The Benefits and Harms of Psychedelic Drugs

An advantage of psychedelic drugs in exploring the unconscious is that a conscious sliver of the adult ego usually remains alert during the experience. Throughout the session, patients remain intellectually alert and remember their experiences vividly. In this highly introspective state, they also are actively cognizant of ego defenses such as projection, denial, and displacement as they react to themselves and their choices in the act of creating them. (Myron 215)

The ultimate goal of the therapy is to provide a safe, mutually compassionate context through which the profound and intense reliving of memories can be filtered through the principles of genuine psychotherapy. Aided by the deeply introspective state attained by the patient, the therapist assists him/her in developing a new life framework or personal philosophy that recognizes individual responsibility for change. (Dahlberg 685-9)

Most of the subjects felt that the psychedelic experience could sometimes supply a guiding vision which provided direction and meaning for one's life thereafter. They mentioned intense emotions such as love, compassion, or empathy, and the recognition that the mind can be and should be highly trained. Three subjects mentioned another residual benefit. Someone who has had a deep positive insight may be able to recall that insight subsequently and use it to guide himself or herself through a situation where it lends an additional useful perspective, even though it is no longer directly available. (Leary 61-72)There was unanimous agreement that under appropriate conditions the psychedelics could considerably speed and facilitate the process of working through psychological blocks. In some cases this involved material which was already being worked on in an ordinary state of awareness, or could be. In other cases, material inaccessible in an ordinary state could be brought into awareness, sometimes producing dramatic transformations including death/rebirth experiences and alleviation of symptoms. Reviews of the therapeutic effects of psychedelics have not shown clear-cut results, but of course it is very difficult to detect experimentally significant effects of a single intervention. (Grof 87-89)

For some of the subjects the occasional use of psychedelics provided a continuously deepening marker of their progress. No matter how much mental training and psychological exploration they had done, further realms of experience could be revealed by the psychedelics. With each major advance in their mental training, a new realm would open to them. An especially common event was to experience something in a psychedelic drug session which would ...