various times, but they did represent profoundly different approaches to
understanding the psyche, as well as to psychotherapy and, ultimately,
science itself.
The so-called psycholytic paradigm was developed first and proved
especially popular in Europe and with the Los Angeles group identified
with Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner, and Oscar Janiger. Coined by an
English psychiatrist named Ronald Sandison, “psycholytic” means “mind
loosening,” which is what LSD and psilocybin seem to do—at least at low
doses. Therapists who administered doses of LSD as low as 25
micrograms (and seldom higher than 150 micrograms) reported that
their patients’ ego defenses relaxed, allowing them to bring up and
discuss difficult or repressed material with relative ease. This suggested
that the drugs could be used as an aid to talking therapy, because at these
doses the patients’ egos remained sufficiently intact to allow them to
converse with a therapist and later recall what was discussed.
The supreme virtue of the psycholytic approach was that it meshed so
neatly with the prevailing modes of psychoanalysis, a practice that the
drugs promised to speed up and streamline, rather than revolutionize or
render obsolete. The big problem with psychoanalysis is that the access to
the unconscious mind on which the whole approach depends is difficult
and limited to two less-than-optimal routes: the patient’s free
associations and dreams. Freud called dreams “the royal road” to the
subconscious, bypassing the gates of both the ego and the superego, yet
the road has plenty of ruts and potholes: patients don’t always remember
their dreams, and when they do recall them, it is often imperfectly. Drugs
like LSD and psilocybin promised a better route into the subconscious.
Stanislav Grof, who trained as a psychoanalyst, found that under
moderate doses of LSD his patients would quickly establish a strong
transference with the therapist, recover childhood traumas, give voice to
buried emotions, and, in some cases, actually relive the experience of
their birth—our first trauma and, Grof believed (following Otto Rank), a
key determinant of personality. (Grof did extensive research trying to
correlate his patients’ recollections of their birth experience on LSD with
contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He
concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the
circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)
frankie
(Frankie)
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