating, and basic hygiene (like washing their hands and getting a flu shot), which can help them be more alert, less frequently out sick, and better capable of coming to class prepared; organizing students into semester-long study groups that can function as built-in support systems, provide peer feedback on one another's work, or emotionally regulate together by taking walks, swimming, or bike riding while talking about the course materials; explicitly naming best practices for basic reading, notetaking, and comprehension of different types of texts and cultural objects so that students understand how to complete each week's assignments; encouraging students to invent ways of integrating what they are learning into their everyday lives, like sharing course topics with friends and family or identifying practical applications for the intellectual ideas or concepts they are most compelled by; and sometimes simply tossing out lesson plans to have authentic, open dialogue about how students are navigating school, work life, and our chaotic political environment. When the learning environment relieves students of some of their primary stressors—like dispensing with the laser-beam focus on rigid grading metrics, providing clear instructions on how to read and prepare for class, offering practical advice on how to participate in class discussion, and reassuring students about their inherent intellectual value and capability—students’ mental bandwidth expands dramatically, with the result that their capacity to read, watch, listen, and respond to the course material takes on a renewed acuity and dynamism. The potential long-term positive effects of these integrative teaching strategies are not simply ancillary by-products of humanist education but arguably its central purpose: namely, to produce less abusive, less traumatized, more emotionally expansive and flexible, resilient but not repressed members of a putatively democratic culture whose mature relationship to life's complexity enables them to be effective judges of what constitutes the good life in distinct contexts.

Consequently, as Caroline Levine (2023) has recently argued, what has been lost to contemporary humanities education is a genuine commitment to materializing or practicing our values, methods, and teachings in our actual lives. For Levine, what is required is a direct application of humanities education to grassroots political activism, especially in relation to the climate crisis and the rise of global authoritarianism. I would add to Levine's vision a necessary psychological dimension: helping mold emotionally mature, self-aware, mentally healthy members of a civil society. The psychedelic renaissance is many things, but chief among them is an individual and collective healing project: namely, an attempt to use mind-altering medicines to occasion shifts in consciousness that, when properly integrated into one's life experience, can solicit equivalent changes in behavior, hopefully aiding in the larger project of moving both individuals and, ultimately, the human species, away from self-destructive patterns of thought and action toward more secure, mutually beneficial forms of relating to ourselves and planetary life. Unfortunately, if the measure of psychedelic therapy's success is how well the experience can be integrated into everyday life so as to encourage more life-affirming modes of existence, the humanities today frequently falls far short of this lofty goal, often teaching, theorizing, and researching various forms of collective transformation but rarely enacting it in the real world. Or as Said (1983: 159) once put it bluntly (and Levine would vigorously agree): “We argue in theory for what in practice we never do.”

If it has become increasingly difficult to model the healing potential of humanities education as a material practice, it is no doubt because the structural realities of the academic profession itself are generally arrayed against human thriving. I want to conclude this section by explicitly naming the range of hurdles to bridging the gap between what we teach and how we live, which begins with the very institutional norms that shape humanities education and postgraduate labor. Consider the following: PhD programs in the humanities, which frequently draw high-achieving, anxiety prone, self-conscious intellectual types to their ranks, generally have no institutionally mandated mental health education for graduate students. These programs tend to be extremely competitive, infantilizing environments, essentially six- to eight-year periods of apprenticeship with no guarantee of finding a mentally stable, available, or even humane mentor to guide one through the process, or securing a full-time job at its terminus (Guillory 2022). Those scholars who successfully secure one of a small handful of jobs at elite research universities will end up moving through highly nontransparent and often biased tenure processes, uncertain about their future job security for years on end, which can lead to chronic depression and anxiety, paranoia, and debilitating self-doubt (Cvetkovich 2012). University teaching at every level of the profession places no strict limits around professors’ intellectual, emotional, and social labor, meaning faculty could be responding to emails, grading papers, doing university service, mentoring students, and joining endless Zoom meetings at every hour of the day. The increasing narrowing of job opportunities for full-time tenure-track employment in the humanities alongside the emergence of low-paid, part-time, or so-called adjunct work has created a seemingly permanent underclass of precarious workers, thus undermining professional and intellectual solidarity within the field. Moreover, as Matt Brim (2020) has compellingly shown, the continued overvaluation of humanities scholarship produced at Ivy League institutions contributes to an impoverished gene pool of intellectual insight while further entrenching an institutional hierarchy that warps the personal egos and professional aspirations of nearly everyone in the field. Finally, among the interdisciplinary humanities, the perennial manic celebration of intellectual trends leads to extremely uneven hiring practices—one year a glut of jobs in eco-criticism, the next Black feminism, the next disability studies, without abiding, reliable support for any of these areas—while the ever-narrowing of specialization cultivates disciplinary insularity, nepotism, field egoism, and a general lack of curiosity about other approaches. Professors themselves must continually grapple with the weight of all the abovementioned demands on humanities education while being made aware of the perpetual financial, social, and intellectual undermining of their field by university administrators.

