Psychoanalysis on Drugs
Wishing for the psychedelic renaissance
Nate Gorelick
Psychoanalysis likes to pretend it is allergic to drugs.
Enervating or euphoriant, depressing or dazzling, drugs are artificial interferences, resistances to resistance, noise over signal—enemies of the unconscious. In the prevailing biomedical context, drugs are mechanisms of adjustment that manipulate the human organism in order to subdue the symptom and quiet its protest against the social link. Or used recreationally, they derange the symptom, scatter it, obscuring the path it carves to the unconscious. Increasingly, even this distinction is nullified by the nebulous, creeping cultural ideal (and superego imperative) of “wellness,” which can accommodate Klonopin just as well as ketamine, ayahuasca alongside Adderall. In any case, drugs install a physical, chemical barrier upon the royal road, and in this way, whatever their advantages or their dangers, they make us less, not more, human.
But is psychoanalysis going to win the war on drugs? Does it want to? Should the psychoanalytic cause include among its axioms Nancy Reagan’s preposterous commandment to just say no? Do you? Will you? I don’t. I say yes all the time. This is neither strange nor deviant. It is banal. Really, Nancy, who doesn’t do drugs?
Or who does? For such a gargantuan, universal phenomenon, “drugs” is an exceedingly ambiguous signifier, somehow both freighted and vacuous. The word is like a symbol in a dream: overdetermined, stacked with multiple meanings, burdened by history, steeped in ideology, tangled with fantasy. The issue is not whether psychoanalysis can admit of, say, ibuprofen for sore muscles or insulin for diabetes. When we speak of taking drugs, doing drugs, being on drugs, we are talking about the sort of exogenous psychoactive substances that act upon the physiological substrate of the mental apparatus in ways that affect the organs of perception. Or, I’ll try again: we take drugs to fuck with our nervous systems and induce altered states of consciousness. Beyond this, and because consciousness is an incurably subjective experience, drugs are quite impossible to define objectively. Morality sneaks in.
If psychoanalysis defines drugs simply as tools of repression, this, too, risks moralizing, or it is willfully naïve. Drugs have everywhere and always been an integral fixture of the human environment, and for this reason alone they ought to concern the most human of the human sciences. In some corners, they do, or they are beginning to. Part of a 2022 issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues included a symposium on psychedelics. The following April, the American Psychoanalytic Association held a virtual meeting on the subject. Elsewhere, Gita Vaid, a clinician at the Center for Natural Intelligence in New York, has argued that incorporating psychedelic medicines into psychoanalytic psychotherapy might resolve the stale impasse between biological and psychological treatment paradigms. Psychedelics, at least, are edging in from the margins. The topic is still niche at best, but we are finally beginning to ask: Must drugs inevitably obstruct the royal road of the unconscious? Or can at least some of them amplify, orient, or raise questions for the work of analysis, clinical or critical? Are they always and forever on the side of repression? Is psychoanalysis really allergic to drugs?
Although these are enduring questions, they acquire a new urgency in light of the explosive surge of venture capital and biomedical research now parading under the banner of the “psychedelic renaissance.” It is a most fitting term. This is a rebirth that wants to break the heavy chains of association binding contemporary medical and scientific psychedelics research to the reactionary caricature of starry-eyed rebellion the 1960s have become. Wishing for a return to the good old days before youthful disaffection and cultural revolution polluted the clear waters of serious, sober science, this is not so much a repetition as it is a restoration. Its fantasy structure is that of being born again, without all the pain and loss from the first time around. It’s already there in the name: renaissance.
