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#psychotherapy
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
LSD as a breakthrough for psychotherapy
Depression and anxiety were particularly responsive to treatment, and by the mid-1950s, lysergic acid was beginning to look like a major breakthrough in the entire field of analytically oriented psychotherapy. The drug worked equally well for Freudians, Jungians, and any other…
Psycholytic versus psychedelic therapy
Dosage was finally established around the mid-1950s. One hundred micrograms was low, 200 was medium, 300 and above, high. And the two major schools of LSD psychotherapy that evolved were defined primarily by the dose range they employed. The first school used relatively low…
Janiger studies LSD in healthy people
Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychotherapist, was the first person to study the effects of LSD on a wide range of people not suffering from any particular psychological problem.
Politics as psychopolitics
LOOKING BACK ON THAT time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of deconditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set ’60s and ’70s radicalism…
Feminists dealt capitalism the body blow
Rather than the terrorists, it was the early feminists who dealt capitalism the body blow. Their work offered the first critique of Western society as a whole and provided the first tools with which revolutionaries could begin to revolutionize themselves—to question their very…
Serial sessions unfold deeper layers
By the second or third trip, however, specific themes were beginning to stand out and evolve—and the serial approach began to make self-evident sense. I had marked a passage from Realms of the Human Unconscious where Grof discusses this development of material from one session…
Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices
At the time I didn’t know what to make of any of this—and all I am doing at the moment is to give a quick synopsis of what I read. For the really important bit came next. Grof suggested that these primal experiences, our very first taste of sentient life in the world, were of…
The order in which the matrices appear
In his experience of hands-on LSD psychotherapy, Grof said, if an individual’s memories of pleasure or pain were traced back through his or her life, they would betray increasingly clear features of their origin in the perinatal realm. Consciously reexperiencing the core…
Resistance to feeling on acid
Hurriedly I looked for one of our son . . . and, yes, that one worked. Taken when he had lost his front tooth, it went straight to my heart. I turned the pages of the album, and all the photos of him had the same sparkling, happy quality . . . though they didn’t suck me into…
The Secret Chief's clandestine network
Jacob continued to expand this clandestine network throughout his sixties and seventies. By the end he estimated he had initiated some four thousand people, a large percentage of them psychotherapists and health care professionals, into the use of psychedelics—particularly…
Love has to be reinvented
For the first time I understood what a terrible blow banning LSD from psychoanalysis had been. We’ve seen that therapists at the time had reckoned the drug could cut down the average duration of individual analysis by a magnitude of ten to one. This could have meant that…
Revolution needs psychotherapy at its heart
Whatever the truth, one of the ideas I kept coming back to was that any future revolutionary movement, however you conceived it, must have some kind of psychotherapy at its heart: some basic analysis of the ego. This struck me as being just as important, if not far more so…
The perinatal crisis of ego death
For Grof insisted there was no way of stably accessing the transpersonal without living through the full implications of the perinatal—implications that climaxed in a convulsive death/rebirth crisis. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure how much I was up for this. I double-checked by…
Resistance on psychedelics
More generally, what I’d suggest was involved was . . . resistance. Resistance is an analytic concept you don’t hear much about in relation to psychedelic drugs, as though they were so potent that blocking them was out of the question. Such hasn’t been my experience. My first…
The death instinct and the Nirvana Principle
I leaned back against the tree and tried to relax. Let go, I told myself. Let go, and let it take you where it wants . . . the trouble was, I liked the look of where it wanted to take me less and less. There was growing pressure on my chest, and I was finding it hard to…
Provocative and integrative halves of a trip
During that summer in the glade I read Christopher Bache’s Dark Night, Early Dawn, which had just come out and remains the outstanding attempt to get LSD studies on the road again. For a large part of his self-experimentation Bache had a series of horrendous trips. At the most…
Somatic symptoms take center stage
Seemingly I was involved in a new cycle of trips. They weren’t like any previous ones: first and foremost because each one was the same, something that had never happened before. There was no beauty . . . no terror . . . no madcap humor. All that remained from earlier sessions…
Acid doubles back to dig out trauma
Yet again I was amazed at the drug’s flexibility. All last summer I had been going deeper and deeper into boundary- and ego-loss states, and when finally I panicked at the depth to which surrender was being demanded, the acid had doubled back on itself to concentrate…
Trauma coded in the body
The coding of trauma in the physical body is an enormous subject; and the two cents’ worth of personal understanding I have of it comes down to a hunch that the convulsive body tremors are of key importance. At the time of these sessions the only analogy I had was from the work…