Under these conditions, all that is psychedelic about the study of literature and culture—its dynamic mind-manifesting encounter with human creative expression—is leached from the profession and then finally destroyed by the widespread failure to integrate the lessons of our research and teaching into our daily practices. One of the most startling realities I have come across as a lifelong member of the profession is just how many of my colleagues, myself included, are, for large swathes of their careers, simply unwell: insecure, people pleasing, perpetually anxious and irritable, taking minimal pleasure in their work, emotionally distant or closed off, manically over-productive, beset by all manner of preventable stress-induced chronic ailments, and simply leading wildly unbalanced, perpetually “busy” lives—all while being among the most inspiring, loving, kind, and intellectually generous teachers and mentors you could imagine. Thus the structural conditions that shape humanities education today produce untenable behavioral and intellectual extremes in professors’ relationship to the vocation and their peers: on the one hand, frantic, boundaryless, cranky workaholics constantly seeking to prove their worth, on the other, disengaged quiet quitters whose version of “healthy boundaries” includes never responding to emails, attending faculty meetings, or participating in the social life of an academic department. On the one hand, perennially anxious, shame-ridden personalities riddled with imposter syndrome, on the other, seemingly oblivious self-important blowhards lording their success or status over others.

Such contradictions are redoubled in the intellectual and institutional behaviors of faculty. All too often, it is the same faculty that constantly beat the drum of structural inequality, the need for institutional change, and radical public engagement who produce research and writing that eschews any meaningful political commitments by retreating into ontological or philosophical abstraction, insufferable jargon, or navel-gazing autobiographical theorizing, the published products of which are more often than not simply glorified vanity projects usually more accessible to a small clique of professional chums than any substantial reading public. All too often, it is the same faculty who embrace and proselytize about notions of care, mutual aid, political recognition, and social justice who reject or criticize any attempts at programmatic change, strategically avoid departmental service, reject any constructive criticism or feedback, and repeatedly stymie serious collective decision-making. In my years as a professor, I have seen faculty members sustain petty interpersonal conflicts for decades, creating unbearably toxic work environments that can unravel entire units of an academic department. I have seen junior scholars seemingly never content with their position or role at any university, hopping from one job to another seeking ever-greater prestige, financial gain, and cultural capital. I have seen senior professors sabotage the tenure of brilliant young colleagues out of spite, jealousy, or the narcissism of small differences. I have seen professors in ethnic studies lie about their racial background to garner ill-begotten cultural clout and world-renowned feminist and Marxist theorists outed as sexual harassers and emotional abusers of vulnerable graduate students. And practically everyone I know in the profession has horror stories about working in virulent department cultures among backbiting, litigious, perpetually grouchy, and fame-seeking colleagues. Nearly all these realities are open secrets, eliciting horror and embarrassment but ultimately a knowing, cynical shrug; for myself, I'm usually tempted to scream “Grow up!”

In lingering a while on these painful realities, I do not mean to overlook the extraordinary intellectual generosity of many of my peers or the tremendously positive work we do for our students and our professional communities; rather, I want to shine a light on the fundamental cognitive dissonance between what we teach and how we behave as an intellectual collective. The fact that many of us would rather think, write, talk, and teach about feelings, affects, and sensations rather than have them, ultimately undermines the genuine positive impact we can have on an increasingly affectively deadened society. As the embodiment facilitator and psychotherapist Prentice Hemphill (2024: 25–26) reminds us:

If humanists consider themselves to be purveyors of important political claims on the world made through attentive study of the cultural creations of humankind, then we must hold ourselves to an especially rigorous standard of practicing what we preach, which might mean recommitting to pursue our own healing both in and out of the classroom.

