LSD Psychotherapy was originally published in 1980. A new 1994 edition has now been made available by Hunter House Publishers of Alameda California, ISBN 0-89793-158-0
In 1980 when this book first appeared, the timing of its publication
could not have been worse. By that time, psychedelic therapy had
been practically discontinued in all the countries of the world
as a result of extremely stringent legislation. It made scientific
research difficult, if not impossible. The image of LSD was not
shaped by already existing extensive professional literature;
it was dictated by mass media sensationalizing the accidents of
unsupervised self-experimentation and spreading scientifically
unsubstantiated rumors about chromosome damage and genetic dangers
associated with this substance. Under these circumstances, it
seemed that LSD Psychotherapy was destined to become an
esoteric historical document of an exciting, but relatively brief
and transient era of psychiatric history.
Considering the situation described above, it seems appropriate
to look at some of the recent developments that justify a new
edition of this work. The most important reason for making the
observations from psychedelic research available to professionals,
as well as the general public, is the revolutionary nature of
the observations associated with it. I seriously believe that
unbiased systematic study of this material would lead to changes
in our understanding of the human psyche and of the nature of
reality that would be as far-reaching and radical as those that
were introduced into physics by the theories of relativity and
the quantum theory.
The critical element here is the recognition that LSD and other
psychedelics function more or less as nonspecific catalysts and
amplifiers of the psyche. This is reflected in the name given
by Humphrey Osmond to this group of substances; the Greek word
"psychedelic" translates literally as mind-manifesting."
In the dosages used in human experimentation, the classical psychedelics,
such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, do not have any specific
pharmacological effects. They increase the energetic niveau in
the psyche and the body which leads to manifestation of otherwise
latent psychological processes.
The content and nature of the experiences that these substances
induce are thus not artificial products of their pharmacological
interaction with the brain ("toxic psychoses ), but authentic
expressions of the psyche revealing its functioning on levels
ordinarily not available for observation and study. A person who
has taken LSD does not have an "LSD experience," but
takes a journey into deep recesses of his or her own psyche. When
this substance is given in the same dosage and under comparable
circumstances to a large number of individuals, each of them will
have a different experience reflecting the specificities of his
or her psyche. In addition, serial sessions of the same person
will vary in their content and show a characteristic progression.
For this reason, it does not seem to be an exaggeration to say
that psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would
be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine
or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible
to study important processes that under normal circumstances are
not available for direct observation. In the first edition if
this book, I wrote that the best way of understanding LSD is to
see it as an unspecific amplifier of psychological processes.
If I had any remaining doubts about this point of view, they have
been all but dispelled by our observations from Holotropic Breathwork.
This approach is a powerful method of therapy and self-exploration
that my wife Christina and I have developed over the last eighteen
years and have used in workshops and seminars all over the world.
It combines extremely simple nonpharmacological means, such as
accelerated breathing, evocative music, and a system of body interventions
aimed at release of pent-up emotions and blocked physical energies.
As I have described in The Adventure of Self-Discovery,
a book specifically discussing the theory and practice of Holotropic
Breathwork, the spectrum of the experiences evoked by this procedure
is practically identical with that of psychedelic sessions.
Experiences occurring in psychedelic and holotropic sessions cannot
be described in terms of the narrow and superficial conceptual
model used in academic psychiatry and psychology, which is limited
to biology, postnatal biography, and the Freudian individual unconscious.
Deep experiential work requires a vastly extended cartography
of the psyche that includes important domains uncharted by traditional
science. My own version of such a model described in the present
volume includes two additional levels of the psyche, for which
I use the terms perinatal and transpersonal.
The phenomena originating on the perinatal and transpersonal levels
of the psyche include sequences of psychological death and rebirth,
encounters with archetypal beings, visits to mythological realms
of various cultures, past incarnation memories, extrasensory perception,
episodes of out-of-body states, experiences of cosmic consciousness
research. These have to be considered to be natural and normal
manifestations of the deeper dynamics of the human psyche.
