Psychedelics and Psychoanalysis: The Inaugural Event

The Maudsley Psychedelic Society


The Maudsley Psychedelic Society is proud to present the first in a series of online events exploring psychoanalysis and psychedelics. 

<h3>About this event</h3>This event, the inaugural event in a series titled “Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics”, looks to initiate a conversation between contemporary psychoanalysis and psychedelic research. It includes access to pre-recorded talks, a panel discussion and Q&amp;A with the three expert speakers who have been engaged at the intersection of these two vast and dynamic subjects.Psychoanalysis dominated the field of psychiatry when psychedelics first entered into its discourse and practice in the 1950s. Over the next 70 years psychiatry would undergo major theoretical shifts, including a movement away from notions of a psychodynamic unconscious and towards biological mechanistic models of mental disease and suffering - its tools and interventions changing in accordance with its desire for legitimisation as a science through &#x27;evidence based&#x27; authority. The incorporation of psychedelics into psychiatric treatment raises questions to which psychiatry must respond, such as how can altered states of consciousness produce psychotherapeutic outcomes? How can they be handled in the clinic? What is the role of the guide? What is the nature of the psychedelic experience? How does meaning emerge? Maybe it is time for psychoanalysis to enter back into psychiatric discourse, providing the tools and specialist lexicon required to begin an inquiry not only into the nature of the psychedelic experience, and ethical psychotherapeutic practice with altered states of consciousness, but also into the nature of the mind itself. This series of events will explore this possibility.<h3>Tickets</h3>ALL PROFITS FROM TICKET SALES WILL BE DONATED TO MIND’s PSYCHOSIS THERAPY PROJECT.General Admission: £10Concession: £5 (please enter the code &#x27;discount&#x27; at the checkout)Ticket holders gain access to Pre-Recorded Talks from 1st February 2021 (a link will be sent via email)and Live Panel Discussion with Q&amp;A 17:45 - 19:00 GMT on 12th February 2021 (a link will be sent closer to the date)<h3>Speaker Bios</h3>Andrew Feldmar - Radical Adventure: Prolegomena to Psychedelic PsychotherapyIs there a symbiosis possible between psychoanalysis and psychedelic psychotherapy? A cautious “Yes” will be explicated.Andrew Feldmar works and lives in Vancouver, Canada, practising psychotherapy since 1969. He studied altered states of consciousness since 1967. In 1974/75 he apprenticed with R. D. Laing, in London, England. For more detail, see: <a href="https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldm%C3%A1r_Andr%C3%A1s" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldm%C3%A1r_Andr%C3%A1s</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Feldm%C3%A1r" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Feldm%C3%A1r</a>Nathan Gorelick - Reading the Twang of the VoidWhat might a psychoanalytically attuned literary criticism reveal about the historical, experiential, and conceptual relation between the psychoses and the psychedelic experience? By now, of course, it has been determined—tragically and abusively, through trial and error—that psychedelics can be wildly unsafe for psychotic patients. It is also clear that they can precipitate a “break” in individuals predisposed to psychosis, and that their overuse may be similarly dangerous for anyone. Experimental clinical investigation with psychedelics upon and against the psychoses thus raises profound ethical concerns. Yet, it is for these same reasons that the deep resonances between psychotic and psychedelic experience cannot be denied. These resonances therefore demand another angle of approach, one that psychedelic-inspired, or induced, works of fiction can provide. Gorelick suggests that an ethics of reading such works of literature built upon an analogy with the ethics of psychoanalysis can open as yet unexplored avenues of clinically and culturally relevant inquiry. Far from doing violence to the psychotic subject, such an approach subordinates our presumptions concerning what is real and what is not to the irreducible truth of experience, emphasising and exploring the limits of objective inquiry and knowledge at which the work of literature, no less than the work of analysis or the theory of psychedelics, takes place.To demonstrate all this, Gorelick presents Philip K. Dick’s VALIS as an ideal case history. In this genre-defying text, Dick offers a personal testimony of his decades-long struggle with drugs and delusion, his forced institutionalisation, and his divinely inspired vision of the origin of the cosmos and mission to save the world through the armature of his fiction. The novel is a most intimate private history of the celebrated author’s struggle to make sense of a field of delusional experience he calls “the twang of the void” and attributes to the overuse of “dope,” including LSD, under the influence of figures like Timothy Leary. At the same time, it is a science-fictional romp through the white noise of popular culture on the way to the occluded truth of the universe. VALIS thus dramatises and performs the relation between psychedelic and psychotic experience. By inviting and enabling that relation to be read, the book instantiates a structure of address that cuts through the radical solitude of the psychotic/psychedelic subject, building a language with which to transmit something of the inarticulable truth of his experience, and perhaps of our own.Nathan Gorelick is Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University in the U.S. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and has completed the six-year cycle of the Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Quebec City, Canada. He has published widely in journals including Theory &amp; Event; Continental Thought &amp; Theory; Discourse; CR: The New Centennial Review; and Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious. His work also appears in various essay collections, most recently Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (Northwestern UP, 2020); Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2020); and Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam: Cultural and Clinical Dialogues (Routledge 2019). He is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious, which develops the relation between clinical psychoanalysis and literary criticism in order to reveal how eighteenth-century literature avowedly or implicitly resists the most powerful and enduring political and philosophical formations of its time.Paul Zeal - Psychedelics and the ‘I’Detailed journal descriptions of psychedelic experiences in the 1960s with Laing and in Kingsley Hall, his experimental community, will be interwoven with commentary, given the wisdom of hindsight, as to their value.Paul Zeal was apprenticed to R D Laing in the treatment of schizophrenia. He trained in psychoanalysis, and worked in London and the West of England. He has been published in several books and journals, and is a founder member of Climate Psychology Alliance.Chaired and organised by Timmy Davis via the Maudsley Psychedelic Society.

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Psychedelics and Psychoanalysis: The Inaugural Event

More events from The Maudsley Psychedelic Society

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

Psychedelics and Psychoanalysis: The Inaugural Event

More events from The Maudsley Psychedelic Society

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.