Amanda Feilding
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss (born 30 January 1943) is a British artist. She is scientific director and founder of the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust. The foundation funds research in human consciousness and organises seminars of leading experts into the regulation of psychoactive substances.
She studied Comparative Religions and Mysticism with Prof. R.C. Zaehner at Oxford University and later did research into psychology and altered states of consciousness. She gained notoriety in the early 1970s when she performed trepanation on herself, about which she made a short cult art film entitled 'Heartbeat in the Brain', shown only to invited audiences. During the '70s and '80s she painted, and produced conceptual artworks to do with consciousness, which were exhibited at PS1 in New York and other galleries in the US. She also wrote ‘Blood and Consciousness’.
Feilding is the youngest child of Basil Feilding (himself a great-grandson of the 7th Earl of Denbigh and the Marquess of Bath) and his wife and cousin Margaret Feilding. She grew up at Beckley Park outside Oxford. Since the late 60s she lived with Joseph Mellen with whom she had two sons, Rock Basil Hugo Feilding Mellen (born 1979) and Cosmo Birdie Feilding Mellen (born 1985). She and Mellen separated in the early 90s and on 29 January 1995, she married James Charteris, Lord Neidpath, 13th Earl of Wemyss, son of David Charteris, 12th Earl of Wemyss.
Feilding has long had interest in exploring different ways of modulating consciousness for the benefit of the individual and society. She has investigated many different ways of altering consciousness from meditation to the use of psychoactive substances and trepanation.
Feilding, influenced by Bart Huges who published a scroll on the topic, Trepanation, Feilding believes, allows people to achieve higher states of consciousness that she theorizes children experience before fusion of the cranial bones. Recent research carried out by Feilding on patients with cranial lesions in collaboration with Prof. Yuri Moskalenko has provided evidence of blood flow changes. This is part of a larger research programme investigating how intracranial dynamics change as we age, and what can be done to increase cranial compliance which they theorize might to help limit some of the detrimental changes associated with aging. Through this research, a new, non-invasive means of assessing intracranial dynamics, ‘The Moskalenko Method’, has been developed by Moskalenko, Feilding, et al..
Feilding ran for British Parliament twice, on the platform 'Trepanation for the National Health' with the intention of advocating research into its potential benefits, but received few votes (40 in 1979 and 139 in 1983). 35 years later, she is funding this research at the Sechenov Institute for Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, St. Petersburg.
Through the Beckley Foundation, Feilding is engaged in a programme of research using psychedelics as tools to alter consciousness. In 2007, her LSD study on consciousness was one of the first involving LSD and human participants since the late 1980s.
She is also collaborating on other psychedelic research projects. These include: investigating the efficacy of using psilocybin as an aid to psychotherapy in overcoming addiction; a brain imaging study investigating the effects of psilocybin on cerebral blood supply and the recall of distant memories; the neurophysiology underlying the effects of cannabis that the users find beneficial; the effects of cannabis on the creative process; the effects of the different components of cannabis and the importance of the THC/CBD ratio in mental health.
Feilding is also active in drugs policy reform, arguing that benefits as well as harms should be considered in forming policies. In 2007, Feilding convened the Global Cannabis Commission Report, authored by a group of leading drug policy analysts, which lays out a blueprint for possible reforms of cannabis control policies at national and international levels. The Report was presented at the 10-yearly UN General Assembly Global Drug Policy Review in Vienna in March 2009 (the Beckley Foundation is a UN accredited NGO). The Cannabis Commission Report is being published by Oxford University Press and the Beckley Foundation.
Feilding is also the founder of the Trepanation Trust.
