Within recent years, an increasing number of people and researchers in the Global North have become interested in psychedelic substances and their therapeutic application. While much of the current media attention and research effort mainly concentrate on the therapeutic potential and actions of the individual's acute psychedelic experience, this article explores the user-perceived, therapeutic dynamics of psychedelics in a more long-term perspective by charting the lived experiences and practices of ‘integration’ among psychedelic users in Denmark. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from (...) November 2020 to June 2021, I offer a dual typology of self-related integration as narrative and experiential-somatic. Combining the two, I argue that psychedelic integration in contemporary Denmark can be viewed as a processual self-transformation of the users' experiential orientation where understandings and/or modes of being from the acute psychedelic experience are woven into, prolonged, and/or embodied in their everyday existence. (shrink)

This paper examines the competing construals of the phrase recovering alcoholic, which, as a Membership Categorization Device, serves to fulfill a commitment to an identity category and at the same time evokes other category-bound activities, often with unintended consequences. Former problem drinkers are routinely referred to by themselves and others as recovering alcoholics, yet they are not ‘recovering’ in the canonical sense of the word, and they participate in a behavior – not drinking – which is a negation of the (...) behavior that originally qualified them as alcoholics. This use of the relatively new identity marker recovering alcoholic may discourage a problem drinker from attempting sobriety, as it implies an unbounded, never-ending period of recovery, unlike recovery from other diseases. (shrink)