The tip of the spear here is a cluster of papers published by researchers at Johns Hopkins University beginning in 2006 detailing psychedelics’ therapeutic potential for treating mood disorders, major depression, addiction, and end-of-life or cancer anxiety. The Hopkins group focuses largely on psilocybin, the primary psychoactive alkaloid in magic mushrooms, but its promising (if preliminary) results have helped revise the regulatory and legal situation in ways that have spurred the wide study of other classical or novel psychedelics worldwide. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ use of MDMA to treat PTSD, anxiety, and eating disorders is treading the path carved by other psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies. Ketamine clinics stand next to nail salons in suburban strip malls; licensed psilocybin clinics are not far behind. Research institutes are springing up at major universities everywhere, along with an attendant gold rush among venture capitalists, mental health practitioners, and peddlers in modern patent medicine.
With billions in private equity now swamping the psychedelic psychosphere, the behemoth pharmaceutical industry is catching on. Start-ups are developing “new chemical entities” out of known psychedelic compounds to harness the neurophysical benefits of the drugs minus the drag of any actual psychedelic experience. Peak convenience, maximum efficiency, bigger profits: spiritual healing without all that embarrassing spirituality, lab coats in place of tie-dye, the destination without the trip.
Faced with this new reality, the psychoanalytic cause cannot afford aloofness. Perhaps more than any other moment of drug-induced enthusiasm, the psychedelic renaissance bears squarely upon the Freudian field’s intellectual and ethical terrain, even on its own terms. In the ballooning marketplace of altered states of consciousness, what place is there for the unconscious? What place is there even for the human? In a research domain that locates even the most awe-inducing experience in a set of neurochemical reactions measurable on an MRI map of the brain, or reduces the erogenous body to the electrochemical nature of the organism, what is the fate of the drive? Under the tyranny of wellness, what is the fate of the symptom? How soon before “ego death” includes a pedicure and a facial?
Forget about holding the barbarians at the gate. Just as it cannot be indifferent, psychoanalysis should keep out of the prohibition business—not simply because we know every prohibition invites its transgression, but because we should also know that any total rejection of drugs and their uses is a fantasy, an impossibility, a wish that is destined to remain unfulfilled. But this sort of sober realism still does not go far enough. Even if we decline the piety of prohibition and, as Jamieson Webster has written (in an important article about nearly every drug except psychedelics), psychoanalysis only urges “better, sturdier pleasures—earthly ones,” this still presupposes a fundamental opposition, as if drugs are inevitably an analgesic to or an escape from the torments of the unconscious.
Like the desire for the maternal breast Freud finds at the base of infantile sexuality, a wish is an impulse to restore an old state of satisfaction that never really was, a bliss that can only be imagined from the other side of yearning.
For the psychedelic renaissance, on the other hand, this may well be the case. It is here that drugs are made to oppose the unconscious. It wishes to have done with the unconscious—not only by asserting a scientific and economic dominance, but also by proceeding as if the unconscious never existed in the first place.
Like the desire for the maternal breast Freud finds at the base of infantile sexuality, a wish is an impulse to restore an old state of satisfaction that never really was, a bliss that can only be imagined from the other side of yearning. In this sense, a wish has the structure of a nostalgia. It seeks a future patterned after a mythical past, a once-upon-a-time where no wishing was necessary or even possible, because everything just perfectly was. This is why a wish fulfillment—in a dream, for instance, or a fantasy—is inevitably a hallucination, a return to a paradise that, like every paradise, is only ever lost.
In the modern history of pharmacology, drugs may have developed an allergy to the unconscious, but psychoanalysis was never allergic to drugs. An allergy is an outsize reaction to some agitating agent in an entity’s environment. If psychoanalysis is allergic, it is to drugs’ increasing separation from their humanity and their expanding function within a broader process of dehumanization. Wish as we might, this process shows no evidence of slowing. The future is coming. To prepare ourselves and to better resist the inhuman use of drugs, it is only appropriate that we refuse the fantasy of a happy rebirth. The way forward is through the past, where we might find the historical truth of, as well as an ethical corrective to, the present.
