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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