American Trip my review

American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century Ido Hartogshhn The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2020. viii + 418 pages, 10 chapters, Notes, Bibliography, Index Expanding the set-and-setting idea, Hartogshon broadens it from its original meaning of indicating two major influences on each individual person’s psychedelic experience; he applies “set and setting” to analyze how society’s reactions to psychedelics arose from wider cultural sets and social settings. This proves a rich way to interpret a history of psychedelic ideas and provides a way to classify and organize America’s 20th and 21st Centuries perspectives on these drugs and their complicated times. Starting by naming America’s first psychedelic period last century as “The Experimental Psychosis Movement,” Hartogsohn moves readers’ attention to a series of cultural progressions that orders how we may see the many separate and conflicting events. Hartogshon’s subsequent psychedelic periods are: LSD, the CIA, and the Military From Psychotomimetics to Psychedelics Experiments in Set and Setting Psychedelics, Creativity, and Culture Psychedelics Go to Silicon Valley The Psychedelic Controversy American Trip LSD and the 1960s The Future of Set and Setting As you might expect these perceptions of psychedelics are not strictly sequential, and Hartogshon does not overly restrict his periods’ borders, but as handy frames of references they help organize an otherwise jumble of events. If the author plans to elaborate on his cultural set-and-setting idea, an article on the rise of transpersonal psychology would enrich his studies from the 1960s to early 2000s. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was the main professional publication that continued to publish psychedelic research during these otherwise quiet decades, and many of the people American Trip mentions were editors and/or contributors: Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, James Fadiman, Stanislav Grof, Willis Harman, Huston Smith, Myron Stolaroff, among other psychedelic pioneers. American Trip is especially strong in its chapter notes and its bibliography, notably listing early psychedelic publications that are too often overlooked. It’s a rich addition to scholarly libraries, helps psychedelic readers organize their thoughts, and depicts the intellectual history of America’s psychedelic movement. ----- Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D.