The dropout: a history

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist

but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and
societal control

by Charlie Williams

Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded

Pathologies of Solitude project at Queen Mary, University of London.

Edited by Marina Benjamin

I n November 1967, Robin Farquharson ‘dropped out’. After

losing his job as a computer programmer along with the flat
he’d been renting, he decided to forgo the dwindling funds in
his bank account and live on London’s streets. In his short
memoir Drop Out! (1968), Farquharson recounted his
homeless wanderings and loose associations with London’s
underground scene, moving from all-night cafés to
‘psychedelic’ nightclubs; he described being robbed and
beaten in the street, and his first experience of LSD. At 37,
Farquharson felt too old to be a hippy, nonetheless he saw his
disaffiliation within the context of a wider movement towards
social and personal liberation, inspired by Timothy Leary’s
injunction to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’: words he interpreted
as a call to ‘rid yourself of responsibility, quit the rat-race.
Don’t obey society’s paralysing conventions … Step out of the
trap.’
Timothy Leary addresses the National Student Association
Congress, 17 August 1967. Photo by Bettmann/Getty

The year 1967 marked a high point in this history. That was
when San Francisco played host to the ‘Summer of Love’,
when thousands of young hippies descended on its Haight-
Ashbury district, drawn to its carnivalesque atmosphere,
psychedelic hedonism and alternative living. According to
Leary, places like the Haight offered a redemptive starting
point for ‘everyone that’s caught inside a television set of
props, and made of actors’. In London, the major
countercultural event that summer was the Congress on the
Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse in Camden. For
two weeks in July 1967, thinkers and activists including
R D Laing, Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael and Herbert
Marcuse (women speakers were notably absent) gathered to
debate new ways forward. Though a more overtly political
event than the Summer of Love, the idea that psychological
liberation was a prerequisite of political change was a central
theme. ‘[W]e are taught, and coerced, to see things through a
filter of politically arrived at and socially sanctioned lies,’ said
one announcement prior to the event. ‘The entire world as we
“know” it must be demystified.’
Though differing in style and scope, both events emphasised
dropping out as hinged on a particular set of anxieties about
modernity and its threat to the liberal mind. In The Making of
a Counter Culture (1969), the academic Theodore Roszak had
celebrated this crucial point of resistance against what he
called ‘the technocracy’, a regime of governance that sought
to rationalise and control all aspects of society, including its
citizens. His concerns were not idiosyncratic; Roszak’s
worldview drew on other critics of technocratic modernity,
including Leary, Marcuse, C Wright Mills, Paul Goodman,
Norman O Brown, Alan Watts and Jacques Ellul. All
manifested what Roszak regarded as a healthy suspicion of
the power structures of Western democracy that, according to
Marcuse, had become totalitarian in everything but name. The
dropouts embodied in the writings and adventures of
Farquharson, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey offered a potential
antidote. To drop out in this sense was to strive for internal
freedom through processes of ‘deconditioning’ or
‘unbrainwashing’ and imagine a type of self that could not be
controlled or contained.

C ultural historians argue that the postwar period was marked

by an acute set of anxieties – what Timothy Melley in Empire
of Conspiracy (2000) labels ‘agency panic’ – about the
potential for large institutions, states and technologies to
control the arena of the personal self. Such concerns, already
heightened by the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and
the Soviet Union, were boosted by the appearance of new
forms of mass media and mass culture, the growth of the
covert security state, and rampant globalisation. But fears of
mind manipulation were also driven by the growing influence
of the psychological sciences and the belief that the next
major frontier in science – the mind and brain – would soon
be unlocked.
Addressing the American Psychological Association in 1955,
the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer warned his audience that
every acquisition of psychological knowledge opens up the
‘most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and
how they think and how they behave and how they feel.’ His
comments came in the wake of the Korean War, when reports
of prisoners of war (POWs) collaborating with the communist
enemy raised widespread alarm about the role of psychology
in warfare. In one case, several captured US airmen publicly
confessed to committing crimes of bacteriological warfare in
North Korea. Some commentators claimed they had been the
victims of powerful techniques of psychological manipulation,
known as ‘brainwashing’, suspicions that appeared to be
confirmed by further scandals in Chinese prison camps. After
the war, 21 Americans even chose to live in communist China
rather than be repatriated.

Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA), declared that the communist enemy was waging a new
form of ‘brain warfare’, seeking to ‘condition the mind so that
it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis but responds
to impulses implanted from outside.’ A panel of military
psychiatrists charged with investigating the conduct of
Korean War POWs later dismissed the more sensational
claims about brainwashing, calling for ‘more sober analyses’
of POW behaviour; nonetheless, throughout the 1950s
brainwashing had become a point of fascination for the
military and intelligence community, who helped fund both
covert and overt research into methods of psychological
indoctrination.

It also became an important cultural motif, featuring in

numerous literary and cinematic productions, including John
Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
Frankenheimer’s semiparodic take on the subject showed
how loyal POWs serving in North Korea might be turned into
political assassins. But it also captured other concerns about
psychological manipulation from the 1950s: a fearmongering
McCarthyite senator, ever-present television media, political
propaganda, and a domineering mother, played by Angela
Lansbury. The latter tapped into ‘momism’, a misogynist panic
arguing that young American boys were emasculated victims
of psychological pressures placed on them by their mothers.
Themes of brainwashing also surfaced in various writings
about the role of psychologists in corporate America. In his
bestselling exposé of ‘depth’ psychology in the advertising
industry, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Vance Packard
described the large-scale efforts ‘being made, often with
impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our
purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of
insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences’.

Suspicions about brainwashing were also a hallmark of

countercultural writings. ‘The stupendous machinery
surrounding us conditions our “thoughts, feelings and
apparent sensory impressions,” and reinforces our mental
slavery,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in 1967. Faced with such an
assault, he suggested the best minds should drop out and jolt
‘the soft machine of the brain out of its conditioned hypnosis’.
In doing so, they turned to the work of artists and writers, but
also psychologists such as Leary and ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such
as Laing, whose writings stood as explicit counterpoints to the
aims and objectives of mainstream psychology and an
antidote to a vision of selfhood that is predetermined or
susceptible to psychological manipulation.

What does a mind free from such control look like? This
question preoccupied writers and thinkers across the political
spectrum, not least Hannah Arendt. In The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), she described the emergence of a new
form of power in the 20th century, employing mass media,
bureaucracy and psychological techniques to control every
aspect of social and economic behaviour. But totalitarianism’s
architecture of control could be effective only if its subjects
operated solely in mechanistic terms, as a series of
conditioned reflexes, denying any role to cognition, interiority
and an unconscious mind. For Arendt, this was a false vision:
human beings possess natural capacities for the free exercise
of reason that must be protected by safeguarding what the
ancients called the private sphere, retaining space and time
for solitary contemplation. Here, the mind converses with
itself (an idea borrowed from the Stoics) in an uninhibited
dialogue of thought. This solitary inner life was for Arendt the
source of political reason and ethics, but also an
indeterminate space that could not be controlled from
without.

Dropping out was a way of safeguarding this inviolable private

life; a theme that was frequently explored in totalitarian
fiction. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a
couple seeking refuge from the surveillance state live among
the ‘proles’ on the fringes of society. Orwell was already
known for his sympathetic portrayal of poverty and
homelessness in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
But against the spectre of totalitarianism, the poorest classes
are depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the last refuges of
unviolated interiority, known in Oceania’s newspeak as
‘Ownlife’.

For Orwell, a free interiority is tied closely to truth and reason

– the ‘freedom to say that two plus two make four’ – but it
was another totalitarian classic from the era, Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon (1940), that would celebrate disconnect as a
route to an expanded and indeterminate inner life. Held
captive in a solitary cell in Soviet Russia, Koestler’s
protagonist Rubashov, a former political commissar, discovers
a hitherto suppressed internal realm, a complex region of
spiritual and emotional life that gives rise to an ‘oceanic
sense’. Rubashov experiences his ‘personality dissolved as a
grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea
seemed to be contained in the grain of salt’. Koestler drew on
his time as a prisoner of Franco during the Spanish Civil War
and, in various memoirs, claimed that it was his experience of
the oceanic that prompted him to quit the Communist Party
in 1938. As he would argue in Darkness at Noon, the
knowledge of the self as infinite and indeterminate disrupts
both the logic and the project of totalitarian control, and
illustrates the individual as essentially free.

