As intellectually exciting as Josh Raymond (May 3) makes Aidan Lyon’s book Psychedelic Experience seem, and as a psychotherapist I certainly enjoyed the whim-wham in that review, I think it falls too much into the Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener camp of overly erudite analysis. What I did not get from the review, hence the book, is the very real danger of psychedelics.
As Raymond himself acknowledges, he has clients who do not have a ball with psychedelics. Recent research does seem to accept that in some cases psychedelics, precisely administered and monitored, can be helpful for conditions such as PTSD. But that is not the layman’s normal experience with psychedelics.
A friend in college, now a psychiatrist, made the typical error, back in the early 1970s, of taking what looked like a speck of ink on a little piece of paper – LSD – then when nothing happened in an hour took another, and spent the next three days sitting on a weedy hill behind campus in a mental no man’s land. A fellow student of psychology, a black man twenty years older than the rest of us, had spent those twenty years in a psychological coma after being subjected to LSD experiments where one military doctor was the devil and the other a god. When under the effects of peyote, a friend and I romped all day long in a thunderstorm, while the other guy, son of a highly placed Drug Enforcement Administration official, spent ten hours in one position staring at the river.
Psychedelics are like a train you can’t get off. Fancy technical terms really don’t serve the purpose of teaching what the experience is actually like.
Women and fairy tales
It’s always good to see new treatments of the tellers of fairy tales, in the case of The Lost Princess (May 17) the bluestocking conteuses of eighteenth-century France. Alongside Madame d’Aulnoy, mentioned by your reviewer Vanessa Braganza, Madame Leprince de Beaumont also had a distinguished leading role. The review gives the impression that these influential writers have been forgotten and asks: “Why should they not be canonical?”
Are they not? Of course the drawing of demarcation lines is arbitrary, but the conteuses have basked in the sun on numerous occasions over the past 100 years and more, especially during the period of intensive studies of the fairy tale conducted in North America and Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. An earlier flowering of their fortunes decorated the fin de siècle and belle époque periods; witness the beautiful illustration by Walter Crane that embellishes the review. Their stories have been anthologized many times in English and other languages (see The Blue Fairy Book, 1889, edited by Andrew Lang, and sequels), and Marina Warner explored their significance extensively in From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), while Angela Carter extended their female wonderstory tradition.
Naturally Perrault co