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History is the best antidote to nostalgia. Before the beginning, drugs were already on the scene of the Freudian discovery. They even set the stage.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colonial scientists had documented the wondrous effects of the coca leaf among the Indigenous people of Bolivia and Peru, but its action could not be replicated in Europe because of how poorly the leaf traveled across the Atlantic. The problem was solved by a graduate student named Albert Niemann, who in 1859 successfully isolated and refined the leaf’s psychoactive alkaloid, but it was not until 1884 that the Merck pharmaceutical company began producing enough of the stuff to make it available for purchase by mail.
Freud ordered a gram of this new, medical-grade cocaine. He had read of the drug’s invigorating and euphoric properties in ethnographies and especially American medical journals and, not yet thirty years old, he sniffed an opportunity to make a splash among the European medical societies. The drug would occupy his attention for the next two years.
Ernest Jones’s biography calls this the “cocaine episode,” as if Freud was struck by some fit or entranced. Jones may have wanted to draw a cordon sanitaire protecting psychoanalysis from this accidental, embarrassing detour in its prehistory. Instead, his account had the opposite effect, so that the “episode” today is a subject of satire or scorn—one more reason to discount Freud, and by implication the whole Freudian discovery, as foolish, unscientific, or obsolete. Freud and cocaine: what a joke.
Freud ordered a gram of this new, medical-grade cocaine. The drug would occupy his attention for the next two years.
Cut through the snark and sensationalism, refuse the thinly veiled puritanical reactionism, begin with Freud’s (in)famous 1884 paper “Über Coca,” and you will find less to laugh about. This was a scientific enterprise drawing amply from a vast medical literature on the subject, some of it decades old, including ideal dosages, ethnobotanical histories, and even critiques of Freud’s contemporaries’ cultural/colonial chauvinism. Many of his conclusions proved disastrously premature; people suffered; people died. Freud felt personally responsible for the slow death of his mentor and friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, to whom he had recommended cocaine as an antidote to morphine addiction. But it is not flippant to note this would hardly be the first time—and, my God, by no means the last—that a mass-marketed pharmaceutical would slip its medical mores. Nor is it even a little strange for medical science to revise or reverse itself through the accumulation of better data.
More importantly, despite his results and their short shelf life, “Über Coca” and Freud’s later works on the subject were foundational to what is now called psychopharmacology. His primary task was to objectively demonstrate cocaine’s inherently subjective effects upon the user’s sense of well-being. With a paucity of reliable test subjects at hand, he had to experiment on himself, which he did comprehensively and with remarkable precision. As was emphasized by Robert Byck, the Yale professor of pharmacology who did more than anyone to restore this record, the Cocaine Papers introduced novel and powerful methods for performing chemical experiments on human subjects and measuring the results in scientifically meaningful ways.
It is true that throughout these papers, even in his account of the drug’s mental effects, there is almost nothing to indicate Freud’s later pivot toward psychology. These are studies in physiology, written by an empirical researcher for a medical audience. Even so, it cannot be denied that the inventor of psychoanalysis honed his powers of observation and learned to treat his own body and mind as the instruments of his analysis under the chemical, intellectual, academic, and medical influence of the best coke on the continent.
This would prove essential to The Interpretation of Dreams. Here, again, the subject and object of analysis were one and the same person. This foundational moment for psychoanalysis does, of course, incorporate numerous dreams from his patients, family, and friends, but he was able to cut the keys to the unconscious by observing the resonances between these other dreams and his own. He also discovered here the cornerstone of the ethics of psychoanalysis: the requirement that one be honest with oneself, particularly when the integrity of the analysis is at stake, and even or especially when the truth hurts. Methodologically and ethically, then, his ability to treat his private nocturnal hallucinations in terms that present dreams as such, everywhere and for everyone, as legitimate objects of scientific inquiry is a direct inheritance from his earlier experiments with cocaine.
