The Women Who Helped Turn Psychedelics from Counterculture into a Science of Healing

The modern history of psychedelics is frequently told through molecules and famous men.

Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin synthesized and investigated an extraordinary catalogue of psychoactive compounds. Timothy Leary became psychedelia’s controversial evangelist. Roland Griffiths helped return psilocybin to rigorous clinical research. David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris helped establish modern psychedelic neuroscience.

But another history runs alongside this one.

It is a history concerned less with discovering molecules than with asking what happens to a human being who takes them.

Three women occupy particularly interesting positions in that history:

Ann Shulgin. Amanda Feilding. Dr Rosalind Watts.

They belonged to different generations and performed very different work. Yet, viewed together, they trace an intellectual arc through modern psychedelic culture.

Ann Shulgin explored the psyche.

Amanda Feilding fought to make its altered states scientifically investigable.

Rosalind Watts asked what happens after the altered state ends.

Together, their stories suggest that the important question about psychedelics was never simply:

What does this molecule do to the brain?

It is also:

What does the experience mean, what conditions make it useful, and what must happen afterward for insight to become lasting change?

I. Ann Shulgin: Into the Shadow

Ann Shulgin occupies an unusual place in psychedelic history.

She was neither primarily a chemist nor an academic psychedelic researcher. She was a writer, artist and Jungian-oriented lay therapist who became one of the early practitioners to work with substances including MDMA and 2C-B in therapeutic settings. She also developed early guidelines concerning therapeutic work with MDMA. (⁠The Shulgin Foundation)

Her husband, Alexander Shulgin, approached psychedelics partly through chemistry.

Ann approached them through the psyche.

This distinction matters.

The Shulgins’ work existed at an intersection of chemistry, phenomenology and psychology. Together they documented psychoactive experiences and co-authored PIHKAL and TIHKAL, works that combined chemical information, personal narrative and reports of altered states. (⁠The Shulgin Foundation)

Ann was particularly influenced by Jungian psychology and the idea of the Shadow.

The Shadow consists, broadly speaking, of aspects of ourselves that our conscious identity refuses to acknowledge: anger, sexuality, fear, shame, aggression, vulnerability, grief, envy and other qualities incompatible with the persona we present to ourselves and society.

For Ann Shulgin, psychedelic experience could become a means of encountering precisely this material.

That makes her contribution more profound than the popular caricature of psychedelics as machines for producing bliss.

Sometimes the psychologically significant experience isn’t:

I discovered that everything is love.

It may instead be:

I discovered something about myself that I have spent twenty years avoiding.

The psychedelic, from this perspective, does not necessarily give a person enlightenment.

It may remove some of the psychological architecture preventing them from seeing themselves.

And what appears underneath can be beautiful, terrifying, embarrassing or painful.

The task of therapy is therefore not simply to produce extraordinary experiences.

It is to help people encounter themselves without immediately fleeing from what they find.

II. Amanda Feilding: Make the Forbidden Measurable

If Ann Shulgin’s territory was psychological, Amanda Feilding’s great historical project was institutional.

Feilding became interested in LSD during the 1960s and ultimately founded what became the Beckley Foundation in 1998. Its work combined scientific investigation of psychoactive substances with advocacy for evidence-based drug-policy reform. (⁠The Beckley Foundation)

Her insight was strategically important.

Arguments about psychedelics had become trapped between two cultures.

One side proclaimed:

These substances can transform consciousness.

The other replied:

These are dangerous illegal drugs.

Feilding’s answer was essentially:

Then investigate them.

Measure cerebral blood flow.

Measure neural connectivity.

Conduct controlled trials.

Publish the results.

Put psychedelics through the machinery of modern science and determine what survives.

Through the Beckley Foundation, Feilding developed collaborations with researchers and institutions investigating LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, cannabis and other psychoactive compounds. She co-founded the Beckley/Imperial Research Programme with neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt, an initiative associated with influential neuroimaging and clinical studies. (⁠The Beckley Foundation)

Among its achievements was research producing the first brain-imaging studies of LSD. (⁠The Beckley Foundation)

This represented something larger than a collection of brain scans.

A substance culturally associated with hippies, prohibition and moral panic could now be placed inside an MRI scanner.

Mysticism met neuroimaging.

And suddenly questions that had spent decades at the margins could be asked using mainstream scientific instruments:

What happens to functional connectivity under LSD?

What happens to ordinary patterns of brain-network organization?

How does psilocybin affect people suffering from severe depression?

Which subjective experiences correlate with therapeutic outcomes?

The psychedelic renaissance did not require society to believe psychedelic advocates.