The overall effect of this negative feedback loop between the soul-crushing structural realities of the profession and the maladjusted interpersonal dynamics of its practitioners is a general feeling of being perpetually under siege. This is why the modern-day humanities functions most often in a less-than-inspiring defensive posture: seemingly paralyzed in its attempts to clearly articulate its fundamental social and spiritual value; continually hand-wringing about the field's diminished status within the university and the culture at large; and frequently undermining the efficacy of its own pedagogical mission by implying that grassroots activist work is more politically meaningful than “mere” classroom education. What this defensive posture radiates is a sense of a perpetually weak ego, a narrowing self-perception of the field and of the individual minds that represent it, both requiring constant shoring up against countless outside threats. Yet in its quest to rigidly defend its shaky self-image, the humanities ironically alienates itself from humanity writ large—the very dynamic, multidimensional object of its critical vision. For the field's entire purpose is ultimately to help each one of us imaginatively surpass the limits of our own ego, identity, and locatedness so that we might deftly “transition from one realm, one area of human experience to another”—just like psychedelic experience. Yet fewer and fewer of us seem convinced that our teaching, research, and writing have much to do with our own personal growth and evolution. And if we can't explicitly show that the field we've committed our lives to has in any way materially improved our own well-being, how could we possibly convince anyone else of its essential benefit? The question for us today is how to reclaim the humanities’ psychedelic promise, to be an ever-evolving cultural laboratory for remaking people's affective landscapes, in the interest of making them more open-hearted, thoughtful, intellectually generous, attentive members of society. This would require us to willfully release the trauma-infused story of the humanities as a dying art, framing it instead as an ongoing gift to the world, a philosophy and art form attuned to understanding and responding to the entire “whirl of an organism,” the rich multidimensional felt experience of a plural world that defines human existence (Cavell [1962] 2015: 48). One thinker in particular, whose work remains synonymous with the power of humanist thought to change hearts, minds, and social worlds, never stopped making this case. His name is Edward Said.

Reading Edward Said's Trip Report

Two decades on from his untimely passing, Edward Said remains among the most prolific, insightful, polemical, and cosmopolitan humanist thinkers of the last two centuries. Said produced a body of criticism that expanded the scope of the literary humanities far beyond the limits of any given literary or cultural text to include the intricate social ecology from which it emerged and circulated. His fundamental project was “nothing less than the reintegration of all those people and cultures, once confined and reduced to peripheral status, with the rest of the human race” (Said [1991] 2000: 379). In many ways, every one of Said's published books, essays, interviews, and commentaries functioned like a magic mushroom ingested into the field imaginary of literary and cultural studies, upending its dominant identities and taken-for-granted analytical positions, reaching toward broad philosophical or cosmic levels of expanded consciousness, and rejecting countless received intellectual orthodoxies. By extension, each of his writings can be seen as a “trip report,” his systematic attempt to make sense of his own mind's encounter with the ideas, models, and concepts of other thinkers as the unique contours of their critical thought collided with, influenced, and altered his own. A trip report is a genre of psychedelic writing in which a so-called journeyer attempts to render the content of their psychedelic experiences in written or visual form (Houston and Masters [1966] 2000; Doyle 2011; Cook 2014). Trip reports are unique in their display of diverse techniques for documenting and translating as clearly as possible a high-intensity affective and somatic experience that often eludes easy or straightforward description. While all scholars necessarily grapple with the insights of their colleagues and peers, Said had a distinct way of providing his readers an affectively rich blueprint of his intellectual confrontations with the critical thought of his generation's greatest thinkers, which for him were always mind-manifesting experiences that shifted the ground beneath his feet. Neither merely citing nor applying the work of such luminary thinkers as Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and Raymond Williams, Said would walk readers through his original interpretation of their ideas; thus he would meticulously reconstruct how his visceral encounter with the sensuous quality of these theorists’ thought and methods inspired him to invent new concepts, turns of phrase, or theoretical frameworks by integrating the affective force of their arguments into his own. He was, in this sense, the closest you could find to a psychedelic guide in the field of literary studies, providing a flexible, erudite, self-aware model for other scholars on how to practice intellectual forms of integration. Four terms in particular capture Said's psychedelic critical imagination: worldliness, exile (or exilic thinking), traveling theory, and representational politics. Taken together, these concepts were ultimately about how culture is produced out of a multidimensional “encompassing round,” but then circulates, travels, makes, and unmakes that world in turn—similar to the way that any psychoactive compound enters one's brain, binding to receptors to produce a viscerally charged experience unique to the contexts of a user's immediate surroundings, but potentially leaving a permanent trace in its altering of the brain's neural networks.