Nowhere is this more expansively illustrated than in the analysis of his so-called dream of “Irma’s injection,” to which Freud dedicated serious analytic attention beginning in 1895. In The Interpretation of Dreams, it introduces his core claim that dreams are wish fulfillments. By disentangling the dream’s contradictions, overdeterminations, and associative complexities, he exercises and then theorizes the twinned mechanisms of condensation and displacement, which together define the dream-work’s strange and singular symbolism. Unpacking its symbolic significance, he practices the distinction between manifest content and latent meaning, and the ways in which the latter evades the censorship of the ego. And because the censorship in this case concerns a sense of professional incompetence springing from his actual medical malpractice, its interpretation strikes at and aggravates his wounded narcissism. Throughout his long book and among the dozens of other dreams he discusses, he returns almost constantly to this one. On it hangs substantial proof of the unconscious.
“Irma’s Injection” is literally a cocaine dream, in a double sense: through its interpretation, Freud finds that its latent meaning indexes his devastating self-reproach for having initially underestimated the drug’s dangers; and the dream took place at a moment when, he writes, “I was making frequent use of cocaine,” a fact that makes its way into the manifest content and proves the key to its latent significance. This is further corroborated in letters to Wilhelm Fliess from that time. (Fliess, then Freud’s best friend, believed the whole health of the human organism rested on the nose. Freud often permitted Fliess to perform surgery on his nose, and his quack friend had recommended cocaine to help with the healing.) Also at this time, Freud was writing the Project for a Scientific Psychology, his fledgling and finally unpublished formulation of the energetic theory of the mental apparatus to which we owe his later conceptions of libido and death drive.
Fine. But is this not still so much historical circumstance? Is the cocaine association accidental, or is it essential? Must psychoanalysis be on drugs?
I think these are the wrong questions. And certainly I am not suggesting that cocaine caused psychoanalysis. But to ask whether there may have been a psychoanalysis without cocaine is rather like asking whether there would have been psychopharmacology without Freud. The fact is, there wasn’t. This should be neither surprising nor shameful. To hold to the contrary is to wish for—to hallucinate—a psychoanalysis that is square, abstemious, pharmacophobic, even crypto-Calvinist, which it obviously never was. The cocaine episode is much more than an unfortunate detour on the way to the unconscious. Psychoanalysis was already on drugs from the start of the whole adventure.
The right question, then, the ethical one—since it is its ethics of inquiry, including its daring to subvert our most preciously held illusions, that more than any method or technique defines psychoanalysis—is that of the relation, or the possibility of a relation, between the subject of the unconscious and the altered states of consciousness drugs can induce.
But every relation implies a difference. Having found drugs and the unconscious together, we now need more carefully to peel them apart—without, however, imagining that their separateness is an existential antagonism or wishing that this were so.
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Around the same time Freud was dreaming of and on cocaine, another branch of drug-induced psychology was coalescing around a different alkaloid, called mescaline. This early psychedelic psychopharmacology was set in motion by fixtures of the psychological establishment like Havelock Ellis, the influential sexologist and author of the first English textbook on homosexuality, who later would become a major voice of the eugenics movement and proponent of social hygiene. Ellis tried peyote on the advice of a friendly anthropologist and published his report, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise,” in 1898, two years before Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. He called his experience “a saturnalia of the specific senses,” “an orgy of vision,” and “an optical fairyland,” albeit one that demanded rather than improved the health of its users.
In 1904, William James similarly inclined toward the poetic in his descriptions of the nitrous-oxide trance, his prose exceeding Ellis’s in the ornateness of its impotence. Of his own nitrous-induced deliria, for instance, in The Varieties of Religious Experience James writes: “Depth beyond depth of truth”—(!?)—“seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense.” Note the wonderful aptness of “veriest,” a word that stretches good grammar past the breaking point and seems to combine the superlative “very” with the “verity” of an impossibly deep truth. “Nevertheless,” he insists, “the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.”
I, too, know more than one such person. No wonder James needed to invent new words for the experience. In fact, the whole of what we might call psychedelic theory, from Havelock Ellis to Aldous Huxley to Terence McKenna to Michael Pollan, is positively defined by this sort of effort to eff the ineffable.
