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Hi, to all.
The recent postings by prospective graduate students have got
me thinking. I once read an interview with James Watson, the co-discoverer
of DNA, who said that he tries to teach his grad students both what they can do
with the existing equipment, and what would be worth going after if new
equipment were to provide the opportunity. Here are some thoughts of the
latter sort.
In this alarmingly warmest of Toronto winters, following a
visit to our city zoo, it occurred to me that our species can have no long-term
future unless we learn to mass-market effective psychotherapy as, in the 19th
century, public education was made social policy internationally. We have
well-intentioned, knowledgeable people in government throughout the Western
democracies (and lots of reprobates too, of course), but little comes of it
because the mental health is not there. However, as long as psychotherapy
requires as much time and work as it does, and is as chancy in its results,
psychotherapy will remain the elitist phenomenon that it has always been, and
the future of our species must be bleak.
Among possible ways to mass-market psychotherapy, a
psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, that is, a psycholytic therapy, is, to my
thought, the most promising possibility on the horizon. But the
possibility needs a lot of work, because existing techniques are still very
unreliable. Our best people are still trying to demonstrate that
psychedelics can facilitate psychotherapy; no one is trying to argue that a
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is by far and away the fastest, most reliable
and/or most through of psychotherapies--as would be needed for a mass market to
occur.
I also suggest that a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
is the best use for psychedelics that I can currently imagine. This
realization represents a significant change of priorities for me
personally. For thirty plus years I have thought of psychedelics as
religious sacraments that happen to have psychotherapeutic use as an occasional
side-effect. This bias was adopted from my first exposure to psychedelics
in the context of the mass social movement of the late 60s and early 70s.
Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck's book on the Eleusinian Mysteries also made it clear
to me that psychedelics have also been used historically in the context of
religious initiation practices. In both sociological contexts--religious
renewal movements, and individual initiation rites--psychedelics have
historically had limited appeal. The problem of bad trips outweighs the
benefits of good ones for most people, and only a few remain dedicated to the
sacrament.
On the other hand, the concept of the unconscious was known in
antiquity and widely accepted among Western intellectuals from the Renaissance
onward. What Freud did (and Freud, according to his son Martin, was a
secret hunter of wild mushrooms, including psychoactive varieties!) was not
to discover the unconscious, but rather to develop a
psychotherapeutic technique that made it necessary to work with the
concept. Similarly, religious approaches to the use of psychedelics have
been around since time immemorial--perhaps prior to the origin of our
species--but we have as yet no technique for using psychedelics whose value is
sufficient to win a mass market. I venture to hope
that the psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics has a potential for mass appeal,
as the religious use historically has not.
And it is mass therapy, and not mass religion, that our
species can no longer afford to do without.
What needs to be developed, I speculate, is a form of
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy that is sufficiently reliable in its
production of therapeutic change to command a mass market share. Cut good
psychotherapy down from 7 years to 2, and increase its reliability dramatically
(like doubling or tripling the rate of success), and there is a market out
there. Potent marijuana, rather than less socially acceptable substances,
might be the most marketable way to go. If such a psychotherapy
promotes an ethical (including ecological) responsibility, it will be "good
enough" to do the socio-cultural job that needs doing, whether it is explicitly
sacramental or not. The sacramental element could be left as an individual
option.
The possibility of using psychedelics as a total program of
psychotherapy--that is, "psychedelic psychotherapy" as distinct from
"psycholytic" or psychedelic-assisted verbal psychotherapy--has been explored
and found too hit-and-miss for marketting success. It is a variant of the
religious initiation model of psychedelic use, with all its
limitations.
Here then is work for specialists in the psychology of
psychedelics: developing a clinical technique that maximizes the
therapeutic utility of the drugs.
Best wishes,
Dan Merkur
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