Perhaps no concept is more fundamental to Said's intellectual vision than that of “worldliness.” For Said (1983: 35), all cultural texts are worldly, both rooted in distinct historical, social, and political contexts, but also being a product of the idiosyncratic life worlds, experiences, personalities, tastes, interests, and attachments of the artists who create them. Said saw the role of the literary critic as someone whose job was, first, to reconstruct the complex worldly conditions of any given work of art or literature and, second, to conceive how their own unique locatedness in present-day reality shaped, altered, deformed, or productively offered a distinct vantage point on our collective understanding of that aesthetic object. He explains, “It is especially appropriate for the contemporary humanist to cultivate the sense of multiple worlds and complex interacting traditions. . . . The task . . . is not just to occupy a position or place, nor simply to belong somewhere, but rather to be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or . . . the society of the other” (Said [2004] 2019: 545). Said, then, understood worldliness multiplicitously: as an existential condition or fact of life, as a pragmatic stance or framework for thought, as an ethical intellectual imperative, and as a methodological antidote to the long-standing tradition of deracinating literary or cultural objects from their enmeshed relationship to lived experience. Thus he affirms: “Worldliness is therefore the restoration to such works and interpretations of their place in the global setting, a restoration that can only be accomplished by an appreciation not of some tiny, defensively constituted corner of the world, but of the large, many windowed house of human culture as a whole” (Said [1991] 2000: 382).

Said's conception of worldliness dovetails with the theory of set and setting in psychedelic therapy, which assumes a holistic view of the potential psychoactive user as someone whose entangled personal history, current outlook, and environmental contexts for psychedelic use will determine the ultimate outcome of their experience. As Hartogsohn (2020: 208) elaborates:

This nested sense of the psychedelic experience as embedded in ever-widening scales or circles of experience is precisely how Said (1983: 175) viewed the aesthetic encounter; from his vantage, the humanist is charged with meticulously reconstructing all the possible “affiliations” between any given literary text and the various levels of experiential, social, political, artistic, and spiritual life to which it could link up and mutually influence. Moreover, considered in the context of contemporary debates about the Western appropriation of Indigenous psychoactive traditions, worldliness can also refer to the global scope of psychoactive medicines. After all, these are chemical compounds that have been used for millennia by a vastly diverse range of human beings in equally diverse contexts and for divergent purposes, each milieu with its own phenomenological reality and each motive for consciousness exploration shaped by distinct religious, spiritual, and intellectual worldviews or assumptions (Dyck and Elcock 2023). Rather than seeing Western and Indigenous approaches to psychedelics as diametrically opposed, a worldly approach encourages us to see each as interconnected nodes in the larger network of human uses of psychoactive substances that must be “reintegrated” into the larger fabric of human consciousness-expanding practices. Worldliness, as central to literary study and psychedelic science, sets up both fields to be attentive to the complex materiality of their objects of study, while functioning as potentially healing knowledge practices; this is because a worldly perspective would demand the reader/user to be ethical, compassionate, and generous in shaping the contexts under which they encounter a text/drug while extending that level of careful precision to other contexts, users, and histories. As “both insider and outsider” to any given aesthetic or psychedelic experience, however, the worldly critic is, in Said's conception, always a figure of exile.

From his earliest scholarly work on the literary fiction of the Polish refugee Joseph Conrad to his most polemical defense of the modern-day Palestinian people's right to self-determination, Said thought, wrote, spoke, and theorized from the liminal position of the literal and figurative exile. Drawing on the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Theodor Adorno, Said ([1984] 2000: 186) understood exile—the forced banishment from one's home of origin—as a form of “double consciousness,” a condition of initial geographic dislocation that, while unbearably anguishing, forces the traveler to become inured to the practice of “acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be,” thus becoming a citizen of the world. He claimed, “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions. . . . that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy” (186). Despite its depredations, Said (1993b: 124) saw exile as an indispensable intellectual stance for criticism, once proclaiming that: “To be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provincial and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo.” If worldliness is a metatheory for apprehending and doing justice to the universe's endless particularity and diversity, “exilic thinking” is the vantage point required to maintain openness to internal critique of one's position, rejection of dogma, and the constant movement between contexts.

