A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Psychedelic Experience
In the journal of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, in a full length article, the author discusses a psychoanalytical perspective on the psychedelic experience. As he discusses 'As interest in psychedelics as treatments for psychological problems grows, it is important for psychoanalysts to learn about them. Our patients will come to us to discuss their psychedelic experiences; additionally, psychedelics deserve reconsideration as meaningful collaborators with our field, at both the theoretical and clinical levels.' After a brief history of these agents, the paper engages three specific areas: 1) psychedelics’ capacity to evoke egolysis, or ego dissolution, and mystical states; 2) their capacity to support hyperassociative states, free association, and emergence of unconscious material, and 3) the role of set and setting in psychedelic therapy. Drawing from the fields of neuropsychoanalysis, phenomenological research and neuroanthropology, the paper offers a discourse that connects mind and brain and psychedelics in ways meaningful for psychoanalysts.
The author concludes with a summing up 'Psychedelic processes offer an opportunity for psychoanalysts to understand psychic functioning in our own vernacular, relation to culture, and the value of integrating our theories with neuroscience. Psychedelic consciousness offers psychoanalysis an invitation to revise, reconceptualize, and expand our theories by diminishing the boundaries that limit our vision of the human psyche and the human condition. In turn, the psychoanalytic attitude (Schafer, 1983) we cultivate offers an extraordinary setting for psychedelic therapy. I look forward to all the ways, some as yet quite unimagined, that psychedelic experience will stimulate creative critical thinking and analytic theory in the years to come.
Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax wrote the following in their 1977 book on their work with LSD therapy, The Human Encounter with Death: “The psychotherapeutic work and effects of the drug are interdependent; they complement and reinforce each other and create a new treatment process” (Grof & Halifax, 1977). Within a treatment process that may occasion phenomena that appear disorganized and chaotic at times, psychoanalyst Gerald Stechler (Stechler, 2003) saw the potential for radical and lasting change. I offer his comment here: “If the therapist can stay connected with his own and with the patient’s destabilization, both can move toward openness and affective authenticity.”
For more psychedelic news and research, visit the psychedelic health professional network homepage.