*POSTPONED*
Who's Psyche is it Anyway? - The horror of suggestion from Mesmer to the psychedelic renaissance.
Location: Cruciform Building - B404 LT2 Gower Street London WC1E 6BT
In 1956 Humphrey Osmond coined the neologism 'psychedelic' to collect together a set of compounds with a seemingly consistent set of effects, the revelation of the psyche. In this talk I will subvert the usual assumptions about the nature of what is revealed after their ingestion. I will put forward the argument that rather than revealing the contents of an individual's 'personal unconscious' what is revealed is the illusion of a stable monadic self. The self (or ego) is revealed to be a phantom. The self is revealed to be porous, or, more radically, diffuse and ephemeral. By positing mimesis (a janus faced concept consisting of imitation-suggestion) as fundamental to the psyche, I will, in other words, argue that what is often revealed by the ingestion of a psychedelic is the affirmation of the subject's fundamental participation in inter-individual affectivity over and above any form of antecedent psychological individuality.
Looking to the history of the study of psychological healing since the dawn of 'psychotherapy' with Franz Anton Mesmer in the 1780s, I will show how the implications of the revelation of the self as a phantom are potentially so disruptive that it has been and continues to be vehemently and ubiquitously defended against. Psychiatric discourse, by taking western medicine as its mode, has naturalised the subject as a stable monadic self defined by the limits of the body's skin. Despite this the spectre of (imitation-)suggestion haunts modern clinical research to this day, with serious implications for psychiatry, and in particular the ethics and practice of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
I will argue that due to some aspects of the participants subjective reports (for example ego-dissolution) and the importance of extra pharmacological factors in shaping the experiences precipitated by psychedelics, these substances threaten the conception of the subject as a stable monadic self and reveal the limitations of Double Blind Randomised Controlled Trials (disrupting contemporary psychiatric discourse altogether). As such, clinical research into these substances necessitates a conception of the subject (such as the one provided), and interdisciplinary research methods, unbound by the limitations of discourses predicated on the notion of a stable monadic self.
These ideas will be explored with reference to Gothic horror including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as Mimi Cave's 2022 directorial debut Fresh.
Timmy Davis
Timmy Davis is a trainee at the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Psilocybin Rescheduling Project manager at the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group. He is a contributing member of Drug Science's Medical Psychedelics Working Group and a guide on the psilocybin for treatment resistant depression trials at Kings College London, as well as a welfare and harm reduction manager at music festivals in the UK and a team leader for Kosmicare at Boom festival. He graduated from Birkbeck College, University of London with an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and with a BA Hons in Philosophy and Religion from the university of Kent, where he was president of the UKC Psychedelic Society for three years.
He co-authored a chapter entitled The Feminine Enshadowed: the Role of Psychedelics in Deconstructing the Gender Binary with Cameron Adams PhD in the book Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine (2019) and The Medical Use of Psilocybin - Reducing Restrictions on Research and Treatment (2020) as well as authoring New, Strange, Odd and Weird Perceptions - A Lacanian Approach to Psychedelic Experience (2020) and THOU ART NOT THAT - Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Bad Trip (2022).
Timmy organises and chairs the Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics event series for the Maudsley Psychedelic Society, as well as regularly speaking on the topic.