Richard Saville-Smith

Als iemand die ziek is en daarom regelmatig wordt opgesloten in psychiatrische ziekenhuizen, en die aan de Universiteit van Edinburgh een PhD in religiewetenschappen heeft behaald, is het me een genoegen dit essay aan Psyche & Geloof aan te bieden. Het schiet op vele punten tekort. Toch hoop ik dat de transdisciplinaire benadering nuttig is om allerlei discussies die door specialisten in verschillende vakgebieden worden gevoerd bij elkaar te brengen. Ik schrijf over psychiatrie en religie, maar die hebben hun achtergrond in de sociale geschiedenis die tot de psychiatrie en de religiewetenschappen hebben geleid, en deze staan op hun beurt in de bredere sociale context van de West-Europese Verlichting. De hedendaagse psychiatrische kennistheorie wordt immers door de opkomst van de moderniteit mogelijk gemaakt. Onderdeel van ziek zijn is het vermogen, of in ieder geval de bereidheid, door grenzen en muren heen te breken. Het nadeel is dat, vanuit welk specifiek vakgebied dan ook, mij een gebrek aan nuance en details kan worden verweten ten opzichte van uitzonderingen en tegenargumenten. Het is moeilijk om alle gegevens en bewijzen recht te doen in zo’n beperkt bestek. Het beeld dat ik in dit korte polemische essay neerzet heeft niet ten doel de lezer op basis van wetenschappelijke nauwgezetheid of theoretische doordenking te overtuigen. Het gaat op beide punten mank. De nadruk ligt op brede penseelstreken, een culturele lezing van de relatie tussen religie en psychiatrie die, zoals gemengde metaforen, een makkelijk lezen zowel mogelijk als moeilijk maken. Hoewel ik begin met een poging de psychiatrie voorbij haar eigen narratief te brengen en haar neer te zetten als zowel subject en object van haar eigen fascinatie, ben ik steeds gericht op de huidige tijd. Dit narratief gaat van de 18e eeuw naar schizofrenie, het psychosespectrum en dissociatie in de DSM-5-TR. Uiteindelijk verschijnt de mogelijkheid van ‘uitlegkundig pluralisme’, waarbij zowel religieuze als psychiatrische kennistheorie een rol spelen, zonder dat de een de ander uitsluit. Om dit narratief neer te zetten, moet het verhaal eerst verteld worden.

Purpose This paper critiques the use of the term “mysticism” in psychedelic research, arguing its continued use is outdated and misleading. Findings: It highlights the confusion stemming from the historical context of “mysticism,” particularly through the works of Walter Stace and Walter Pahnke, whose ideas have shaped the psychedelic discourse despite being flawed and largely unexamined. The paper is divided into two parts: the first is an archaeology that re-evaluates these foundational texts that misled psychedelic discourse; the second is a genealogy that traces how the concept of “mysticism”, with its religious roots, became attached to “psychedelics” and became normalised in second generation psychedelic research. Conclusions: It advocates for rebranding the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) to the Psychedelic Experience Questionnaire (PEQ), emphasising that this change accords nicely with the idea of Psychedelic Experience which Walter Pahnke developed in his later research, as a five-part typology, and liberates the instrument from the hangover of a dubious legacy in which the correlation between therapeutic outcomes and mystical experiences invites psychedelic experiences to be shoehorned into a very particular and peculiar quasi-religious construct.

How do we explain the coincidence of religion and madness in which prophets, founders of religions and great saints often show symptoms of an excitability that is extreme and even pathological? This book attempts to address this phenomenological problem. Richard Saville-Smith argues that 'acute religious experiences' provides a novel category to the study of the non-rational. This book provides an epidemiological approach to a crisis, which is non-veridical and non-reductionist, recognizing a predisposition due to gene variation as a perennial constant, whilst affirming that culture contextualizes experiences. Informed by contemporary psychiatric theory, which is passed through the lens of mad studies, this book proposes the 'sweet-spot' of 'acute religious experiences' which express the phenomenality of madness – but where mad is good. This interdisciplinary study provides a species-wide account of interest to all disciplines that encounter such anomalies in their subjects, from fine art to psychiatry.

Psychiatry and Religious Studies have common interests in extreme and extraordinary states when articulated in the languages of religions. For Religious Studies the problems with the category of religious experience are philosophical and profound; whilst the resurgence of interest in religion by psychiatrists (three meta-analyses in the past five years) has not repaired the damaging legacy of reductionist interpretations. In this paper I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the religious experience discourse. From psychiatry I apply the new idea of Disruption, which makes its first appearance in the US psychiatric textbook DSM-5 (APA, 2013); and the older Biopsychosocial model (Engel, 1977). From Physiology I apply the language of ‘ictal’ (Adachi, 2002, 2010) to privilege a dynamic idea of time. These concepts involve particular epistemological presuppositions and, as this is an interdisciplinary, rather than a multidisciplinary contribution, these will be critically developed. The approach I propose provides a way of holistically addressing the categories of Mysticism, Possession and Altered States of Consciousness, as acute or extreme categories of experience. I propose that the idea of ‘Disruption’ can act as a pre-interpretive placeholder for a real existential experience which might (or might not) result in a non-pathological diagnosis of religious experience. The outcome depends on the socialisation of interpretation. I hope to show that the idea that there might be alternative interpretations removes the need for a sui generis defence of religious experience. By insisting on a biopsychosocial approach within an ictal framework, a way beyond the linguistic impasse of interpretation is proposed; the essentialism, implicit in the mysticism discourse, is questioned; and the non-medicalisation of Possession confirmed. The limitations of this paper point to the opportunity for further conversations between interested parties, including people with experiences of Disruption.