This is even the basis of the term “psychedelic,” coined in 1956 by Humphry Osmond, a respected psychiatrist at the enormous mental hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and early advocate of LSD-assisted psychotherapy. He fashioned it from Greek: psyche: “mind”; delic: “manifesting.” (History should be grateful to Osmond for saving us from his friend Huxley’s strained alternative, “phanerothyme,” from the Greek for “to reveal” and “spirit.”) Even this new term, Osmond admitted at the meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences where he unveiled it, was inadequate.
But this was already the point. The substances at issue could not be reduced to their chemical compositions, perceived medical functions, or common effects. To treat them only as “psychotomimetics” (tools for inducing temporary or “model” psychoses) or “hallucinogens” was to profoundly misunderstand their potential. Channeling James’s conviction of genuine revelation, and also honoring or at least paying lip service to the thousands of years of Indigenous practice to which we owe knowledge of many of these substances’ very existence, Osmond entreated his colleagues to give the drugs a try, “preferably several times,” so they would understand what he was trying but could only fail to say.
It seems quaint, but well before Freud’s mail-order cocaine and until relatively recently, it was considered a basic clinical responsibility for practitioners to dose themselves before prescribing mind-altering drugs to their patients. Imagine that.
The rest of Osmond’s remarks here, as well as his long record of clinical experience, help us see that what unites Ellis and James with Huxley and his contemporaries like Timothy Leary or Alan Watts—or with earlier ethnobotanists like Paolo Mantegazza, from whose 1859 treatise Freud drew much of his information on coca before cocaine, or with the first substantial monograph on what would become psychopharmacology, Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours’s 1845 Hashish and Mental Illness—is not the molecular proximity of the drugs themselves. Sure, cocaine isn’t laughing gas and hash isn’t mescaline. But after Mantegazza’s ecstatic testimony of the “most fertile kaleidoscope” of “splendid apparitions” washing over him with a plug of coca in his mouth, or James’s metaphysical revelations from “depth beyond depth of truth,” the stoichiometry doesn’t really matter.
What they have in common is, first, a basic methodological consistency: before, after, and including Freud, these researchers were both the experimental object and the experimenting subject; and second, all of them are equally seeking a means to articulate the “sense of a profound meaning,” as James put it, at stake in their experience, after confronting the utter insufficiency of the language at hand to capture and communicate the subject’s experience.
For psychoanalysis, the discrepancy between the subject (of desire, of the drive, of the unconscious) and the language with which this subject is encumbered is constitutive. It is what psychoanalysis is about. More than any abnormal or empirical psychology, then, it ought to be able to speak to this excess of experience over language.
Alas, the Freudian field had plenty to say about the psychedelic experience, but this was the middle of the twentieth century. After Freud, the science and clinical practice he invented had become a powerful psychiatric institution. Its intellectual integrity and therapeutic viability were under constant assault from behaviorists, puritans, and insurance companies who insisted that only what can be externally measured is scientifically valid or clinically relevant. So, especially in the United States, and not always intentionally, analysis was medicalized and its radical ethics of inquiry was absorbed by a countervailing interest in its institutional hegemony. The quest of the unconscious was steadily diverted into a cult of expertise.
In short, psychoanalysis had an ego problem. It had become a paradigm by the time LSD hit the scene. This is one reason why the initial encounter between psychoanalysis and psychedelics, as we will see, was in many ways a missed encounter. And it is why what interests us today is not the restoration of a lost cause but rather the invention of a new relation out of the wreckage of what might have been but never was.
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Even after Osmond had given it a name, the psychedelic experience was still primarily a clinical phenomenon. And the drugs that induced it were perfectly legal and hardly regulated.