I n 1961, Leary invited Koestler to Harvard University to

experience the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin (popularly
known as magic mushrooms). Koestler was one of a long list
of intellectuals, artists and writers, including Kerouac,
Ginsberg and Willem de Kooning, who Leary hoped would
respond enthusiastically to the drug. ‘Remember your
enlightenments in the Franco Prison?’ Leary wrote to
Koestler. ‘Very similar to what we are producing.’ Koestler was
unenthusiastic. Insofar as his psilocybin trip resembled any
form of inner enlightenment, he compared it to seeing the
view from a summit without having climbed the mountain.
Leary was unperturbed. At Harvard, he was steadily building a
platform to proclaim the psychedelic experience as a tool of
psychic liberation, demonstrating the limitless possibilities of
mind in a world that increasingly tried to constrain it.

Prior to joining Harvard, Leary had made a name for himself

as an expert in personality testing and theory, combining
numerous metrics to develop a model of personality based on
people’s situational behavioural strategies. Personality testing
was booming in academia as well as in industry, with tests
such as the Myers-Briggs, using introspective questionnaires
to determine different personality ‘types’, being widely
adopted in recruitment and management. But by the end of
the 1950s, critics of the personality test grew more vocal,
claiming it was a tool for the technocratic age, an
unacceptable invasion of privacy and a means of policing
nonconformity. William Whyte’s The Organization Man
(1956), about the standardisation of the American workplace
and its worker, implored readers to cheat on personality tests.
An organisation could ask for labour in exchange for the
worker’s salary, wrote Whyte, ‘but it should not ask for his
psyche as well.’

During a mid-life crisis and facing wavering faith in his

research, Leary’s first psilocybin trip on a visit to Mexico in
1960 was a revelation, offering an experience of selfhood that
conventional personality diagnostics seemed unable to
account for. Returning to Harvard, he set about reinventing
his research under the auspices of the Harvard Psilocybin
Project. The project’s board included Aldous Huxley, whom
Leary had contacted after reading The Doors of Perception
(1954), perhaps the most important postwar text on the
psychedelic experience. Here Huxley proposed a theory,
developed with the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, that drugs
such as mescaline remove vestigial filters on the brain,
widening perception and allowing users to transcend the
limits of everyday consciousness. Huxley was best known for
pointing to the perils of behavioural control in a
technoscientific future in his novel Brave New World (1932).
Yet, during the 1950s, he also went through his own
conversion, as Nicolas Langlitz puts it in Neuropsychedelia
(2012), ‘from cynical British intellectual to committed
Californian mystic’. For Huxley and Osmond, ‘psychedelic’
drugs such as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD offered potential
liberation from a brave new world of mind-manipulating
technologies. As Osmond wrote to Huxley in 1957: ‘expand
the psyche or become slaves of the machine’.

In ‘How to Change Behaviour’ (1962), Leary set out a vision

for psilocybin therapy as a way of countering the rigid
modalities of behaviour, or culturally determined ‘games’ that
societies imposed. According to Leary and his colleagues,
psilocybin allowed its users to experience consciousness as a
multitudinous set of possibilities. He later wrote:

The first step is the realisation that there is more: that

man’s brain, his 13-billion-celled computer, is capable of
limitless new dimensions of awareness and knowledge.
In short, that man does not use his head.

In 1962, Leary and several colleagues would establish the

International Federation for Internal Freedom, which claimed
in its manifesto:

We are aware that cultural structures (however

libertarian their purpose) inevitably produce roles, rules,
rituals, values, words and strategies which end in
external control of internal freedom. This is the danger
we seek to avoid.

