No One Understands Psychedelics ($)

The effects of psychedelics exist outside reductive psychology.

“Although both spirituality and emotion regulation have been identified as potential mechanisms between psychedelic use and mental health, no research to date has examined... these two variables together.” — Lafrance, et al. (2021)

“The scientific literature lacks any comprehensive framework through which we understand psychedelics.” — Petranker, Kim, & Anderson (2022).

Facts are experiential and knowledge is cultural. Because the subconscious exists outside of language, psychedelics will always exist outside of psychology. Efforts to contain, define, limit, or apply psychedelics to one point of view are a failure from the start. The idea that psychedelics are going to “assist” psychotherapy is both absurd and a desecration of the original language. The original language is the chaos of experience, and that’s what psychedelics offer.

Psychedelics' action on the mind is not chemical, although they are chemicals that act on the brain. The mind is not a linear algorithm and is not reducible. Psychedelics release the mind from the reductionist blinders of logic, language, and culture. They will not be harnessed in service of psychology’s flawed definitions of mental health, any more than they can be used as a paste to relieve itching.

Anthropology

Psychedelics are being ushered into the mainstream. We're emerging from a dark period of ignorance and mind restriction. Many people feel we're at the beginning of a psychedelic renaissance.

The light at the end of this tunnel is not the blue sky of healing, it's the train of retribution. Retribution for making people think they’re struggling with a psychological defect when they're on a path to healing. It's retribution for poor psychological understanding, as all psychology has fled from the authentic, disassembling experience of the subconscious such as psychedelics offer.

Anthropology makes the distinction between the emic and etic approaches to understanding. The emic approach is what you follow within a culture or cosmology, striving to understand within that context. The etic approach is interpreting experience through the perspective of your own culture, judging others by your own standards.

The experience one has of oneself under the influence of a psychedelic is emic. Your rational approach is taken away, and you experience the world anew. Applying rational psychology to the psychedelic experience is an etic approach. The psychedelics experience seen through the lens of psychology is a projection of our limited, rational, consensus mind.

Psychology views psychedelics as primitive and uncivilized, just as Europeans viewed Indigenous cultures before trying to destroy them. The psychedelic and reductive perspectives are two different approaches to reality, and they are perpendicular. They are neither contrary nor reconcilable. You cannot understand psychedelics using the thinking of psychology, any more than you can shoehorn indigenous cultures into a free-market economy.

I recently spoke to a rancher in the Coast Ranges of British Columbia. Although the government has arranged water rights with the tribal bands, tribal bands sometimes deny ranchers access to water. The government keeps out of these disputes because the disputes are not reasonable, legal, or amenable to adjudication. The conflicts are resolved when the ranchers accept that they’re part of a local community and accept the community's changing and peculiar needs.

The water is not there to serve anyone, it’s a link in the human ecology. In indigenous cultures, if brother Jack or aunt Josie have a need, it’s everyone’s issue. As a user of community resources, you become partly responsible for everyone. Legal agreements don’t answer community needs any more than theories explain the mind.

It is not psychedelics that mediate healing, it's changes of mind. Our minds are a part of the natural environment and, like water, will not be harnessed for medicinal purposes. The sooner we are free from the deleterious effects of reductive therapies, the sooner we'll understand psychedelics. Whether this means therapists get wise or therapists will be replaced has yet to be seen.

Medicine

To appropriate psychedelics as medicines is to constrain dreams as explanations. Yes, psychedelic substances can be used in this way, but it does not define them, and it does not put them to best use. The reason psychedelics provide relief from depression, trauma, and addiction is because they provide relief from the prison of one’s mind.

When therapists define the proper use of psychedelics to involve a comfortable experience followed by reasonable psychotherapy, they are undoing the invitation psychedelic can provide, which is to rid the client of the psychotherapist's mindset.

The psychotherapist's mindset is the belief that healing involves letting in the light and shutting out the dark. It is the fallacy that healing is a comfortable experience because comfort is good and chaos should be banished. If the therapist is nothing but a sitter and the psychedelic experience is just a positive unfolding, then our darkness will not be integrated and therapists don't heal.

Psychotherapy could accommodate a person’s enlarged sense of self, but does not. Transpersonal, gestalt, and client-centered therapies originally aimed to do this but have all been housebroken to serve our institutions to provide coping not curing. Therapy gets people back to work, supports the market economy, is consumed like a drug, and is paid for by insurance. It serves mediocrity.

Therapy-Assisted Psychedelics

Psychotherapy’s place is to help people understand their experience. Similarly, psychotherapy’s place in the world of psychedelics is to help people understand their psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is a variation of the trance, dream, and hypnotic experience. What psychedelics are not for—and what the psychedelic experience will react against—is its use in support of the psychotherapeutic experience.

To use therapy to assist in the psychedelic experience, one must first discard self-serving presumptions. Those presumptions include presumptions of thought and behavior considered proper and healthy. Such presumptions are like directions for turning marshmallows into health foods. They do not serve and, moreover, they are likely a cause of dysfunction.

The only presumptions that need to be retained are those of safety and communication. These are the operative principles of therapy-assisted psychedelics. We can go further, but we will start here.