Under these conditions, hundreds of clinical papers were published on psychedelics’ therapeutic potentials. Reading through this archive, one imagines a kind of Wild West—part lawless frontier, part manifest destiny. A few of these clinicians were on the government payroll, secretly working for Operation Artichoke (the CIA’s enhanced interrogation research program), and later, MK-ULTRA (its mind-control program), or the U.S. Army Chemical Corps’ psychochemical weapons program. For the most part, though, these papers reflect their authors’ well-meaning desire to help people.
Among this remarkable archive, one finds a bounty of putatively psychoanalytic experiments, particularly with LSD. The general idea, it seems, was to pour some acid on the ego’s resistances to the unconscious, dissolving them so that the analysis could really get going. The scene was variously ebullient, terrifying, and tragic. Osmond’s invitation to self-experiment notwithstanding, nobody quite knew what they were doing. Only with a great deal of trial and error (imagine the worst, and then imagine some more) did practitioners learn how to control for environmental variables, how much of what drugs to give which patients, how to combine them with other techniques like insulin-induced comas or electroconvulsive therapy or with other drugs like methamphetamine and Thorazine.
It belies another wish among these acid analysts, one we already recognize in the increasingly corporatized, medicalized discourse of the psychedelic renaissance today: the wish to restore a world without psychoanalysis, which is to say, a world before the unconscious and without the drive
Throughout, these papers deal in Freudian terms: the unconscious, repression, libido, ego defenses, obsessional neuroses, conversion hysterias, insight. Practitioners applied LSD to forcibly unblock unconscious material and permit its integration by the ego. Trips were interpreted like dreams. The most striking consistency among these articles, more tonal than strictly substantive, is a ringing optimism bordering on religious enthusiasm. The clinicians admitted there were challenges, and the results were limited and not yet conclusive, but by all accounts, psychedelics were almost a panacea for any patient under psychoanalytic care, including those found to be otherwise untreatable.
That same enthusiasm can also be heard, for instance, in Freud’s first writings on cocaine, or in Mantegazza’s treatise On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca, or, why not, in Nathan Kline’s 1974 encomium to antidepressants, From Sad to Glad. None of these is concerned with the unconscious—the first two precede the invention of psychoanalysis, whereas Kline’s book is famously and openly hostile to it and aims to replace the Freudian paradigm tout court.
The resonance between these pre- or anti-analytic texts and those operating chronologically between them, at the peak of this first wave of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and at the heart of the Freudian paradigm, is telling. It belies another wish among these acid analysts, one we already recognize in the increasingly corporatized, medicalized discourse of the psychedelic renaissance today: the wish to restore a world without psychoanalysis, which is to say, a world before the unconscious and without the drive.
To see why, we need to keep in view that, unlike the neurophysiology of the human organism, the unconscious is not an object of knowledge. We can measure, say, a given drug’s average physiological effects, or a controlled population’s response to a sensory stimulus. But the unconscious is incalculable. It disturbs the coherence not only of the ego but of any therapeutic or theoretical system that claims to contain it, including its own. Otherwise, psychoanalysis is like any other unthought ego: a narcissistic containment strategy, afraid of its absurdity and incompleteness, concerned primarily with its own defense.
The mid-century eruption of the psychedelic panacea within the language but not the ethics of psychoanalysis had it upside down. It retained the discourse of the unconscious but forgot that the unconscious is by definition an irruption into and a defiance of every discourse. As Freud often repeated, the unconscious is resistance. If psychoanalysis is a theory, it is only because it is a specialized strategy for tracking this resistance, and not because it is a ready-made apparatus to which the subject conforms in advance of the actual analytic experience.
This is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from psychotherapy or any therapeutics of adjustment—this, and the consequent position that the subject’s trouble is not in themselves so much as it is in the wider world, the social order, which runs on its hostility to the incalculable. To buy into drugs’ potential as panacea or even expedient, as if they are power tools for knocking the wayward subject back into place, mechanisms of adjustment, is to betray the analytic cause from the start. Once the betrayal was carried off, history conspired to ensure no correction could then be made.
