Breakdown or Breakthrough? A History of European Research into Drugs and Creativity

Introduction

Anonymous frames the paper as a corrective history: language barriers have kept much European work on drugs and creativity out of American view, and the author aims to assemble and interpret studies conducted in Switzerland, England, France and Germany from the 1940s to the 1970s. The introduction sketches a long-standing cultural expectation—rooted in Romanticism—that psychoactive substances might enhance artistic inspiration or sensibility, but notes that anecdote and artistic myth have outpaced systematic evidence. Earlier experimental attempts to answer whether drugs stimulate creativity are described as methodologically diverse and fragmentary, and further research was largely curtailed after late 1960s drug prohibitions. The paper therefore sets out to recover and synthesise European experimental material, to question competing metaphors of drugs as either dictating style or liberating a true self, and to reflect on artists’ motives for using intoxicants. Writing as an art historian rather than a psychologist, Anonymous intends both a historical account of experiments and a close reading of artist practice under intoxication, emphasising the roles of set and setting in shaping outcomes.