They have been repeatedly described in the context of various
shamanic procedures, rites of passage, aboriginal healing ceremonies,
and mysteries of death and rebirth, as well as Eastern spiritual
philosophies and mystical traditions of all ages. For this reason,
any serious effort to understand spirituality and religion requires
recognition of the perinatal and transpersonal dimensions of the
psyche Attempts to interpret any of these phenomena in the context
of the narrow and superficial model of the psyche currently used
by Newtonian-Cartesian science necessarily leads to serious distortions
and to pathologization of the entire spiritual history of humanity.
From this perspective, the founders of the great religions of
the world, as well as their prophets, saints, and eminent teachers,
all of whom had visionary experiences, are labeled as psychotics.
Shamans are diagnosed as ambulant schizophrenics, hysterics, or
epileptics. Religion and spirituality are interpreted as resulting
from superstition, lack of education, infantile regression to
primitive and material thinking, or mental disease. Similar pathological
criteria are applied to the ritual and spiritual life of pre-industrial
cultures that cannot be adequately understood and makes no sense
to Western scientists with their limited model of the human psyche.
Among additional phenomena that elude the reductionist interpretations
of Western materialistic science are the experiences in near-death
situations, reports about UFO abductions, various parapsychological
occurrences, as well as experiences and behaviors observed in
certain forms of hypnosis and various powerful experiential psychotherapies
other than Holotropic Breathwork_. Experiences induced by biofeedback
training, sensory deprivation and overload, different electronic
and kinesthetic devices, and lucid dreaming are additional important
examples.
The same can be said about a large subgroup of states that contemporary
psychiatry diagnoses and treats as functional psychoses, meaning
mental diseases of unknown etiology. The understanding of the
psyche that includes the perinatal and transpersonal levels shows
these conditions in an entirely new light as psychospiritual crises
or "spiritual emergencies." If they are properly understood
and the individuals engaged in this process are encouraged to
surrender to their experiences, these states can result in emotional
and psychosomatic healing, deep personality transformation, and
consciousness evolution.
The extended cartography of the psyche described in the present
volume, although originally based on the research with LSD and
other psychedelics, is equally applicable to all the above situations.
It makes it possible to account for many phenomena that traditional
psychiatry and psychology have to deny, pathologize, or explain
in a superficial and inadequate way. However, the new findings
offer much more than a revised and vastly expanded theoretical
model of the psyche. Many of the new principles discovered during
psychedelic research are of a highly practical nature and are
directly applicable to therapeutic situations without the use
of psychoactive substances. Here belongs a new and revolutionary
understanding of the nature and architecture of emotional and
psychosomatic disorders, including certain forms of psychoses,
effective mechanisms of healing and transformation, therapeutic
techniques, and strategies of self-exploration.
The future implications of psychedelic research thus fall into
two different categories. The first of these involves the destiny
of psychedelic therapy per se, the other the theoretical and practical
importance of the new discoveries about the nature of the psyche
and of consciousness. Whether or not psychedelics will return
into psychiatry and will again become part of the therapeutic
armamentarium is a complex question. Most likely what will have
the decisive influence will not be the results of scientific research,
but a variety of political, legal, economic, and mass-psychological
factors.
After having personally conducted over the years more than four
thousand psychedelic sessions, I have developed great awe and
respect for these substances and their enormous positive, as well
as negative potential. They are powerful tools and like any tool
they can be used skillfully, ineptly, and destructively. The question
whether LSD is a phenomenal medicine or a devils drug makes as
little sense as a similar question asked about the positive or
negative potential of a knife. Naturally, we will get a very different
picture from a surgeon who bases his or her judgment on successful
operations and from the police chief who investigates murders
with knives. Similarly, the image of LSD will vary whether we
focus on the results of responsible clinical or spiritual use,
naive and careless mass self-experimentation of the young generation,
or deliberately destructive experiments of the army or the CIA.
