A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Psychedelic Experience

Abstract: 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.

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The past three decades have seen a tumultuous revival of interest, in both professional and lay circles, in the group of substances known as psychedelics (R. Carhart-Harris & Goodwin, Citation2017; Sessa, Citation2012). These compounds, molecularly disparate, are united by their unique effects on consciousness, perception, identity, and meaning-making. Elucidating the nature of these effects and how they differ across individuals and settings is today an active area of inquiry, generating renewed research and scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, consciousness studies and information theory (Johnson et al., Citation2019). Central to this work is the growing recognition that the intentions for use and context of use are crucial for understanding and using psychedelics in wise, valid, and effective ways.

I suggest that psychoanalysis is a particularly well-suited setting for psychedelic work, and, in turn, that psychoanalysis has much to gain from the resurgence of interest in these substances, as they reveal the mind in a unique way. I hope to bring the discourses of psychoanalysis and psychedelic therapy together by exploring their affinities and demonstrating how both practices, drawing on individual and collective intentional and unconscious processes, offer a path toward subtle, yet radical, reconfigurations of the self.

To set the stage for our exploration of the psychedelic/psychoanalytic relationship, I begin with a very brief review of past/current indigenous uses of psychedelic medicines, followed by reflection on the “golden age” of psychedelic research and the clinical use of psychedelics within psychoanalysis and psychiatry during the mid-20th Century. After this, the paper’s main focus: detailed descriptions of two complementary phenomena that form the core of the psychedelic experience most likely to be of interest to psychoanalysts: 1) ego dissolution and 2) unconstrained, hyperassociative cognition. I examine these phenomena through the lenses of psychoanalysis, neuropsychoanalysis and psychedelic phenomenology. I invite the reader to consider that the convergence between psychoanalysis and psychedelic therapy is indicative of a deep kinship, which, if recognized and strengthened, can inform, deepen, and expand the theory and practice of both....[Full Article]