We altered mates find ourselves now almost at the end of a deep dive into the intersession between psychedelics and psychosis, and at this point is seems to be that what is happening in both psychotic episodes and psychedelic trips are what Scott Hill refers to as a “confrontation with the unconscious”, or in other words — an overwhelming of the conscious ego by the archetypal forces of the unconscious.

According to Jung’s ideas, the archetypal forces of the unconscious, or just the archetypes, “live in a world quite different from the world outside— in a world where the pulse of time beats infinitely slowly, where the birth and death of individuals count for little. No wonder their nature is strange, so strange that their irruption into consciousness often amounts to a psychosis. They undoubtably belong to the material that comes to light in schizophrenia.”

Jung argues that our alienated condition is manifested in symbolic messages from the unconscious that express themselves in a strange and incomprehensible language, which cries out for interpretation. As Jung puts it, “in insanity we do not discover anything new and unknown; we are looking at the foundation of our own being, the matrix of those vital problems on which we are all engaged.” The terrors of the psychotic are merely extreme forms of our common human condition.

Perhaps we should consider our own sanity to be traversing a knife’s edge—for anyone who's engaged in high dose psychedelic experience, this may well be a regular thought…

As mentioned in the introduction: A Glimpse of Eternity by Alejandro Tuama

• Purchase the novel here.
• Listen to the serialised audiobook here.

References:

• Episode 12 — On Scott Hill’s “Confrontation with the Unconscious”—Part One
• Scott J. Hill — Confrontation with the Unconscious
• Paris Williams — Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
• Christopher Nolan — Inception
• The Farrelly Brothers — Me, Myself & Irene
• William Shakespeare — A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Pete Docter — Inside Out

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby

We try to wrap our heads around useful, working models of psychosis and (attempt to) determine where this troubling and mysterious phenomenon overlaps with the psychedelic experience. In the process we toss around ideas like Washburn’s Ego and the Dynamic Ground; discuss how researchers accidentally induced “ecstatic mystical” experiences and cured a group of alcoholics of their addiction; speculate as to whether a psychotic episode has the potential to reveal insights for the experiencer; and we even come up with our own metaphor to illustrate how the ego can become overwhelmed by the unconscious.

Ultimately, we agree that psychotic experiences and psychedelic experiences appear to have a common underlying mechanism that enables unconscious material to penetrate the psychic membrane and potentially overwhelm the ego, albeit in a variety of different forms and across varying durations in time.

One question left unresolved in our discussion is this: if you have a personality disorder, are you more likely to have a psychotic experience? If you have any insight into this question, please get in touch with us…

References

• Scott J. Hill — Confrontation with the Unconscious
• Paris Williams — Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
• John E. Nelson — Healing the Split: Integrating Spirit Into Our Understanding of the Mentally Ill
• Michael Washburn — Ego and the Dynamic Ground
• Ernest Becker — The Denial of Death
• Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri
• Kurzgesagt — “Addiction” (note: Kurzgesagt has taken the video down from their YouTube, but it is available here).
• Episode 1 — Challenging Psychedelic Experiences
• Episode 9 — From Pepe Silvia to Geshinka: the curious domains of psychosis
• Episode 10 — Czech, mate! Psychedelic Research in Communist Czechoslovakia
• Episode 11 — Giving LSD to kids! (…to treat severe childhood schizophrenia)

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby.