Download project description - Standard drugs and drug standards

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Recently the ESF Networking Program “Drug Standards, Standard Drugs” has hosted a number
of discussions and conferences on the standardization of pharmaceuticals and standardization
processes in general. My research project tries to invert the perspective on substances asking
whether the standardization of psychoactive substances has also led to a standardization of
personhood? Using Ian Hacking’s notion of “making up people”1 and Nikolas Rose’s finding
that we are becoming “neurochemical selves”2 as a starting point, I would like to write a history
of personhood and of technologies of the self by writing a history of objects.
Psychoactive drugs often become stabilized in a network of actors, bringing together different
research areas and regimes of values. They are used to cure, normalize, transform, or enhance
and as such, their history is entangled with concepts of the self, the psyche, and the person.
Compared to other drugs, subjectivity and personality play an especially important role in the
history of psychotropics. Fixing drug action and specific effects in drug testing, e.g. in clinical
trials, relies on the first person perspective and cannot entirely draw on third person accounts.
Also, beginning with early psychopharmacology in the 1950s, a tension between psychodynamic
and biological explanations of mental disorders and drug effects became apparent. Psychoactive
drugs challenged existing concepts of personhood, of normalcy and pathology and at the same
time triggered new standardization processes: On the one hand, personhood became
standardized by entering a statistical mode during drug-related procedures with rating scales,
personality tests, drug action tests, as well as with diagnostic categories. On the other hand,
consuming psychoactive drugs can be described as a technology of the self, with different drugs
in different times promoting certain values and norms.
The cooperation between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatric clinics in drug testing is
central to my project, especially where drug action is tested, discussed and eventually fixed and
explained by referring to concepts of personhood. Furthermore, some psychoactive substances
have had certain moments in their historical biographies when they became means to investigate
personhood. A good example for this is the history of LSD and its use to induce ‘model
psychoses,’ and later to undertake journeys to discover inner frontiers and expand consciousness
or the antidepressant imipramine, which in the 1960s started to challenge existing models of
personality types.
HOSTING INSTITUTIONS
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, London
Hacking, Ian: Making Up People, in: Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna & David E. Wellbery (eds.): Reconstructing
Individualism. Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford 1986, pp. 222-236.
2 Rose, Nikolas: Neurochemical Selves, in: Society Nov/Dec 2003, pp. 46-59.
1
Brookes University, Oxford
Descartes Centre, University of Utrecht