Sartre’s Bad Trip

“Beyond their visual qualities, mescaline’s hallucinations posed profound philosophical questions. During the mid-1930s three prominent writers and thinkers left records of their experiments with it. In 1934 and 1935 respectively, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre participated in the now-familiar modus operandi of private session between psychiatrist and artist, with the scientific gaze and the philosopher’s insights informing—or, more often, pitted against—one another. And in 1936, Antonin Artaud, having already cut himself loose from the strictures of Breton’s Surrealist movement and the precepts of scientific materialism, abandoned the Old World for the New and the narcotics of western pharmacy for the ancient sacrament of the cactus, and launched himself into a self-experiment without limits. Sartre was injected with mescaline by his old school friend, the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache, at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris in January 1935 in the course of his researches into phenomenology, Edmund Husserl’s radically reconceived form of philosophy, which Sartre had encountered in 1933 and relocated to Berlin over that summer to study more deeply. Mescaline was a tool of obvious relevance to Husserl’s injunction that ‘a new way of looking at things is necessary.’ Phenomenology aimed to describe reality purely as it was perceived, stripped of all theories, categories, and definitions: turning attention exclusively, in Husserl’s famous dictum, ‘to the things themselves.’ Much of the mescaline literature to date, from the early peyote reportage of Silas Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis to the stream of consciousness dictated by Witkacy, had tended in this direction: in aiming simply to describe its visions and sensations without imposing definition or meaning on them, it had in a sense been phenomenology avant la lettre. … On the contrary, he felt submerged against his will in a miasma of sensations that assailed him viscerally at every turn, a world of grotesque extreme close-ups in which everything disgusted him.  The best-known detail of Sartre’s bad trip is Simone de Beauvoir’s anecdote of him being haunted for weeks after by lobster-like creatures scuttling just beyond his field of vision. Sartre, like Aldous Huxley, was partially sighted—a curious coincidence linking two of the most celebrated intellectuals to have taken the vision-producing drug—and his poor vision may have exacerbated his anxieties about shapes lurking just beyond its reach. Later in life he claimed that it had driven him to a nervous breakdown. …”
The Paris Review
Open Culture: When Jean-Paul Sartre Had a Bad Mescaline Trip and Then Hallucinated That He Was Being Followed by Crabs
Sartre’s Existential Lobsters
NY Times: When Sartre Talked to Crabs (It Was Mescaline)
“Hell Is Other People”: Sartre on Personal Relationships