Substance use beyond science in De Quincey

The term psychonaut, from Ancient Greek meaning mind/soul navigator/sailor, denotes an (often drug-assisted) explorer of inner mental space, searching for new experiences and knowledge. Coined by Ernst Junger in the 1940s, this may have influenced the thinking of the creator of lysergic acid diethylamide, Albert Hoffmann.^{Reference Jay22} Contemporary connotations of psychonaut can suggest an individual operating beyond the conventional frameworks of institutional science.^{Reference Jay22} Nevertheless, this distinction is not necessarily absolute, because these subjects often conducted their experiments in collaboration with prominent scientists.^{Reference Jay22}

Blending the empirical and introspective, De Quincey was a proto-psychonaut, placing his account both inside and outside of science. As he notes: ‘I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it [opium-eating] to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man.’^{Reference De Quincey15} De Quincey’s mode of administration was laudanum, entailing the dissolving of opium in alcohol. Thus, the excess he speaks of is doubly so, because he probably had a further addiction to this second, de-emphasised substance.^{Reference Morrison23} Regardless, De Quincey appeals to personal experience as a means to authorial validity. This is as an individualised recitation of what he deems to be symptoms, but also as an enquiry of such epistemological depth that it develops a ‘record’. This can be construed as both competitive and curatorial, exceeding contemporary understanding and offering this excess to further human knowledge. De Quincey’s subjective approach becomes a site of verifiable and empirical enquiry, reflecting goals of current qualitative approaches towards substance use.^{Reference Narayanan and Murthy24} However, in Confessions this self-gained knowledge is presented as being beyond the scope of medical professionals – although this was not necessarily the case – rather than data to be interpreted by them: ‘therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be room for further discoveries, stand aside, and allow me to come forward and lecture on this matter’.^{Reference De Quincey15}

The truth, when turning to the observations of medical professionals, is more complicated. In 1829, Robert Christison described opium as ‘the most common drug in medical practice’.^{Reference Christison25} Furthermore, Christison was one of the earliest medical professionals to acknowledge some of De Quincey’s observations, describing his account as follows: ‘a very poetical, but I believe also a very faithful, picture of the phenomena now alluded to is given in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, – a work published not long ago by a gentleman who writes from personal experience’.^{Reference Christison25} Christison goes on to further state: ‘it is singular that our profession should have observed these phenomena so little, as to be accused by the author of having wholly misrepresented the action of the most common drug in medical practise’.^{Reference Christison25} In accordance with Christison’s observations, De Quincey posits the subjective as a route towards the objective in the search for verifiable information. In turn, he seeks to emphasise the ineffectiveness of contemporary scientific investigation, inverting a professional-recreational paradigm of substance use in the process:

This technique of self-enquiry may be traced into the development of psychoanalysis almost 100 years later. In his preoccupation with dreams, internal states and the influence of childhood experiences, De Quincey foreshadows Carl Jung (1875–1961), and especially Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who likewise blurred scientific object and subject. In Uber Coca (1885), Freud presents self-administration of cocaine – a stimulant with different properties and drug classification than opium – as a mode for scientific research: ‘I have carried out experiments and studied, in myself and others, the effect of coca on the healthy human body.’^{Reference Freud26} As a doctor who believed in scientific approaches, Freud does not adopt such an oppositional stance towards the medical establishment, affirming that ‘many doctors felt that coca would play an important role by filling a gap in the medicine chest of psychiatrists’.^{Reference Freud26}

De Quincey’s text can, however, be seen in the extension of the self-analytic method. Freud’s self-administration prefigured the self-interpretive technique inherent in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and may have contributed to the development of psychoanalysis. This link has been acknowledged within De Quincey scholarship. For instance, although evidence would indicate that Freud was not familiar with De Quincey’s work at first hand, they shared similarities in their insights.^{Reference Proudfit and Snyder27} De Quincey’s self-analysis led to a theorisation of the human mind, evocative of later conceptions of the unconscious. In the sequel to Confessions, Suspiria de Profundis (1845), he represents the human mind as a palimpsest inscribed with impressions that may or may not be recalled: ‘everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before.’^{Reference De Quincey15} As Robert Maniquis writes:

Recent scholarship has, however, argued against the limitations of reading De Quincey as a teleological predecessor to psychoanalysis. Joel Faflak, in his Romantic Psychoanalysis, contends that De Quincey’s own writing invites reading ‘synchronously rather than teleologically’ to reveal its dense and allusive contents, placing him, as a subject who invites analysis, in a ‘conflicted relationship to the psychoanalysis he helps to invent’.^{Reference Faflak29} Markus Iseli has similarly argued that tracing ‘the historical line that finally and logically leads to the wisdom of the grandmaster, Freud’s psychoanalysis’ obscures the influence De Quincey exerts over separate fields and concepts, such as cognitive psychology and the cognitive unconscious.^{Reference Iseli30}

De Quincey’s opium use

De Quincey’s literary form is an important consideration for exploring subjective illness theories and individual experiences; the mode of the autobiography presents a specific capacity for figuratively representing the structure of the mind. Historically the form emphasises the life of the narrator, in the first person, for self-questioning and scrutiny. Through this, De Quincey’s own mind is both the contents and the measure of the narrative, foregrounding the voice of the opium user, emphasising its validity and underlining the centrality of the ‘patient’s view’ in the medical humanities.^{Reference Porter31} This centrality of the individual, a ‘medical history from below’, aligns with De Quincey’s view on his substance-induced excursions, although it remains open to interpretation whether he would have explicitly described himself as ‘sick’.^{Reference Porter31} Specifically, De Quincey claims his reasons for first taking opium to be therapeutic: the easing of ‘excruciating rheumatic pains’, although its pleasures are equally the motivator of his continued usage.^{Reference De Quincey15} As he states: ‘That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: – this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me – in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.’^{Reference De Quincey15}

