MAPS: Digest: Re: Conditioning and Psychedelic Experience

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Contributions from Michael A. G. Cohn and Bob Wallace

---------------------------
From: "Michael A. G. Cohn" <laborit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, John Lolis wrote:

> There has been some discussion about hypnotherapy and the psychedelic
> experience, but does anyone know of any studies involving conditioning an
> individual to have a psychedelic experience on cue?

	I recently mentioned an article which described a successful
attempt to induce an MDMA-state in several MDMA-experienced subjects.
Since then, I've also found an article in which a woman who was given LSD
(100ug) once was able to re-experience the drug (with novel thoughts and
perceptual changes) three weeks later, under hypnosis. During her initial
experience, she was also reportedly able to suspend and reinstate the drug
effects under hypnotic suggestion. She said that the two experiences were
similar, although the drug-induced trip brought on a long period of peace
and euphoria which the hypnotic one did not (although we should remember
that this was also a first vs. a second experience).
	In both experiments, subjects showed reduced physiological signs
of the drug (although, oddly enough, LSD caused the woman's pupils to
contract). Apparently, all subjects had taken the drug relatively few
times, but were experienced hypnotic subjects. In the LSD experiment, the
authors note that they still had difficulty getting the subject into a
trance because she was so distractable.

	In a third article, subjects were hypnotized and instructed to
change their perception of depth. The "flat" subject experienced a
schizophrenic reaction, while the one instructed to experience increased
depth reported a euphoric sense of beauty and wholeness, with some crazy
god stuff thrown in. No drugs were used or invoked, although the author
puts this forward as a disproof of the then-current idea that psychedelics
provided a useful model of psychosis.

	Your further thoughts are compelling, as I've been tossing around
the very same idea - what would the government tell us if a person only
had to take drugs once, and could then experience them safely forever
after?

1. Using drugs just once will kill you.
2. Hypnosis causes insanity.
3. The hypnotist might rape you
   -OR-
4. Self-hypnosis means you might drown yourself or jump out a window.
5. Flashbacks!
6. When you're high, you're not working.
7. It's unpatriotic - Support our national beer industry!

REFERENCES:

Fogel, S.; Hoffer, A. "The use of hypnosis to interrupt and to reproduce
an LSD-25 experience". Journal of clinical and experimental
psychopathology and quarterly review of psychiatry and neurology. 23(1).
3/1962

Hastings, Arthur. "Some observations on MDMA experiences induced through
post-hypnotic suggestion". Journal of psychoactive drugs. 26(1) 1994

Aaronson, B. "Hypnosis, depth perception, and psychedelic experience". In:
C. Tart, Ed. _Altered States of Consciousness_ 1990 [1969]


	- Michael Cohn
	enkidu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
	"And it was years before the bones disappeared from the fields
outside Adrianople."


------------------------
From: Bob Wallace <bobw@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: MAPS: Conditioning and Psychedelic Experience
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19990607014907.0068a8cc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

John Lolis wrote:
>There has been some discussion about hypnotherapy and the psychedelic
>experience, but does anyone know of any studies involving conditioning an
>individual to have a psychedelic experince on cue?

I have heard, from a psychiatrist friend, that there are a few people who,  
after much experience and exposure to psychedelics, do learn how to 
create this mental state all the time, without the compound. In the cases 
he mentioned, the person developed a strong aversion to their "everyday
life", generally because their lives were pretty difficult and/or painful, so 
this altered mental state was an unhealthy escape. However, this does 
show it is possible to learn how to maintain the psychedelic mindstate, 
if one is strongly motivated. 

>As an aside, what would happen if someone patented and could sell a
>sure-fire method for inducing an altered state of consciousness at will, in
>particular, euphoria, and possibly also lead one to question our most
>well-established paradigms.  

Stan Grof's Holotropic Breathwork is a pretty reliable, non-drug method 
of reaching psychedelic mind states (but not really euphoria). 

>Would the government not try to ban something such as this, despite 
>the fact that it does not involve trafficking in a controlled substance?

There is no entity called the "government" which has awareness, intention,
and consistant principles or beliefs which form the basis of actions. 

There are a number of drug enforcement agencies, which focus on 
psychoactive substances only. There is no agency focused on states 
of mind per se. There are legislature and media people, who together 
respond/react with news stories and then laws regarding anything they 
perceive as something the public perceives as a threat. 


- Bob Wallace (just my opinion);  bobw@xxxxxxxxxxx

Mind Books offers publications about psychedelics; 
books@xxxxxxxxxxx, or http://www.promind.com


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