Betty Eisner: Heroine with a Hitch?

Tal Davidson

Timothy Leary, Ram Dass. These two were as formative for me as they were for the worlds they were a part of; and yet, I had grown very tired of the saga of psychedelic history beginning with their names. When I was a teenage Deadhead, their use of psychedelics to critique and reimagine society started off my thinking about the ways that our reality was socially constructed. Later on, as a psychology student steeped in social constructionism and interested in the history of psychedelics, I began to spot a place that their theories about the social fabrication of reality did not reach—namely, I noticed how their celebrity repeated the white male heroics of a patriarchal society, crowded out the participation of people at marginalized intersections of identity, and ultimately, showed that psychedelics may not have unstitched the social fabric to the full extent they thought was possible... continue reading.