Speaker Bio
Nicolas Langlitz, a medical doctor by training, is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine who uses ethnographic fieldwork to think through philosophical questions. He wrote three books: Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists (2020), Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012), and Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse: Lacan und das Problem der Sitzungsdauer (2005). He is Professor of Anthropology and director of the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at The New School for Social Research in New York.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Psychedelic medicalization: What can a square peg teach a round hole?
Psychedelic substances have notably influenced medicine, highlighted by Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD. This breakthrough reshaped scientific perspectives on consciousness, spurred innovative pharmaceutical research, and suggested psychedelic therapy's potential for treating diverse disorders. Ironically, US Food and Drug Administration's rigorous regulatory demands, aimed at ensuring biomedical research integrity, severely hindered psychedelic science (Oram 2018).
In response, this panel unites specialists from psychedelic humanities, medicine, and social sciences to discuss the interplay between the second wave of psychedelic research and the complexities of medicalization. How, for example, are epistemological and regulatory demands of biomedicine shaping agenda-setting in the psychedelic renaissance? And, vice-versa, is it possible for psychedelic therapy to alter the underlying assumptions of biomedicine? How do psychedelics challenge the meaning of expertise? And will any of this change the fundamental practice of medicine?