Leary had entered Harvard trying to understand, map and

diagnose the roles, rituals and values that shape interpersonal
behaviour; he left arguing for the need to embrace a more
complicated vision of selfhood that could not be contained in
a series of personality types. The psychedelic experience was a
fast-track to ‘jailbreaking the mind’ in a world where, he said,
‘objective science, automation, machine-like conformity, and
political thought control’ threaten the survival of the
individual.
I n the 1960s, the beat writer Alexander Trocchi invited Leary
to join Project Sigma, an underground network of activists,
dedicated to cultural revolution. Trocchi saw Leary and his
‘group of mad doctors’ as the US counterpart to another
‘group of mad doctors’ he knew in London, ‘centred around a
man called Laing’. It was by no means the first or last time
that the Scottish psychiatrist would be compared with Leary.
Both men emerged from establishment professions in
academia and medicine to achieve the kind of countercultural
celebrity usually reserved for writers, musicians and actors.
Both acquired cultish followings and built careers on a call to
liberate the mind in a world where social conditioning and
manipulation were said to be pervasive. While Leary’s ‘jail
break’ was tied closely to the psychedelic experience, Laing’s
politics of the mind involved rewriting the medical rulebook
to embrace the kinds of experiences pathologised by
conventional psychiatry. Laing’s colleague David Cooper
named this movement ‘anti-psychiatry’ to reflect their
commitment to radical innovation in the field of mental
health.

R D Laing (right) attends a discussion on the legalisation of

marijuana in London in 1967. Photo by Stan Meagher/Express/Getty
Laing entered psychiatry in the 1950s during a period of
innovation and optimism about the potential for treating
patients suffering chronic mental illness. Some of these
innovations were psychosocial, involving experiments with
group and community therapy – techniques that would
influence much of the work later done under the banner of
‘anti-psychiatry’. But the 1950s also saw widespread uptake of
‘new’ methods of physical treatment first developed in the
interwar years, such as insulin coma therapy, drug treatments,
lobotomy and ECT. Enthusiasts claimed these techniques
were bringing about a revolution in psychiatry that would see
all mental pathologies treated like any other condition – with
medical intervention at outpatient-style hospital wards. Their
critics argued that these physical treatments were damaging
and coercive, sedating and pacifying patients instead of
healing them. One of the most vocal proponents of physical
therapies, the psychiatrist William Sargant, had guilelessly
compared his own techniques to ‘brain-washing’. In his 1985
autobiography, Laing paints a grim picture of his earliest
experiences as a psychiatrist, writing:

I was beginning to suspect that insulin and electric

shocks, not to mention lobotomy and the whole
environment of a psychiatric unit, were ways of
destroying people and driving people crazy if they were
not so before, and crazier if they were.

Laing made his first major intervention into psychiatric

discourse with The Divided Self (1960), a book that promised
to make ‘madness, and the process of going mad,
comprehensible’. Drawing on insights from existential
philosophy and contemporary psychoanalysis, he portrayed
the withdrawn and isolated states of his schizoid patients as a
response to what they perceived as a threatening and
bewildering interpersonal environment. A ‘schizophrenic may
say that he is made of glass’, Laing wrote, ‘of such
transparency and fragility that a look directed at him splinters
him to bits and penetrates straight through him’.

The first edition of The Divided Self received a polite reception,

with reviewers commending Laing’s demand for a more
humane approach to psychiatry and his vivid portrayal of
schizophrenic lives. But in the far more widely read paperback
edition of 1965, Laing included a short foreword gesturing to
a more radical agenda:

Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are, on the

side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true
human growth. But psychiatry can so easily be a
technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is
adjusted.

This ‘normal’ ‘adjusted’ state, he suggests ‘is too often the

abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities …
a false self to adapt to false realities.’ He goes on to evoke
Marcuse’s countercultural classic One-Dimensional Man
(1964), writing that:

Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that

someone with an insistent experience of other
dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will
run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of
betraying what he knows.

