MAPS: the force of psychedelic narratives

[Peter Webster <vignes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Fear of the full force of psychedelic narratives also appears in the
insistence that those who provide the most eloquent accounts are so
atypical that they are telling us only about their own imaginative powers.
This belief is based on a correct insight: Aldous Huxley's trip, as we have
emphasized, is not Joe Smith's, much less Charles Manson's. But the obverse
of the great variability of psychedelic experiences is their basis in
common features of the human mind. So the gifted man, the ordinary man, and
the madman are traveling through the same regions, and their tales are
recognizably similar. Although all have something to contribute, we are not
wrong to pay most attention to the most learned, articulate, wise and
emotionally balanced witness at a time when he is recollecting in
tranquillity. If his experience of psychedelic drugs is somewhat different
from that of other people, so is his experience of everything else; its
universal relevance is never denied for that reason. The verbally fluent
may have more power to distort and falsify with words, but they also have
more power to tell the most important truths. As long as we assume a
substratum of shared experience, there is no reason for a bias toward the
inarticulate. Are deaf-mutes the best witnesses because they tell no lies?
The opposite complaint is also sometimes heard: that too much of the
rhetoric inspired by psychedelic drugs is commonplace. But so is most
religious rhetoric, or for that matter most conversation; most people lack
literary talent, but that is not regarded as a reflection on the
authenticity of the experience they aim to convey, and they are not asked
to justify the importance of what they say by the standards of great
poetry. All this criticism of drug takers' words as too eloquent to be
genuine or too banal to be worthy of attention indicates an unwillingness
to attend to what they are talking about, some haltingly and some fluently,
with the authority of (partially) shared knowledge.

Grinspoon & Bakalar -- Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered p 92


When I took the drug myself, I found that I was suffering from the delusion
that I had been psychoanalyzed. I had spent seven and a half years on the
couch and over $20,000, and so I thought I had been psychoanalyzed. But a
few sessions with LSD convinced me otherwise.

Mortimer A. Hartman, Psychiatric Inst Beverly Hills
1959 conference on LSD in Princeton NJ.


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