In this way, Said's conception of the exilic intellectual echoes the psychedelic experience's disorganization or enlargement of the ego. As a non-ordinary state of consciousness, psychedelic experience is about the cultivated alienation from everyday life in the interest of bringing something back from the journey that disrupts its seamless order. As Letheby (2021: 141) underscores:

This “reduction of the brain's confidence” in one's self-perception offers a cognitive corollary to the exile as a figure resolutely suspicious of all national, cultural, and ethnic identities, which Said ([2004] 2019: 546) claimed, “constituted territories and selves that seem to require killing rather than living.” A humanistic framework of exile or critical antagonism to any given geographic, psychic, conceptual, or spiritual location can allow us to be ever present to the revelatory possibilities of each local psychedelic experience, without falling into the dogmatic orthodoxy of universal redemption that the psychedelic renaissance sells—which, despite its overblown claims to universal healing, is a field rife with inequalities of access to psychedelic medicines, dysfunctional or abusive therapists and medical practitioners, and often predatory corporate interests seeking to profit off global suffering (Wright 2021–22; Devenot 2024; Londoño 2024). Simultaneously, the exilic imagination Said championed—so often wracked with grief, “restlessness,” and unprocessed trauma—can benefit from the integrative healing potential of the psychedelic experience, which productively alienates the subject from themselves, but only long enough to allow them to touch the possibility of belonging to a larger, spiritual whole (whether understood as the universe or cosmos, God, planet Earth, or the human family). Under psychedelics, Carhart-Harris and Friston (2019: 320) explain, the tyranny of the brain's traditional hierarchical, ego-driven functioning, which is radically destabilized, allows “the mind and brain [to] spontaneously transition between states with greater freedom—and in a less predictable way, [consequently promoting] an enriched or broadened global state of consciousness.” In this way, psychedelic experience viscerally enacts Said's ([1988] 2019: 380) conception of the exile as “one who does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring,” one “representing change[,] . . . moving on [and] not standing still.” Perhaps more importantly, the exile is someone “constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse . . . in the interest of human freedom” (Said [1983] 2019: 244).

Never wavering from his worldly vision grounded in the exile's restless desire to “transition between [figurative and literal] states with greater freedom,” Said studied not only works of art in their rooted contexts but also critical theories as they traveled from one location to another. In a classic eponymously titled essay, Said ([1982] 2019: 213) introduced the concept of “traveling theory” to describe how certain critical frameworks emerge from the exigencies of a given time and then surprisingly travel to new locations, where their origins frequently become a distant echo:

Said initially lamented this circumstance, which he saw as frequently deforming the radical or insurgent potential of an original theory in future performances. But he would later revise his conclusions (Said [1994] 2000), celebrating the ways that the surprising travels of theoretical concepts can revivify their initial political or intellectual force, accounting for their pitfalls, and infusing them with the “unstoppable predilection for [finding] alternatives” to a stifling present (Said [1982] 2019: 219). At the core of Said's reconsideration of traveling theory was his sense that when theories move to new places, they find unexpected interlocuters and open dialogue between previously siloed, delimited, or regionally distinct intellects, traditions, voices, or cultures, which makes new insights possible.

It perhaps goes without saying that the colloquial description of a psychedelic experience as a “trip” captures this vibrant sense of intellectual traveling that Said embraced. As Michael Pollan (2019: 316–18) enumerates, one of the key neurochemical aspects of psychoactive drugs is their ability to allow previously siloed or separated parts of the brain to communicate more freely:

This effect is associated with psychedelics’ ability to increase “neural plasticity” by interrupting the brain's most habituated thought patterns during a trip, consequently opening the mind out to new and unexpected modes of cognition, which can become encoded in an enduring way through integration. Just as the psychedelic experience encourages the various parts of the brain to communicate more freely, Said's polyglot and expansive approach to global literary production allowed the various far-flung regions of the modern world to speak to one another across genres, time periods, identities, disciplines, and aesthetic styles: for instance, putting the work of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in dialogue with the anti-colonial aesthetics of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Martinican author and politician Aimé Césaire ([1993] 2019); identifying the revolutionary spirit of Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel (1916) in the work of the midcentury Black revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon ([1994] 2000); or bringing the contemporary materialist critique of the slave plantation system to bear on Jane Austen's 1814 novel Mansfield Park (Said 1993a). Through these awe-inspiring intellectual leaps across time and space, Said expanded his readers’ representational or imaginative landscape, allowing them to picture in the mind's eye an interconnected world no longer easily divided along the lines of nation, identity, or culture.