In this short preface, Laing resituated The Divided Self within

the more radical ideas of British anti-psychiatry and its
international influences, including the work of Erving
Goffman, Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz. As the
psychologist Daniel Burston points out in The Wing of
Madness (1996), Laing gives little reason, in the first edition of
The Divided Self, for readers to think that normal adjustment
or ‘ontological security’ is undesirable, especially when
compared with the ‘torment and loneliness’ of the schizoid
position. But, soon after, Laing shifted his position, referring
to normality more pejoratively as an adjustment to a system of
capitalist excess and social injustice. On this model, those
individuals that society labelled ‘normal’ were most alienated
from inner authenticity. Connecting with the minds and lives
of schizophrenic patients, the anti-psychiatrists suggested,
offered a potential pathway to liberation. Schizophrenics,
Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience (1967), are brilliantly
‘adept at making themselves unremittingly
incomprehensible’, and it was precisely this unintelligibility
that made the schizophrenic mind a model of psychic
resistance in an over-controlling world.

In 1965, Laing and several colleagues established a

therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in East London. The
community was anti-hierarchical, without formal roles, and
with every member of the community paying rent – although
its chief architects undoubtedly held considerable sway over
the running of things. During their five-year tenure, Kingsley
Hall received numerous guests, seeking therapy or wanting to
experience its alternative lifestyle and politics. As the therapist
Joseph Berke wrote in 1971:

They came because friends lived there or because they

liked community life, or heard that Kingsley Hall was a
‘groovy scene’, or to demonstrate their wares at the
poetry readings, film shows, music and dance recitals,
and art exhibitions which took place in the big hall
downstairs.

If Berke’s account is anything to go by, those visitors were

certainly treated to a spectacle – long drawn-out dinners,
where one might be seated next to Sean Connery or Francis
Huxley, listening to Laing holding court on philosophy and
psychology.

Kingsley Hall also played host to a serious therapeutic project,

inspired in part by Bateson’s description of psychosis as ‘a
voyage of discovery’ from which the psychotic returns ‘with
insights different from those of the inhabitants who never
embarked on such a voyage.’ Instead of the mental hospital,
Laing wrote:

[W]e need a place where people who have travelled

further and, consequently, may be more lost than
psychiatrists and other sane people, can find their way
further into inner space and time, and back again …
Psychiatrically, this would appear as ex-patients helping
future patients to go mad.

The story of one Kingsley Hall resident, Mary Barnes,

appeared to vindicate this approach. Her therapeutic journey
involved ‘going down’ into a state of infantile regression,
where, with the help of her therapist – the aforementioned
Berke – and the wider community, she occupied an artificial
womb, fed from a bottle, and painted with her faeces. Her
regression was described as a necessary precursor to her
reintegration, after which she took on a role as caregiver
within the community and went on to be a successful artist.

Though her case was widely celebrated by Kingsley Hall’s

advocates, critics regarded it as an exception. Ultimately, the
Kingsley Hall project was short lived. Many residents found
life there difficult, and few, including Laing, stayed for
extended periods. Though the community had been set up
with the ambition of removing chemical and physical
restraint, there were incidents of violence and physical
coercion. One of the more disturbing moments in their
coauthored biography Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey
Through Madness (1971) is Berke’s description of punching
Barnes and making her nose bleed during a moment of
frustration. Laing’s son Adrian claimed it was almost
impossible to stay sane at Kingsley Hall and that living there
sent his father into a state of ‘drunken, wild madness’. In The
British Anti-Psychiatrists (2017), the historian Oisín Wall writes
that many residents felt under pressure to act mad, or in
Laing’s words have a ‘dishonest flip-out’.

Under looming financial pressure, and infighting among its

founding members, the community disbanded in 1970 and
the building was left to disrepair. The key figures behind
Kingsley Hall moved in different directions, some returning to
more conventional psychiatry, while others pivoted towards
the counterculture and political activism. Though many
legacies of the anti-psychiatric movement live on, the
psychopolitical narrative that linked the schizophrenic
experience with the psychedelic and situated both within the
post-war struggle for the mind was largely forgotten.