Contrary to contemporary medical consensus, De Quincey portrays opium as a memory aid. Although its capacity for pain relief is verified (as are its effects of euphoria), the experience of recollection appears personal to De Quincey.³² His consumption, occurring at a time of loose regulation, could likewise have produced contaminations and thus different chemical structures.^{Reference Berridge17} Commentators have frequently discussed the fact that opium in De Quincey’s time differed depending on its place of origin. Drawing together medical sources, Robert Morrison notes that East India opium was ‘considered weaker than that of Turkey’.^{Reference Morrison33} According to the American Journal of Science, ‘the Turkey opium has hitherto possessed the best reputation and has been considered superior to any other’.^{Reference Morrison33} Likewise, the Colonial Magazine reported that the ‘opinion very generally entertained in Europe’ is that the ‘East India opium is inferior to that grown in Persia (known as Turkey opium)’.^{Reference Morrison33} In Confessions, De Quincey records himself as having used both: ‘I … have taken happiness, both in a solid and a liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and Turkey’.^{Reference De Quincey15}

Regardless of scientific veracity, impurities of substance collate with poetic yet unwanted adulterations of neurochemistry. Memory is ‘disjointed’, with decontextualised and partially deciphered moments of recall. Here, opium is again wrongly classified as a panacea for forgetfulness. De Quincey voices his belief that ‘there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind’, and opium provides his proof, serving to emphasise critical and traumatic life events.^{Reference De Quincey15} In Suspiria, De Quincey recollects his childhood with his three sisters, two of whom, Elizabeth and Jane, died at an early age. The pain of these losses, occurring years before, returns as remembrances, such as speculation over Jane’s being ‘treated harshly’ by her carer in the days leading up to her death.^{Reference De Quincey15} His sisters return in his dreams, the faculty which in Suspiria he calls ‘the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy’, and in combination with which ‘opium … seems to possess a specific power … not merely for exalting the colours of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows; and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities’.^{Reference De Quincey15} Opium thus serves to stimulate the dreaming mind, exalting, deepening, but also distorting an all too real childhood trauma.

The deaths operate as an initially unacknowledged but significant motivator in Suspiria’s textual development. In ‘representing’ the unconscious, the form of the work reveals the ambiguities of individual experience, and the apparent effects of the substance become irretrievably linked with the subjective act of writing. Regardless, in making the workings of his unconscious publicly available for interpretation and scrutiny, Confessions and Suspiria present a theory from certain schools of psychoanalysis that may be recognisable to the modern reader.

Social factors

The role of the reader as an interpreter of the text is important to Confessions, as is what the act of literary interpretation could offer by portraying subjective illness experiences in a cultural form. Yet rather than solely emphasising a medical reading, a more productive approach may be found in an acceptance of ambiguity. This could allow for a deeper engagement with the text, and the multiple meanings – social, political and medical – that it concurrently holds.

For instance, De Quincey charted the growth of industrial capitalism and its effect on the production of subjectivity. Under the effects of opium, he wandered the streets of London. He relays in detail these meanderings among the shops and markets of an ever-changing city. Nevertheless, although his impressions are mediated through opium, the drug also induces a social reprieve for him. In Suspiria, he writes that ‘Crowds become an oppression’, representative of a ‘colossal pace of advance’; ‘the natural tendency of so chaotic a tumult’, he writes, ‘must be to evil’.^{Reference De Quincey15} Writing in 1845, twenty-four years after the Confessions, De Quincey’s words present the increasingly concerned voice of an individual whose subjectivity is under threat. Crucially, of all the qualities affected by this changing social life, ‘none suffers more than the power of dreaming’, a faculty that he believes opium to directly stimulate.^{Reference De Quincey15}

This points towards an unacknowledged aspect of escapism, as opium becomes a social inoculant for dealing with the ever-changing sensations of modernity, or what we may today consider as a coping strategy for these situations. As De Quincey himself writes, opium permits him to stand ‘aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended’.^{Reference De Quincey15} Drug use is here explained through cultural and historical circumstances, which for De Quincey had clearly made the effects of dreams harder to appreciate and the aid of opium in a sense more necessary, in the long gap between the publications of Confessions and Suspiria. Such an explanation may clarify why a user rejects a cure that would appear logical from a solely medical perspective to the determinant of acknowledging wider systemic contexts. A reader of De Quincey can confront these problematics.

Literature and science

This article explores the intersection of science and the humanities on the subject of substance use from a number of interrelated angles. We acknowledge that this is a single individual in two specific narratives, and therefore its applicability and scientific validity have limitations, particularly since De Quincey may be misattributing the effects of other substances solely to opium. Nevertheless, his account has proved culturally influential despite contradicting current medical knowledge on addiction. Milligan writes:

This acceptance has, more recently, prompted Theodore Dalrymple to condemn De Quincey’s romanticising and mythologising of opium:

Regardless, our aim here has been to show the productiveness of such an approach and its potential applications in psychiatric education, to highlight individual patient experiences and the sociocultural lineage and dynamics of substance use. In this sense, a joint humanities–medical paradigm makes the investigation of these concerns a richer proposition; owing to its ambiguities and subjective descriptions, Confessions and Suspiria could provide rich sources to use in the classroom.