This expansion of representational possibilities was for Said the most concrete transformational practice that a humanist could pursue. Among his most enduring scholarly arguments was the fact that representations of our shared planetary experience in art, literature, film, and media not only reflect the world as we know it but also actively shape and organize it: including securing our consent to dominant patterns of thought and action or inciting our rebellion against them. This argument was the lynchpin of his most cited monograph, Orientalism (1978), in which he made the monumental claim that nearly five centuries of European cultural production (including travel writing, poetry, memoir, painting and visual culture, political documents, scholarship, film, and news media) had actively misrepresented the diversity of Middle Eastern life, culture, religion, and society as uniformly barbaric, atavistic, sexually perverse, violent, and irrational for the purpose of legitimizing white colonial projects in the region. These misrepresentations were neither innocent misunderstandings nor inconsequential cultural ephemera, but together helped form and sustain an elaborate ideological system of belief in the supremacy of white European culture among citizens of the West—one that has motivated murderous imperial policies and stoked xenophobic views of Arab peoples for centuries. In Culture and Imperialism, Said (1993a) broadened his claim to conceive of culture writ large as a domain of astonishingly durable power relations, asserting that “there is a [central] dimension to the idea of culture as possessing possession. And that is the power of culture by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too” (9). But precisely because the realm of representation is where hegemonic or dominant views of a given geopolitical terrain are solidified, Said similarly saw representational politics as the key to putting forward competing or resistant attempts to speak truth to power. If at one point literary studies primarily functioned as a conservative or archival project meant to uphold strict ideas of literary canons, traditions, and hierarchies of taste and value, Said forcefully advocated for the field's evolution into an investigative enterprise aimed at exploring all the possibilities for articulating new, innovative, surprising, and unfamiliar representational conceits into our popular vocabulary.

Said's framing of representation as both hegemonic and resistant presages cognitive scientists’ computational theory of mind (or CTM) by decades by acknowledging in the realm of literary study that creative renderings of the world alter people's affective universe, invoking powerful feeling states that then underwrite how they might think and act. According to the CTM, everything we observe or experience with our senses is translated into mental representations, which are effectively elaborate networks of electrical signals that interconnect various regions of the brain (Letheby 2021: 102–4). In this view, our material experience of the world is akin to a “controlled hallucination,” a series of mental representations that stand in for our worldly reality, which are themselves constantly being reconfirmed or revised and altered in response to new sensory data (Pollan 2019: 308–9; Clark 2023). One of the most powerful effects of psychedelic experience is that it disrupts the top-down ordering of representational data in the brain, a system usually designed to overvalue or heavily weight neural patterns that reconfirm our most familiar self-perceptions and assumptions about the world. Once this top-down structure is relaxed under psychedelics, this common-sense outlook is provisionally made opaque or available as an object in attention that is open to being questioned, reworked, expanded, or discarded (Letheby 2021: 148). Echoing this logic, Said's critical thought frequently operated like a psychedelic head trip to the Western popular imagination, unwaveringly arguing on behalf of the humanist project of unseating, disrupting, and dismantling taken-for-granted discriminatory systems of cultural and representational value, primarily those that shored up the image of a dominant, white Euro-American civilization. In an oft-cited 1985 interview he boldly declared: “What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented” (42). Among Said's greatest achievements, of course, was to give voice to, and intellectually represent, the Palestinian people, an ethnic-Arab minority who had not only been exiled from their nation of origin but also been culturally prohibited from legitimately narrating their own experience of forced removal. Through his writing, reportage, and circulation of stories about the Palestinian people—including their political and cultural history, literary production, and multidimensional life worlds—Said literally imprinted new representations of a nigh-invisible population into the mental landscapes of his audiences, arguably making it possible for a Western Palestinian rights movement to even be cognized and subsequently become a major political force in world politics.