B y the end of the decade, the politics that had formed the far-
out element of anti-psychiatry and the psychedelic movement
were shifting. The apparent apathy of dropping out and doing
one’s thing was seen by factions of the New Left as a
hedonistic distraction from targeted activism, while Kingsley
Hall represented the folly of trying to contain individual
liberation, political revolution and mental health reform under
one roof and one endeavour. The utopian ideals that
underpinned the Summer of Love in San Francisco exposed a
similar naivety. By the autumn of 1967, the Haight had
become a haven for young runaways and addicts, and sexual
exploitation was rife. It seemed a stark reminder of the
warnings Erich Fromm posed in Escape from Freedom (1941),
when he argued that liberation expressed only in negative
terms was futile without a positive social and psychic
structure. In Bomb Culture (1968), the activist Jeff Nuttall
wrote:

[T]he West Coast hippies were utterly parasitic, not

other, not alternative, not truly a community, in that
their whole self-maintenance relied on the excess
material in the overmaterialistic culture they purported
to despise.

Both Leary and Laing built their public profiles and their
departures from medical and academic orthodoxy on a call to
liberate the mind. In doing so, they drew on a series of
postwar anxieties about mind control and the existential
threat that Cold War psychology and late modernity was said
to pose to the liberal self. Dropping out in its simplest form
meant preserving interiority through disaffiliation from the
wider culture, but the psychedelic vision of the dropout went
further, arguing that, since threats to the mind were so
pervasive and all-consuming, freedom required pushing the
boundaries of consciousness to embrace alterity and preserve
the mind’s enigmatic status in the century of the human
sciences.

By the end of the 1960s, the postwar fascination with mind

control and psychic liberation was waning. Despite great
advances in psychological and psychiatric research, the mind
and brain continued to be an enigma, and many postwar fears
about brainwashing were looked back on as sensational, even
paranoid. On the other hand, as the intellectual landscape of
philosophy and sociology drifted into the postmodern, the
idea that agency and culture was ‘conditioned’, ‘situated’ or
‘constructed’ largely came to be taken for granted.
And yet we appear to have arrived full circle. Today, many of
the debates about behavioural control in the age of big data
echo Cold War-era anxieties about brainwashing, reprising
the Marcusian nightmare of insidious manipulation and
repression in the ‘technological society’. In Byung-Chul Han’s
book Psychopolitics (2017), the philosopher warns of the
sophisticated use of targeted online content, enabling
‘influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level’. On our
current trajectory, writes Han, ‘freedom will prove to have
been merely an interlude.’ The fear is that the digital age has
not liberated us but exposed us, by offering up our private
lives to machine-learning algorithms able to process the
masses of personal and behavioural data often unwittingly
disclosed daily.

In a world of influencers and digital entrepreneurs, it’s not

easy to imagine the resurgence of a culture engendered
through disconnect and disaffiliation, but concerns over the
threat of online targeting, polarisation and big data have
inspired recent polemics about the need to rediscover solitude
and disconnect. In Psychopolitics, Han muses on the
philosophical figure of the ‘idiot’ who resists neoliberalism’s
order of ‘total communication and total surveillance’ by
veiling themselves in noncommunicative silence: ‘By nature,
the idiot is unallied, un-networked, and uninformed.’ Han
often portrays himself in the guise of this modern-day heretic,
surrounding himself with analogue objects and nurturing the
garden that he says connects him to ‘earth’s otherness’.

Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing (2019) provides more

of a practical guide for resisting the lure of the attention
economy by reconnecting with our lived environment and
exercising alternative practices of attention and volition.
Alternatively, hobbyist communities known as self-hosters
argue that resisting surveillance capitalism does not
 necessarily require disconnecting but, instead, reclaiming the
architecture of the internet and running services on hardware
owned by individuals and collectives, as opposed to the
monopolies of big tech. In such examples, the legacies of the
1960s dropout and its politics of disconnect are alive and well,
romanticising lives lived against the grain of a digitised
existence. But they also push back against the psychedelic,
indeterminate vision of the dropout I’ve explored. Perhaps
because machine learning puts into question the nature of
human spontaneity and the limits of behavioural
unpredictability, its critics are inspired to reprise debates
about privacy and those parts of the self that should remain
hidden.

To read more about altered states and the history of psychiatry,

visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the
human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.

aeon.co 3 February 2022