The results of the administration of psychedelics are critically
influenced by the factors of set and setting. Until this is clearly
understood, there is no hope for rational decisions in regard
to psychedelic drug policies. I believe that psychedelics can
be used in such a way that the benefits by far outweigh the possible
risks. This has been amply proven by centuries of safe ritual
and spiritual use of psychedelics by generations of shamans, individual
healers, and entire aboriginal cultures. However, the Western
industrial civilization has so far abused all its discoveries
and there is not much hope that psychedelics will make an exception,
unless we rise as a group to a higher level of consciousness and
emotional maturity.
On the positive side, it can be said that Western society is at
present much better equipped to assimilate psychedelics than it
was in the 1960s. At the time when psychiatrists and psychologists
started to experiment with LSD, the official image of psychotherapy
was that of civilized face-to-face discussions or disciplined
free-associating on the couch. Intense emotions and active behavior
were referred to as "acting-out" and were seen as violations
of basic therapeutic rules. In contrast, psychedelic sessions
were associated with dramatic emotions, psychomotor excitement,
and vivid perceptual changes.
They thus seemed to be closer to states that psychiatrists considered
to be pathological and tried to suppress by all means than to
conditions to which one would attribute therapeutic potential.
This was reflected in the terms "hallucinogens" and
experimental psychoses" used initially for psychedelics and
the states induced by them. In any case, psychedelic sessions
resembled more scenes from anthropological movies about shamanic
rituals of "primitive" cultures and wild aboriginal
ceremonies than those from a psychoanalyst's office.
In addition, many of the experiences and observations from psychedelic
sessions seemed to seriously challenge the image of the human
psyche and of the universe developed by Newtonian-Cartesian science
and considered to be accurate and definitive descriptions of "objective
reality." Psychedelic subjects reported experiential identification
with other people, animals, and various aspects of nature during
which they gained access to new information about areas about
which they previously had no intellectual knowledge. The same
was true about experiential excursions into the lives of their
human and animal ancestors, as well as racial, collective, and
karmic memories.
On occasion, this new information was drawn from experiences involving
archetypal beings and mythological realms of different cultures
in the world. In out-of-body experiences, experimental subjects
often witnessed and accurately described remote events occurring
in locations that were outside of the range of their senses. None
of these happenings were considered possible in the context of
traditional materialistic science and yet, in psychedelic sessions,
they were observed on a daily basis. This naturally caused deep
conceptual turmoil and confusion in the minds of conventionally
trained experimenters. Under these circumstances, many professionals
chose to stay away from this area to preserve their scientific
world-view and to protect their common sense and sanity.
The last three decades brought many revolutionary changes that
have profoundly influenced the climate in the world of psychotherapy.
Humanistic and transpersonal psychologies have developed powerful
experiential techniques that emphasize deep regression, direct
expression of intense emotions, and bodywork leading to release
of physical energies. The inner experiences and outer manifestations,
as well as therapeutic strategies, in these therapies bear a great
similarity to those observed in psychedelic sessions. As I mentioned
earlier in relation to Holotropic Breathwork_, these nondrug approaches
involve a similar spectrum of experiences, as well as comparable
conceptual challenges. As a result of it, for therapists practicing
along these lines, the introduction of psychedelics would represent
the next logical step rather than dramatic change in their practice.
Moreover, the Newtonian-Cartesian thinking in science that in
the 1960s enjoyed great authority and popularity has been progressively
undermined by astonishing developments in a variety of disciplines.
This has happened to such an extent that an increasing number
of scientists feel an urgent need for an entirely different world-view,
a new scientific paradigm. Philosophical implications of quantum-relativistic
physics, David Bohm's theory of holomovement, Karl Pribram's holographic
theory of the brain, Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures,
Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields, and Gregory
Bateson's brilliant anthropology and psychology, are just a few
eminent examples of this development. It is very encouraging that
all these new developments that are in irreconcilable conflict
with traditional science seem to be compatible with the findings
of modern consciousness research and with transpersonal psychology.