Taken together, Said's worldly approach to cultural texts, his exilic critical imagination, his respect for the insights of traveling theory, and his commitment to a resistant representational politics describe a distinctly psychedelic or mind-manifesting approach to humanistic study. These are concepts that collectively embrace confronting human multiplicity above protecting rigidly defined identities, cosmopolitan encounter above national boundaries, and flexible, multidisciplinary inquiry above theoretical orthodoxy. These concepts were never intended simply to explain the world but to materially intervene in it, including helping mend the unnecessary rifts that white supremacy, colonialism, and global capitalism had created among members of “the family of man.” And finally, all these ideas imagine reading, or interpretation, at ever-widening scales of experience, to be central to this constructive project, long presaging psychedelic therapy's insistence on integration as the lynchpin of healing.

A bird's-eye view of Said's exceptionally cosmopolitan life—unfolding across four continents and six multiethnic cities—will reveal the many ways that he enacted his most cherished intellectual ideas in his professional and public persona: as a “restless” world traveler; a beloved, inspiring, yet often enigmatic teacher, mentor, and colleague; a world-renowned public intellectual; and an unparalleled activist in the global fight for Palestinian freedom. And yet, zooming in on the most quotidian aspects of Said's day-to-day existence, one sees a man who often seemed to live at an extreme disjoint from his greatest intellectual values. As he recounts in his award-winning autobiography Out of Place (1999), throughout his life Said felt doubly exiled from his home (as a Palestinian refugee) and his body, as a tall, gangly, bookish boy in a strict Arab household constantly judged for his appearance and behaviors. Summarizing his memories of youth in the narrative's final page, he expounds:

Like the distant causes of pathology Goodman finds everywhere in eighteenth-century medical discourse, these multiple displacements produced in Said a level of psychological insecurity so deep and abiding that it functioned like a ceaseless engine driving him to extraordinary, feverish heights of academic achievement. At age sixty-four, having published more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles, won the nation's most prestigious scholarly grants, and become a world-renowned public intellectual and political leader, he claimed he woke each day feeling as though he were a child starting from square one. As Said's biographer Timothy Brennan (2021: xv) recounts, this insecurity played itself out in countless behavioral contradictions: a rigorous mentor and great proponent of his students’ careers, yet also at times unduly harsh, meanspirited, and fickle with his attention; a towering intellectual celebrity radiating confidence and mastery of his expertise, but perennially insecure and needing “constant love and affirmation” from his peers; gentle, friendly, and inviting, yet also at times aggressively pugnacious and intensely resistant to criticism; thoroughly contemptuous of power, but deeply invested in the most elite aspects of Euro-American education. Despite coming from a well-to-do Arab family, securing an elite university job, and pursuing decades of psychotherapy, Said clearly suffered from what family members assumed was undiagnosed lifelong depression. This expressed itself in his terribly melancholy view of what by all other accounts was a charmed childhood, his manic avoidance of sleep (which he perversely saw as wasteful for intellectual productivity), his abiding but often volatile friendships with the world's leading scholars and politicians, and his struggle with a series of chronic ailments throughout the second half of his life (often complaining to friends about repeated bouts of pneumonia and fatigue) (Said [1999] 2012: 294; Brennan 2021: 214–15). All these stressors culminated with his terminal diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1991—a disease the medical literature explains is triggered primarily by environmental rather than genetic factors. In light of these realities, it is difficult not to feel that Said spent most of his career attempting to produce an expansive, cosmopolitan, unrestrained mode of intellection intended to conceptually treat the myriad sources of his lifelong anguish, which ultimately could not be easily translated into a more practical daily routine of comprehensive self-care. Like so many humanists before and since, Said gained extraordinary understanding into his lived condition as a life-long exile through meticulous research and writing and decades of therapy but failed to match insight with action. Even in his final years of illness, he sought to justify his workaholism and frantic publishing schedule as invigorating his will to live rather than exhausting his body's potentially capacity to heal. It is as though he was urgently searching for a form of psychedelic therapy, but one that he could produce sui generis from his own fiery mind. That mind, which was the propulsive force that drove him inexorably forward despite every setback, is also the very kind of psychedelic energy that influenced, transformed, and healed so many others but ironically potentially destroyed him.

