The Bad Trips of Early Psychonauts

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One thing that stands out about trip reports from early Western psychonauts is that they often involve unpleasant, uncomfortable experiences. Such experiences are still more frequently reported in Western countries without a tradition of ritualistic use than they are in non-Western, Indigenous cultures that do follow this kind of tradition. Julian Shea wrote an excellent essay on why we don’t find many so-called ‘bad trips’ in accounts of Indigenous psychedelic experiences. Some of these reasons help explain why so much early experimentation in the West led to negative experiences, but other specific cultural factors led to these outcomes as well.

It is worth understanding how cultural factors surrounding psychedelic use affect the quality of altered states of consciousness, as this is essential to improving our navigation of these spaces. With this aim in mind, I would like to detail some accounts from early psychonauts – various artists, writers, poets, and philosophers – and what went wrong during their psychedelic experiences.

Henri Michaux

I recently visited an exhibit of Franco-Belgian artist Henri Michaux’s ‘Mescaline Drawings’, showing at the Courtauld Gallery in London. These drawings were recreations of the visions that the artist experienced during four mescaline experiences he had in the 1950s, beginning in 1955. This was an experiment prompted by his publisher, with the aim being to see how mescaline – found in psychedelic cacti like peyote and San Pedro – would affect the creative act.

Michaux viewed these experiences as windows into the unconscious. What we see on the page are transcriptions of the artist’s visions, emotions, feelings, and sensations; we get the sense that his hand became like a shuddering seismograph, recording the activity of his mind. While he did not create the drawings during the full effects of the drug, he experienced a ‘vibratory motion’ that he felt for hours, days, or weeks later his experiences, which we can see reflected in the vibratory nature of the artist’s pen and pencil strokes.

However, while Michaux saw great value in his mescaline-influenced drawings, which we the viewers can see as well, they are the outpouring of experiences that the artist also viewed in negative terms. We can see the conflicted view he had of mescaline based on the title of his work Miserable Miracle (1956), which contains drawings and writings based on these psychedelic experiences. Michaux wrote, “After a while the effects of the drug, at least for me, are terribly fatiguing and enervating, and for a complex man who has within him contradictory tendencies and urges, each experiment can be a severe test.” In a 1956 article for The Paris Review, Louise Varèse notes,

Floods of contradictory, urgent, and often upsetting impulses would seize him: for instance, to telephone someone, then not to; or, to enumerate dozens of words ending in able. In another phase of the drug, grotesque tableaux would appear.

During his fourth (and last) mescaline experience, Michaux accidentally took six times the usual dose, so that can at least partly explain why that particular experience became distressing. Taking high doses – or taking more than one intended or was prepared for – is often a cause of bad trips. Mixhaux recounts seeing “grotesque faces senselessly laughing”, and much like other accounts of bad trips, he reports feeling utterly abandoned in a never-ending trip:

Lost at an amazing depth, I was no longer moving. Still in this stupor, several seconds elapsed. And, suddenly, the innumerable waves of the mescalinian ocean came pouring over me and knocked me down. Kept knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down. It was never going to end, never. I was alone in the vibration of this wreckage, without periphery, without annex, a man-target without hope of return.

Jean-Paul Sartre

One of the most famous bad trip reports comes from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He was administered mescaline (by injection) by his old school friend, the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache, at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris in January 1935. Lagache was studying phenomenology, the philosophical school of thought founded by Edmund Husserl. Mescaline became a relevant tool in this respect, given that phenomenologists aim to describe reality as it purely is – free from definitions, categories, and theories – turning attention only “to the things themselves”, as Husserl put it.

Sartre framed this mescaline experience, as Michaux did, in negative terms. Mike Jay writes for The Paris Review that Sartre found mescaline’s effects “sinister”, adding that “he felt submerged against his will in a miasma of sensations that assailed him viscerally at every turn, a world of grotesque extreme close-ups in which everything disgusted him.”

In an article published on Blue Labyrinths, Matt Bluemink describes some of Sartre’s disturbing visions:

During the midst of his trip Sartre had received a phone call from [Simone] de Beauvoir; a phone call that had apparently rescued him from a desperate battle with scrambled lobsters, octopuses and other grimacing sea-life. To Sartre ordinary objects had begun to change their shape grotesquely: umbrellas were deforming into vultures, shoes were turning into skeletons, and faces looked absolutely ‘monstrous’. All the while, behind him, just past the corner of his eye was the constant threat of the terrifying deep water dwellers. Yet, despite these horrible hallucinations (that seem rather uncharacteristic of the mescaline experience), by the following day Sartre had apparently recovered completely, referring to the experience with ‘cheerful detachment.’

More well-known is the fact that Sartre experienced persisting hallucinations of lobsters following him, long after the acute effects of mescaline had subsided. In an interview with the scholar John Gerassi, Sartre recounted:

[A]fter I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “O.K., guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.