From a practical point of view, it is important to mention that
legal experimentation with psychedelics has been resumed in Switzerland
and several new research projects have recently been approved
in the United States. In spite of all these encouraging developments,
the future of psychedelic therapy as such remains uncertain. However,
the situation is very different in regard to its revolutionary
findings concerning the nature of the psyche and human consciousness;
their relevance for psychiatry and psychology is independent from
the fate of this therapeutic modality. Since it has become clear
that the phenomena involved represent genuine manifestations of
the psyche that occur in many situations where no psychoactive
substances are involved, they have to be taken into consideration
in any serious attempt to understand the human psyche.
If the experiences observed in psychedelic sessions were toxic
artifacts, professionals would have a reasonable excuse for their
disinterest in this area. One could be an expert in the field
without having knowledge about the pharmacological effects of
an exotic group of psychoactive substances. However, ignoring
or misinterpreting observations from a large category of situations,
including ancient and Oriental spiritual practices, trance states
in aboriginal rituals, near-death experiences, various forms of
nonpharmacological experiential psychotherapies, and psychospiritual
crises is a different matter. Such an approach reflects rigid
adherence to a superficial and inadequate model of the psyche
and resembles more religious fundamentalism than good science.
The critical issue here is the ontological status of non-ordinary
states of consciousness—whether we see them as pathological
conditions that should be indiscriminately suppressed or variable
alternatives to our everyday states of consciousness that can
contribute to our understanding of the psyche and have a great
therapeutic potential. Of all the human groups, the Western industrial
civilization is the only one that has taken the former position.
All the ancient and pre-industrial societies have held non-ordinary
states of consciousness in high esteem and used them for a variety
of purposes—diagnosing and healing diseases, ritual, spiritual,
and religious activity, cultivation of extrasensory perception,
and artistic inspiration. These cultures have spent much time
and energy developing various techniques of inducing these states,
including a wide range of nonpharmacological approaches and psychedelic
plants.
Michael Harner, a well-known anthropologist who has also undergone
personal shamanic initiation during his field work in the Amazon,
describes that from his dual perspective Western psychology and
psychiatry are seriously biased in two important ways. They are
ethnocentric, which means that they consider their own
idiosyncratic point of view to be superior to that of any other
cultural group and label as pathological any activities that they
cannot understand in their own framework. Harner's name for the
second serious conceptual distortion is cognicentric, although
a better term for it might be pragmacentric. What he means
by it is that theoretical speculations in Western academic psychology
and psychiatry are based exclusively on experiences and observations
made in the ordinary states of consciousness (with the possible
exception of dreams). The evidence from the study of non-ordinary
states of any kind are systematically ignored or pathologized.
Herein lies the importance of the material from psychedelic therapy.
It is the most extreme and dramatic example of the challenge that
the research of non-ordinary states of consciousness presents
to traditional Newtonian-Cartesian science. Systematic and open-minded
study of the evidence amassed by this work strongly suggests the
need for a radical revision of our basic ideas about the human
psyche and the nature of consciousness. It would lead to an entirely
different understanding of emotional and psychosomatic disorders,
as well as the therapeutic process and strategy of self-exploration.
Some of the observations from non-ordinary states would require
not only revision of our ideas about the human psyche, but of
the traditional beliefs about the nature of reality. An extreme
example of this kind is the ability of individuals in near-death
situations to accurately perceive, without the use of their senses,
not only the immediate environment, but also various remote locations.
Observations of this kind seriously question the most fundamental
metaphysical assumptions of Western philosophy of science.
In view of the above facts, LSD Psychotherapy represents
much more than a source of information on psychedelics and their
use. It certainly is a book that is of interest for therapists
who treat casualties of unsupervised self-experimentation or for
those who might conduct psychedelic therapy in the future. It
can also be useful for those who have already experienced psychedelic
states and need more understanding, as well as for lay audiences
specifically interested in the subject. However, its significance
goes beyond that; it is a book that describes the deepest dynamics
and the outer reaches of the human psyche, as they manifest in
non-ordinary states of consciousness of many different kinds.
The experiences and observations that it describes have far-reaching
implications for our understanding of consciousness, human nature,
and the nature of reality. For this reason, the material in this
book should be available to all those who are interested and open
to it.
