Re: MAPS: Prescription: Euphoria

[Robert Forte <robertforte@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Dan, I appreciate your thoughts. In 1982, I wrote a paper in Div School
on the curative effect of MDMA whch touched upon some f the points you raise.
You must know Jerome Frank's study, Persuasion and Healing in which he compares
healing practices from a great number of traditions in search of common
elements and finds that the preminent common feature of all healing practices
(I'm quoting from memory) is the attempt to stir the client emotionally so to
motivate them toward health.  In this sense, obviously, MDMA can serve an
invaluable function in therapy. But I don't think "euphoria" is the right word
and I have always deplored the dub "ecstasy" for the same reason.  The MDMA
experience is not ecstatic, it is really more "enstatic", if you will, for what
is curative is an dwelling in the present moment, in the body and not out of it
into cosmic or non ordinary planes as the name "ecstasy" connotes.  I've seen
the greatest insight and relief come under the influence of MDMA, before it was
illegal, when the client was distinctly somber, fully present and introspective
and hyper aware. MDMA was called "Ecstasy" by profitteers seeking to exploit
the pleasure that the not yet illegal substance can cause but is, as you
correctly note, only a part of its effect, and perhaps a superficial one at
that.
The balance of the now frequently used quote of Huston's is: (again from
memory) "The goal cannot be stressed too often, is not religious experiences it
is the religious life, and with respect to the latter psychedelic theopanies
can abort a quest as readily as--if not more readily--than they further it."  I
may be mistaken but I believe that comes from his appendix in Forgotten Truth,
at least that is where I lifted it from to start my 1986 piece with Jack
Kornfield looking at psychedelic experience from his perspective as a Buddhist
teacher and psychologist. In Buddhist psychology momentary breakthroughs in
consciousness such as sometimes occasioned by psychedelics are sometimes
regarded as "corruptions of insight" because of the tendency for the naive to
mistake them for liberation and make the "flight into health."  I'm grateful
for your analysis and scholarship putting these things in context.

You also reminded me of the excellent book on Freud by Bettleheim, Freud and
Man's Soul in which he rescues Freud, despite his limitations, allowing us to
appreciate the soulfulness of the man and the truly religious origin and
function of much maligned psychoanalysis....

be well,

rf

Dan Merkur wrote:

> I'd like to share an idea about psychotherapeutic technique.  In Mahayana
> Buddhism, there is a pairing of two kinds of meditation:  a meditation that
> leads to the experience of samadhi, which is euphoric; and then mindfulness
> or insight meditation, which is analytic.  In the original Method of John
> Wesley (hence the term, "Methodism" for the Protestant denomination he
> founded), there was again a pairing of two kinds of meditation.  One, called
> the practice of the presence of God, aimed at experiences of God's immediate
> presence, which were euphoric; the second, called "watching," was a close
> analysis of one's sins, and often enough disturbing.  People prior to Wesley
> had used the same two meditations but in the reversed order:  first the
> purgation of sins, then the encounter with God.  Wesley reversed the
> traditional order because he believed that a sense of God's love provided
> the strength needed to address the guilt involved in a history of sin.
> Freud's remarks on the theory of technique suggest a similar pattern.  Freud
> was emphatic that a "positive transference," equivalent to the "rapport" in
> hypnosis, was the curative principle in psychoanalysis.  He wrote things
> like:  Psychoanalysis cures through love, because it is only the patient's
> love for the analyst that causes the patient to believe in the analyst's
> interpretations (the latter, of course, are often difficult, disturbing,
> even painful.)  So here once again is the idea that good technique:  (1)
> begins by promoting euphoria, and then (2) spends that part or all of that
> emotional capital by using it to sustain the personality during the rigours
> of analysis.  It should also be remembered that Freud claimed, and most
> psychoanalysts have always agreed, that psychoanalysis is a technique for
> increasing the patient's self-understanding; and that such cure as takes
> place takes place as a side-effect, simply because a patient who knows
> him/herself better, is less conflicted, and able to choose both means and
> goals that have greater self-advantage.
> Analysts after Freud were apparently embarrassed by Freud's statements about
> cure through love, and so it was the mid 1950s before the "therapeutic
> alliance" or "working alliance" began to be mentioned in the analytic
> literature, and it was explicitly said to be an alliance of the analyst with
> the patient's rational, realistic thinking, not with the patient's love.  It
> really wasn't till the 1980s that Freud's original ideas began to be revived
> by a significant number of analysts.  This bit of psychoanalytic history is
> parenthetical to my main point, except as it meant that the psychedelic
> research in the 1950, 60s and 70s did not have the benefit of Freud's
> original model (much less Mahayana Buddhism, or Wesley's Method [itself
> obsolete among Methodists since 1880s or so]).  So work with LSD,
> psilocybin, etc., that happened to conform with the euphoria-then-analysis
> model did so mostly on an accidental basis.  Practitioners tended to go
> either for analysis, or for euphoric spirituality, but seldom both; and even
> among those who addressed both features usually concurred with Stan Grof,
> who placed the analytic work first, and the spirituality later, rather than
> the other way around.
> I do not want to be misunderstood as faulting anyone for their valued and
> valuable contributions.  Research and discovery are cumulative and
> collaborative processes.  It is only recent reflection, the last 5 years or
> so, on Huston Smith's 1960s remark that the goal is not religious
> experiences, it is the religious life, that has led me by a series of stages
> to come to think of religious experiences as stepping stones along the path
> of personality change, rather than as the culmination of a path of
> spirituality.  In this way I've been led (a metaphor I am not here using
> idly) to the ideas I'm presenting in this email (and will expand into a book
> eventually).  I am concurrently applying them clinically in my (alas)
> ordinary, drug-free practice of psychotherapy.
> Due to the natural tendency of Ecstasy to promote euphoria, its therapeutic
> use has apparently tended to weight the value of euphoria.  In my opinion,
> the key thing is to keep the euphoria from being an end in itself, by adding
> analytic self-understanding to the programme.  I offer these remarks not in
> polemic, but as a suggestion for those who care to try out in their
> practices, and see if it works for them.
> Best wishes to you all
> Dan Merkur
> University of Toronto
>
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