Looking back, it is hard not to imagine that Said's early passing seems almost a direct consequence of his ambivalent self-image, never quite of any world, always believing it was “better to be out of place . . . and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere” (Said [1999] 2012: 294). In this sense, Said's own commitment to exile—which took the form of expertly intellectualizing an unbearable subject-position—arguably overvalued this state of being, while inadvertently downplaying the equal importance of stability, groundedness, and personal healing that is the hallmark of what psychedelic therapy is intended to enact in the long term: namely, the ability to skillfully flow between instances of productive disorganization, heightened receptivity, and expanded perspective, and periods of well-earned peace, contentment, and joy. How might Said have benefited from an actual form of psychedelic therapy? What might his life have been like had he experienced his own intellectual cosmology in a non-ego-driven way, as a visceral, embodied experience of losing one's identity (which he so ardently sought to do in every intellectual exercise) and finding fleeting but perhaps life-affirming communion with the universe?

Today, alongside his astonishing psychedelic view of humanist thought, Said can teach us the necessity of developing a more graceful, synthetic weave between our most cherished, adaptable, open-minded approaches to critical thought and our commonplace existence where we viscerally meet our “encompassing round” moment by moment. Put another way, the provocation of psychedelic medicine is to figure out, by countless imaginative experiments, how to translate what we study and teach into how we live, how we treat ourselves and our expanding network of relations. This is elegantly captured by the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield (2000) when he says: “As much as our breath comes in and out, it must integrate inner knowing and outer expression. It is not enough to touch awakening. We must find ways to live its vision fully.” This is simply a form of growing up, which is, after all, what we ask our students to do year in, year out. Near the end of his life, Said grappled with this very question of what it means to truly grow up by returning to the value of the humanities not simply as a mode of inquiry but also as a primer for daily life, a stance and, perhaps most importantly, a style of thought. His concern with “late style,” the way that numerous luminary critical thinkers become cranky, fearful, closed off, cynical, or nihilistic near the end of their lives, spoke to his desire to fend off the depressive character of individual mortality, which could consume the exilic thinker with disappointment and bitterness over all they had failed to accomplish (Brennan 2021: 367–68). The fear of losing emotional control before a psychedelic experience, as expressed by so many of my colleagues, is a form of this late style, an anxious, protective, defensive stance that seeks to mitigate against the shock of any future surprise, which is in essence a rejection of all that we do not yet know.

I think it's fair to say that Said would have been devastated by the current state of interdisciplinary humanistic scholarship: on the one hand, a retreat into the airy heights of detached theorizing characterized by nihilist pessimism, ontological platitudes, and abstruse auto-theorizing divorced from rigorous historical research or meaningful social purpose (all that Said rejected about postmodernism); on the other, a repudiation of genuine intellectual intervention into the messy fray of practical political life by a mind-numbingly predictable partisanship, a self-satisfied turn against humanism, and a quasi-religious attachment to identitarianism (all that Said rejected in deconstruction and vulgar Marxist identity politics). Psychedelic guide that he was and remains, Said would have urged the humanities to release its attachment to an endlessly wounded identity as a sort of egoistic defense of our embattled boundaries that overlooks our inherent value, which is our studied attention to worldliness. If we were to do so, we could simultaneously reject the false universality of a distinctly white Western humanist tradition, instead conceiving the global literary humanities as part of a much longer tradition of visionary thought that includes Indigenous cosmologies, which are attuned to the interwoven relations among all earthly beings; Buddhist philosophies, which centralize the importance of harnessing the human capacity for feeling toward ending collective suffering; democratic political theory, which attempts to create forms of governance attentive to human heterogeneity and a multiplicity of competing perspectives; and, of course, psychedelic experience, which locates the potential for healing, personal growth, and cosmic vision in the expansion of the human sensorium (Kripal 2022). Each in their own way is a holistic, system-level philosophy, cosmology, or theory of worldly contingency that provides tools for recognizing the phenomenological realities of sharing a world in common and negotiating difference at the most refined level possible. And each in its own way can be a collective and individual healing practice. Said ([1982] 2019: 218–19) said it best: “If these are not imperatives, they do at least seem to be attractive alternatives. And what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?”

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