It required society to permit scientists to investigate their claims.

That distinction is crucial.

Science does not rehabilitate psychedelics by declaring them good.

Science rehabilitates the question.

III. Rosalind Watts: What Happens Monday Morning?

By the time clinical psychologist Dr Rosalind Watts entered psychedelic research, something remarkable had happened.

The argument had shifted.

Researchers no longer needed merely to demonstrate that psychedelics were worthy of scientific investigation.

Clinical trials were already underway.

Watts joined Imperial College London’s work on psilocybin and depression, eventually serving as clinical lead on psilocybin research. Her qualitative research examined how patients themselves described psychological changes following psychedelic treatment. (⁠ACER Integration)

One finding became particularly important.

Participants frequently described movement along two psychological dimensions:

from disconnection toward connection, and from emotional avoidance toward acceptance. (⁠Sage Journals)

Connection could mean connection with oneself.

Connection with other people.

Connection with the world.

Connection with nature.

This reframed the psychedelic experience.

Perhaps depression is not experienced solely as sadness.

For some people, it is experienced as disconnection.

The person becomes disconnected from emotion.

Disconnected from relationships.

Disconnected from meaning.

Disconnected even from their own body and identity.

A psychedelic experience may temporarily loosen some of those walls.

But Watts encountered another problem.

The walls can return.

The extraordinary experience ends.

The person goes home.

Work resumes.

Family dynamics remain.

Bills remain.

Loneliness remains.

Trauma remains.

Social structures remain.

The psychedelic molecule eventually leaves the bloodstream.

Life does not.

IV. The Most Important Part May Begin After the Drug Wears Off

This realization led Watts increasingly toward the problem of integration.

Her later work emphasizes that psychedelic experiences should not be understood as automatic cures. Watts herself has publicly reflected on the danger of contributing to overly simplistic narratives suggesting psychedelics can straightforwardly “unlock” depression. (⁠ACER Integration)

That is an important evolution within psychedelic culture.

The first phase needed pioneers willing to say:

These experiences matter.

The second needed scientists willing to say:

We can study them.

The third needs clinicians willing to say:

Don’t exaggerate what we know.

A breakthrough experience is not necessarily a transformed life.

A person may experience profound love for humanity on Saturday and find themselves trapped in the same destructive relationship on Tuesday.

They may experience ego dissolution without developing emotional maturity.

They may understand their trauma without changing the circumstances that continually reproduce it.

They may encounter something psychologically profound and still require years of ordinary work.

Therapy.

Friendship.

Exercise.

Community.

Boundaries.

Purpose.

Sleep.

Meaningful work.

Nature.

Accountability.

Integration asks the least glamorous but perhaps most important question in psychedelic medicine:

How does revelation become behaviour?

V. Accept. Connect. Embody.

Watts subsequently helped develop the ACE framework:

Accept. Connect. Embody.

The model draws partly upon psychological flexibility and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and was developed for psychedelic-assisted therapy. (⁠Dr Rosalind Watts)

Its language is revealing.

Not:

Escape.

Transcend.

Become enlightened.

Destroy the ego.

Instead:

Accept.

What emotions, memories and realities are already present?

Connect.

Can the individual reconnect with self, relationships and the larger living world?

Embody.

Can insight become something practiced rather than merely remembered?

Watts’s subsequent work led toward longer-term integration frameworks and the ACER approach—Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore—with emphasis on sustained community and connectedness rather than treating transformation as a single pharmacological event. (⁠ACER Integration)

That represents a maturation of the psychedelic idea.

The psychedelic session becomes not the destination but an event inside a much longer process.

VI. Three Generations, Three Problems

Put Shulgin, Feilding and Watts beside one another and an interesting progression appears.

Ann Shulgin asked:

What might psychedelics reveal about the hidden psyche?

Her territory was introspection, the Shadow and therapeutic encounter.

Amanda Feilding asked:

Can these forbidden states of consciousness survive scientific scrutiny?

Her territory was research, institutions, neuroscience and drug-policy reform.

Rosalind Watts asks:

How can temporary psychological openings become sustainable forms of connection?

Her territory is therapy, integration, connectedness and community.

Their contributions are not interchangeable.

Nor should they be romanticized into a single ideology.

Psychedelic science remains an evolving field. Different compounds, diagnoses and therapeutic frameworks have different levels of evidence, and powerful subjective experiences do not automatically establish clinical effectiveness.

But historically, these three women illuminate three problems every serious psychedelic medicine eventually encounters:

The Psyche.

The Evidence.

The Aftermath.