The reversal of fortune began, somehow fittingly, with what at the time was the most successful comedy film ever made, 1959’s Operation Petticoat. Hollywood’s leading man, Cary Grant, was the star. He was also tripping on LSD all the way through the film’s production, under the guidance of his therapist. After Grant’s acid adventures made it into the press, he became the (still legal) wonder drug’s greatest promoter. For the next ten years, he extolled better living through psychedelics in interviews with coffee-table magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. In part thanks to this, acid was prescribed to thousands of bored housewives suffering the weight of the feminine mystique.
By 1964, the Journal of the American Medical Association was running editorials decrying the drug’s use, medically or recreationally (this was becoming an increasingly untenable distinction). One editorial called it “bootlegged ecstasy.” By the end of the decade, global prohibition and, in the U.S., the Controlled Substances Act listed what we now call the “classical psychedelics” as Schedule I drugs, meaning, they have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
This did little to stem the popular interest in drug-induced mystical experience and the promise of cultural revolution the drugs had accrued. Quite the contrary, it confirmed Huxley’s famous suggestion from The Doors of Perception that these substances were forbidden fruit flavored with the true knowledge of good and evil. Prohibition definitely did not save the suburbs from psychedelics, any more than the larger war on drugs has saved much of anything, other than maybe the massive drugs marketplace from rational regulation.
What prohibition did accomplish was the collapse of a robust, decades-old field of scientific and medical inquiry. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, after psychedelics were driven underground, psychoanalysis was further corroded from within by the pharmacological model that its own clinical application of psychedelics had helped establish. Ego psychology and its American avatar, cognitive behavioral therapy, opportunistically exploited emergent ego ideals like “mental health” or “wellness” in order to win their hegemony in the modern therapeutic marketplace. Freud was relegated to the smudged margins of Psych 101 textbooks, while the culture wars remade him into a caricature of the very institution he had turned on its head. His name became a floating signifier for the worst sort of conservatism, conformism, chauvinism—in short, all the enemies of the new revolution, whatever it was.
Psychedelics endured a parallel hostility, but from the other direction. They were grafted inseparably onto a paranoid spectacle of youth in revolt for which charismatic bon vivants like Tim Leary and Ken Kesey were made the poster children. As Danielle Giffort’s recent sociology of the psychedelic renaissance, Acid Revival, makes clear, Leary today is the Gorgon’s head with which the sanctioned science of the psychedelic renaissance petrifies itself into compliance with biomedical imperatives and conformist social norms.
Of course, the popular fascination with psychedelics did not simply evaporate with the first wave of psychedelic science. Instead, it found a happy complement in a pseudo-Jungian naturalism. James’s “veriest nonsense” was given a sturdier lexicon in books like Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience; here, Jungian principles provided a universal biological substrate from which psychedelic experience is supposed to emerge, predictably, consistently, as if a journey into inner space were a trip down the phylogenetic strata into the archetypal realms of the collective unconscious.
This sounds like psychoanalysis but in reality it is perfectly aligned with the general assault against the Freudian discovery. Jung’s “collective unconscious” is not, as is sometimes assumed, a realm of associations we draw from like leaves in the canopy of some invisible psychic jungle. Archetypes in myth, religion, art, and so on, ancient or modern, are common and consistent, Jung claims, because they are manifestations of universal human nature, of instincts inscribed by evolution. Even Leary, in his own odd way, tied psychedelic awakening to an evolutionary mandate, already encoded in our DNA, that was supposed to take us from our origins in the ancient protoplasm to our next far-out home among the stars.
For Freud, however, “human nature” is a contradiction in terms. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he founded the unconscious upon a symbolic logic that is without external reference, including reference to some invariable natural world or physiological substrate, so that the meaning of any dream is radically specific to the dreamer, and ultimately untranslatable. Later, identifying libido’s essential polymorphous perversity, he located human sexuality precisely in its deviations from the mechanics of sexual reproduction. With the death drive, he discovered our irrepressible inclination to go beyond what is useful and good for the human organism, to go beyond the pleasure principle. All this exemplifies an existential fact: we are all, in our own ways, constitutively maladjusted. What makes us human is that we are decidedly unnatural beings. This is why we are all, in our own, infinitely odd ways, incalculably and incommunicably, subjects, not objects.
