Renewing Psychopharmacology: Elements for a Phenomenological Research Program

Psychopharmacological research has a recent history, but changes in its scope and method brought about an estrangement from the lived experience of substance use. In this article, we briefly overview these historical trends and point out some of its consequences, emphasizing their relationship to contemporary conundrums in the field of psychopharmacology. We then propose elements for a research program in phenomenological psychopharmacology, defined as the study of “changes in the lived experience caused by an exogenous substance.” We proceed with a discussion of the core concepts of: lived experience in terms of pre-reflective structures of subjectivity (a); change, in a dialectic perspective (b); cause, as outlined in recent works of phenomenological psychopathology (c); and exogeneity departing from the endogenous/exogenous distinction in psychopathology to arrive in a phenomenological approach to the lived experience of the exogenous (d). Finally, we address some implications of this research agenda to qualitative study designs, research ethics, and the role of first-person and second-person perspectives.