VII. From Molecules to Relationships

Perhaps the most interesting development in psychedelic research is that the field increasingly forces medicine to reconsider what exactly constitutes a treatment.

Ordinary pharmacology offers a relatively straightforward model:

molecule → biological mechanism → symptom change

Psychedelic-assisted therapy complicates that chain.

The molecule matters.

But so might the therapist.

The patient’s expectations matter.

The environment matters.

Preparation matters.

Music may matter.

Trust matters.

The experience itself matters.

The interpretation of that experience matters.

And what happens during the following weeks and months may matter enormously.

Research involving Watts and colleagues has, for example, investigated the relationship between therapeutic alliance, rapport, psychedelic experience and treatment outcomes. (⁠Dr Rosalind Watts)

The medicine therefore cannot always be conceptualized solely as the chemical.

The therapeutic intervention may be better understood as an ecosystem.

Drug.

Person.

Guide.

Environment.

Experience.

Interpretation.

Integration.

Community.

Time.

Remove enough of these variables and the same molecule may produce a radically different outcome.

VIII. The Psychedelic Renaissance Must Survive Its Own Hype

Every renaissance eventually encounters commercialization.

Psychedelics are no exception.

Once a marginalized idea becomes respectable, industries emerge around it.

Clinics.

Retreats.

Startups.

Patents.

Training programmes.

Wellness products.

Investment funds.

Influencers.

Some will contribute valuable infrastructure.

Others will inevitably oversell certainty.

The danger is replacing the old propaganda—

“Psychedelics will destroy your mind.”

—with equally simplistic propaganda—

“Psychedelics will heal your mind.”

Neither is scientifically adequate.

Psychedelics are powerful psychoactive substances capable of producing profound changes in perception, emotion and cognition. Clinical research suggests therapeutic potential in particular settings, but benefits, risks, durability and appropriate patient selection remain active scientific questions. Recent controlled research continues to investigate psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression rather than treating the matter as settled. (⁠Nature)

A mature psychedelic culture therefore requires something less exciting than evangelism:

epistemic humility.

Investigate.

Measure.

Replicate.

Follow patients longitudinally.

Document adverse outcomes.

Improve screening.

Improve therapist training.

Study integration.

And never confuse an extraordinary experience with proof of an extraordinary claim.

IX. The Real Revolution Was Not Psychedelics

There is a deeper thread connecting these three women.

Ann Shulgin treated inner experience as something worthy of careful attention.

Amanda Feilding insisted altered consciousness was worthy of scientific investigation.

Rosalind Watts emphasizes that whatever is discovered must eventually return to ordinary human relationships and ordinary life.

Seen this way, the psychedelic renaissance is not fundamentally about drugs.

It is about consciousness.

What happens when the normal architecture of identity temporarily changes?

Why do humans suppress parts of themselves?

Why can a few hours of altered consciousness sometimes change a person’s interpretation of decades of experience?

Why does connection appear so frequently in accounts of psychological recovery?

And why do powerful realizations so often fade when people return to the environments that shaped their suffering?

These questions extend far beyond psilocybin or LSD.

Meditation encounters them.

Psychotherapy encounters them.

Religion encounters them.

Art encounters them.

Love encounters them.

Grief encounters them.

Psychedelics simply provide an unusually powerful experimental window through which to examine them.

X. The Trip Is Not the Transformation

Perhaps the trajectory from Ann Shulgin through Amanda Feilding to Rosalind Watts can ultimately be compressed into three sentences:

Look inward.

Test what you find.

Then learn how to live differently.

Shulgin represents the courage to descend into the psyche.

Feilding represents the determination to bring extraordinary claims before ordinary scientific scrutiny.

Watts represents the recognition that neither chemistry nor revelation eliminates the slow work of becoming a person.

And perhaps that is where psychedelic culture finally grows up.

Not when society declares psychedelics miraculous.

Not when society declares them harmless.

Not even when brain scanners demonstrate that they profoundly alter neural activity.

It grows up when the psychedelic experience ceases to be the centre of the story.

Because eventually the music stops.

The perceptual alterations disappear.

The molecule is metabolized.

The ordinary world returns.

There is still a body to inhabit.

There are relationships to repair.

There are habits to change.

There is grief to carry.

There are other people to care for.

There is a life to build.

The psychedelic experience may open the door.

Walking through it—and constructing a life on the other side—is the human part.

One historical update worth noting: Ann Shulgin died in 2022, and Amanda Feilding died in May 2025 at age 82; Feilding’s institutions and scientific legacy continue after her death. Dr Rosalind Watts remains active through her work on connectedness and ACER Integration.