While this seems like he dealt with this intense form of hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) with a humorous attitude, the constant recurrence of the hallucinatory sea creatures (lasting for weeks) did lead Satre to complain to de Beauvoir (his partner), “I know what the matter with me is. I’m on the verge of a chronic hallucinatory psychosis.” His mescaline experience led him to experience a nervous breakdown. While it is not explicitly referenced, mescaline certainly influenced Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938). He makes numerous references to crabs, almost always in connection to psychological distress. Also, in the novel, mundane objects continually become hideous or dissolve into viscous masses.

Nonetheless, Sartre would later refer to mescaline in glowing terms. He told Gerassi, “I liked mescaline a lot.” He recalled taking it in the Pyrenees: “As you know I am not a nature lover. I much prefer to sit four hours in a café, but he said that on mescaline the mountains “take on so many colors, it’s really art.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

10 years after Sartre’s trip, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher and proponent of phenomenology, also had a negative experience with mescaline (despite taking a much smaller dose than Sartre). He recounted, “Everything seemed at once clammy and scaly, like some of the large serpents I have seen uncoiling themselves at Berlin zoo. Then I was seized with the fear of being on a small island surrounded by serpents.”

Walter Benjamin

On May 22, 1934, eight months before Sartre’s experiment in Paris, the German poet and philosopher Walter Benjamin was administered mescaline in Berlin, funnily enough also by an old friend turned psychiatrist – Ernst Joël. Fritz Fränkel, a colleague of Joël, supervised Benjamin’s mescaline session in Joël’s apartment. The session was largely unstructured (Benjamin was just presented with a few psychological tests). Jay writes in his piece for The Paris Review:

The mescaline experiment of 1934 began with Fränkel giving Benjamin an injection and then leaving the room. On his return a few minutes later, his subject seemed in a bad mood. He was irritable and fidgety, and described the onset of the drug’s symptoms as ‘an impertinence.’ He complained that this was the wrong setting: the experiment should be taking place in a palm grove…. When presented with Rorschach inkblots he complained—”the peevishness, the mood of discontent keeps returning”.

Throughout his experience, Benjamin complained to Fränkel about the effects of the drug but also how he hadn’t been given enough. Indeed, for some users, bad trips can arise not only from feeling overwhelmed by a high dose but also due to not taking enough – as if they’re stuck straddling the worlds of sobriety and psychedelia.

Oscar Janiger

Oscar Janiger was one of the pioneering psychiatrists using LSD in the 1950s and 1960s. He introduced LSD to actor Cary Grant and writer Aldous Huxley. He is also the first recorded person in the US to have used DMT. Discovering the work of Hungarian chemist Stephen Szára (who first discovered the psychoactive effects of DMT), he had the local laboratory make him a batch. Then, one afternoon while he was alone in his office, he filled a syringe and shot it into his arm, describing it as “a dangerously stupid, idiotic thing to do.” In Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1987), author Jay Stevens reports:

Compared to DMT, LSD was like a lazy summer picnic. Janiger felt like he was inside a pin-ball machine, bombarded by flashing lights, clanging bells, infernal messages. There was no insight. He was lost, disconnected, and when he later regained consciousness (the DMT lasted only thirty minutes) he was convinced he had been “totally stark raving crazy”. Which was terrific! Perhaps he had found the elusive M [madness] factor.

Alan Watts

Stevens adds in his book that Janiger, after his DMT trip, “called up Alan Watts and bet him he had a drug that could finally shut him up. Watts took the bet and the DMT, and for thirty minutes he lay there staring at Janiger, who kept repeating “Alan, Alan, please say something. Talk to me. Your reputation is at stake.” But Watts never said a word…Everyone who took DMT agreed it was a hellish half hour, with absolutely no redeeming qualities.”

William Burroughs

In the 1950s, the author William Burroughs was in search of a cure for his heroin addiction, which is described in semi-autobiographical fashion in his novel Junkie (1953). Burroughs travelled to the Amazon rainforest and became one of the first non-botanist/non-anthropologist Westerners to try yage (another term for ayahuasca). He described his experiences with the brew in a number of letters sent to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, which were later published in the short book The Yage Letters (1963).

In 1961, while in London, UK, Burroughs obtained a supply of DMT to experiment with. But he then completely scared himself off the drug after believing he had nearly overdosed with a 100 mg (IM) trip. This trip shook him to his core; he said that “it was completely and horribly real and involved unendurable pain.”He referred to DMT as a “terror drug”.

Jack Kerouac

Ginsberg offered Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), a chance to try the DMT he had brought back from Leary’s Millbrook estate (a mansion which played an important role in the psychedelic movement – it was where much experimentation took place, and it was visited by figures such as author Ken Kesey, psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and Watts). A photo shows Kerouac “grimacing” under the influence of DMT in Ginsberg’s apartment in 1964.

Why Did Early Psychonauts Have Such Distressing Trips?

Despite mescaline being regarded as the most ‘easy-going’ of the classic psychedelics – it typically creates a more lucid, euphoric, and easy-to-navigate headspace – it led to many unpleasant effects for Michaux, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Benjamin. Initial experiments with DMT also didn’t seem to yield the encounters with loving entities that many contemporary psychonauts report. I think there are several reasons why we see so many bad trip reports from early Western psychonauts.

The first reason is that psychedelics were new. This was uncharted territory. These early experimenters didn’t have the wealth of knowledge, information, and trip reports we have today, which can help prepare one for the experience. If you really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, and you don’t ‘start low and go slow’, then it’s not too surprising that a moderate-strong dose would feel overwhelming.

Second, many of these psychonauts took too high a dose (often unintentionally, either by miscalculating the dose or by not knowing the level of intensity that would result). 100 mg of DMT IM is far too large a dose. You don’t need that much to achieve a breakthrough experience.

Third, the bad trips of early Western psychonauts were influenced by the settings in which they took place. For example, Jay writes of Benjamin, “He complained that this was the wrong setting: the experiment should be taking place in a palm grove.” Michaux likewise took mescaline and remained in his apartment, lying in a darkened room. On the other hand, Michaux did pay close attention to his setting. The Courtauld Gallery offers the following description for his drawing Mescaline writing (1955):

At home, away from prying eyes, Henri Michaux prepared himself for taking mescaline with great care – closed shutters, silent surroundings, music, both contemporary (Gustav Mahler, Olivier Messiaen) and traditional (Indian raga and polyphonic music from the Aka tribe of Central Africa), and hourly notetaking.

If not an apartment, other early psychedelic experiments in the West took place in a hospital setting, which at the time were not designed to be the trip-friendly spaces they are today in modern clinical trials. The kinds of people administering or supervising the experiences would have influenced these psychedelic journeys too. Sartre, for example, blamed Lagache for causing his initial bad reaction; he described Lagache as “saturnine”, and how he said to Sartre before he took the mescaline, “What it does to you is terrible,” and that this is why “I ended up having all sorts of unpleasant hallucinations.”

We can contrast these kinds of settings with the settings in which they have typically been taken in Indigenous, non-Western contexts. In the latter, a shaman (also referred to as a curandero/curandera, medicine man/woman, or healer) administers the psychedelic. This person is considered an expert at navigating these spaces and has undergone years of training specifically to support people in these states of mind. The same cannot be said of many of the psychiatrists who administered psychedelics to people between the 1930s to the 1960s. Moreover, Indigenous psychedelic sessions take place in a ceremonial context, typically in nature, and in a group setting. People in an altered state certainly aren’t left on their own. The result is a more community-oriented, supported experience. All of these factors can act as an important mitigator of unpleasant experiences. Nonetheless, we should keep in mind the following point about ‘bad trips’ that Shea highlights in his essay:

“Bad” trips do not exist [in Indigenous cultures] because psychedelic experiences in indigenous communities are not conceptualized in such binary terms, and for that reason neither do “good” trips exist—because things are often not so clear cut. And for that reason psychedelics in these communities may not often be seen as an opportunity to have a discrete experience, such as to inspire personal growth or to cure illness, and neither do they inspire either joy or dread. Rather, psychedelic experiences are part of a way of life that allows a complex, dynamic, unrestricted, blending of the human world and the spirit world.

A fourth and final reason for the bad trips of early psychonauts, which I think ties into Shea’s point above, is how psychedelics were conceptualised at the time they were taken. At the Michaux exhibition, I saw a description of one of the artist’s works that mentioned how the artist took mescaline at a time when psychedelics – mescaline and LSD – were thought of as psychotomimetics. In other words, they were seen as psychosis-mimicking compounds. Early psychedelic researchers believed that by giving these compounds to subjects, they could better understand the nature of schizophrenia.

Now imagine that you take a powerful mind-altering compound, with the assumption that it causes a psychotic-like state. Given the influence of ‘set’ (or mindset), it would not be that surprising to find yourself experiencing mental distress. Relatedly, the final chapter of Miserable Miracle, in which Michaux describes his last trip, is titled ‘Schizophrenie Experimentale’. The cultural milieu of early Western psychedelia had elements that were simply not conducive to a good trip. Contrast this framing with the concept of psychedelics as ‘sacraments’, ‘entheogens’, ‘plant medicines’, or ‘plant teachers’: these latter concepts – especially when they are part of a rich tradition – work to influence the quality of the experiences they produce.

Unlike early Western psychonauts, many Western contemporaries have adopted Indigenous framings of psychedelics, moving away from referring to them as ‘drugs’ or ‘hallucinogens’, which often carry a constellation of negative connotations. This doesn’t mean using a neutral term like ‘psychedelic’ isn’t also conducive to therapeutic or spiritual experiences. However, there are many other assumptions we carry with us when we take these substances. It’s important to be aware of what these assumptions are and how they might be influencing the character of the experience.

We can learn a lot from the psychedelic experiments that Western psychonauts conducted in the early- and mid-20th century. Various aspects of set and setting – which should include the culture in which the substances are taken – contributed to the unpleasant experiences described above. Going forward, psychonauts today can learn from these mistakes, as well as take note of the aspects of set and setting that are common in Indigenous contexts. What is admirable about those early psychonauts – their curiosity, and artistic, philosophical, and psychological motivations – can be combined with better practices. Psychedelic mindscapes can be explored with fewer mishaps along the way.

Sam Woolfe | Community Blogger at Chemical Collective | www.samwoolfe.com

Sam is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to David via email at blog@chemical-collective.com