The drive’s vicissitudes, its derangement of organic purpose and biological determination, are what ensure that human beings are not mere products of automatic natural processes. And the source of this derangement—language—is also and exactly what the psychedelic experience renders strange and ridiculous. In both cases, what is at stake is the subject’s stubborn resistance to every effort of objectification.
The naturalist position, meanwhile, moves in the opposite direction. Psychedelic naturalism—Jungian or otherwise, mystical or empirical—replaces drive with instinct. This naturalization of the drive is entirely consistent with the general scientism that wants to relegate both psychoanalysis and the psychedelic-fueled counterculture, with all its legitimate disillusionment and rage, to the dustbin of history. The wished-for result is a total objectification of experience, an objectivity without remainder, a total subtraction of the subject.
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If Freud’s early work on cocaine is an “episode,” it is a pilot. Whatever else it may be, psychoanalysis is in no small part the result of an encounter between drugs and the unconscious. And we know this is neither strange nor deviant. We also know that drugs are not inherently radical or liberatory. In their youth, eugenics tried mescaline and empirical psychology was high on laughing gas. Baby LSD dressed in bows and posed with puppies on the cover of Good Housekeeping.
The psychedelic renaissance has not brought drugs back. They never left. Nor did this so-called renaissance fall from the sky; it takes place in that same post-Freudian, anti-Freudian paradigm that fantasizes the subject’s total calculation and manipulation: subject as object, object of a wish to take even the most profound drug-induced experiences, with all their potential for meaning, and remake them into known quantities, chemical reactions, flickers of light on a computer screen, diagnostic codes from the DSM-5, therapies of adjustment.
Will it work? Even if not, even if there will always be some place or at least some thirst for the ineffable, the wish animating this renaissance will extend our society’s hostility to the subject and sharpen its violence against the drive. This alone is reason to call for a new relation between drugs and psychoanalysis.
Unlike their first missed connection, such a relation might resist the temptation to cure, the ideals of ego integration, the lure and weight of wellness, and the economic incentives behind them. Against the urge to speak the truth of the subject in the language of psychoanalysis, or of mysticism, or of science, this new relation might take place at the orbit around the unsaid and the unsayable, where the incurable singularity of every subject can be traced but never exhausted, where language falters or fails and the work takes place, as Freud says, interminably.
Practically, this means analysis ought to recognize what drugs, in all their ambivalence, with all their danger and potential for abuse, have also always been: possible elements of clinical practice and of cultural critique. To frame this new relation, we may begin with a few open questions. They are open because they are guidelines for further, interminable exploration of psychoanalysis on drugs rather than problems to be solved, and because they situate this conversation within those incomplete conceptual containers Freud invented and invited us to embellish or transform, as experience and ethics may require.
Do drugs necessarily repress or derange the symptom? Are they a distraction and escape from the insistence of the unconscious? Or, under certain conditions, can they augment the work of analysis? And what might those conditions be? How is a drug experience, psychedelic or otherwise, like a dream or a fantasy, and how are they different? Is it useful for analysis to distinguish drugs according to their chemical properties and typical psychoactive effects?
And if drugs are not all that special, nor especially strange, if it is frankly ordinary to fuck with our nervous systems in order to induce altered states of consciousness, well, then is ordinary unhappiness really possible without them?
Whatever the answers, however incomplete or uncertain the questions, psychoanalysis is obliged to take drugs seriously because what remains of both psychoanalysis and drugs, beyond all the historical contingencies, false starts, persisting obstacles, and mean words between them, is precisely this: the experience. The irreducible facts of experience. That is what is real. Let’s stand with the real. Let’s not wish it away.