but to stick to Luka's concept
or something close to it
there is an art critic I like called Donald Kuspit, whose whole thing is to do with how modernism and the avant-garde was primarily about healing - art as therapeutics, psychic reintegration, a cure for modern alienation / the human condition
he is very caustic about everything that follows after Warhol (and I guess also Duchamp), i.e. postmodernism, concept art, Koons, appropriation art, Sherrie Levine, probably Damien Hirst type stuff - ie. everything that is evading this primal function for art, and instead playing games with references, offering meta-commentary on art itself. so not unrelated to some of the things critiqued in Retromania - music about music, pastiche pop, etc.
From Kuspit's point of view all this is just prattle, empty games with signifiers, ignoring what people desperately need from art, which i guess he also sees in quasi-religious terms
Anyway although psychedelia is about something else - something more shattering - it still has a relation to the idea of art having spiritual purpose and serving as a remedy
i always remember a comment at the end of this book Leaving the 20th Century, the collection of Situationist texts and graphics and cartoons, the editor Christopher Gray says in his conclusion, the masses don't need to be told what the score is by Guy Debord and his pals, they know everything is fucked, they know they are alienated, this way of life is not right... and he says the Situationists were too theoretical, not attentive to the emotions or the body, and that the missing part of their politics was a mass program of psychotherapy
i wonder where the connection is between psychedelia and psychotherapy / psychoanalysis ... the first is breaking down, the latter building up again?
there was all that radical psychiatry in the Sixties
i guess this is something Mark would have explored in his Acid Communism book