Friday 30 august 2019, 14:00-17:30 at PSY-FI Festival, Sacred Island
Description:
The subject of the lecture is about the interpretation of the psychedelic experience and of the stages of
psychedelic therapy. The analysis is made in terms of Analytic Psychology, the psychological approach promoted by C.G. Jung since the beginning of XXth century. Accordingly, the relationships between the psychedelic experience, the junghian approach and some ancient sacred texts will be presented, according to recent academic works coming from Psychology and Egyptology.
Quite a few scholars and psychologists acquainted with psychedelics, as Ben Sessa and Scott J. Hill, sees the junghian approach, for reasons that will be illustrated, as the best fit for describing and understanding the psychedelic experience. However the junghian mainstream seems yet mostly absent on the matter. A reason for such an absence comes also from C.G. Jung himself that manifested, toward the end of his life, some opposition about the use of psychedelics in therapy: a review of Jung’s criticism and the opinion of some contemporary scholar will be illustrated.
In the last years, new validations about Jung’s model of unconscious are coming from the same fields that led Jung to understand the existence of a collective unconscious, that is, ancient mythology, sacred texts and ancient symbolism. Few examples of correlation of the new findings in the egyptian texts and the work of psychologists using the psychedelic therapy such Ann Shulgin and Claudio Naranjo, will be shown.
The first work connecting the psychedelic experience with the content of ancient sacred texts were T. Leary, R. Metzner and R.Alpert “The psychedelic experience”, 1964, where the psychedelic experience was connected to passages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Some few concepts from Leary’s book will be examined.
In more recent times, the field of Analytic Psychology working jointly with Egyptologists have produced detailed analysis of the New Kingdom egyptian funerary texts, showing that they were nothing less than immersion of the conscious mind in the depth of the unconscious, the egyptian Am-Duat. The aim of those travels in the underworld is the same of any psychotherapeutic treatment, to achieve healing and personal evolution, what C.G. Jung called “Process of Individuation”.
In the lecture we will go in more details about some specific psychological topic. For example, examining and finding the correlation between Ann Shulgin’s technique of using MDMA to proceed with the “meeting of the Shadow”, a fundamental step in psychotherapy, and C.G. Jung’s first step of the “Process of Individuation”. The egyptian texts and figures that will be shown will confirm as ancient Egypt had a detailed knowledge of such a process and possibly open the way to a better understanding through the decoding of the numerous details they seems to have.
The subject of the lecture is about the interpretation of the psychedelic experience and of the stages of
psychedelic therapy. The analysis is made in terms of Analytic Psychology, the psychological approach promoted by C.G. Jung since the beginning of XXth century. Accordingly, the relationships between the psychedelic experience, the junghian approach and some ancient sacred texts will be presented, according to recent academic works coming from Psychology and Egyptology.
Quite a few scholars and psychologists acquainted with psychedelics, as Ben Sessa and Scott J. Hill, sees the junghian approach, for reasons that will be illustrated, as the best fit for describing and understanding the psychedelic experience. However the junghian mainstream seems yet mostly absent on the matter. A reason for such an absence comes also from C.G. Jung himself that manifested, toward the end of his life, some opposition about the use of psychedelics in therapy: a review of Jung’s criticism and the opinion of some contemporary scholar will be illustrated.
In the last years, new validations about Jung’s model of unconscious are coming from the same fields that led Jung to understand the existence of a collective unconscious, that is, ancient mythology, sacred texts and ancient symbolism. Few examples of correlation of the new findings in the egyptian texts and the work of psychologists using the psychedelic therapy such Ann Shulgin and Claudio Naranjo, will be shown.
The first work connecting the psychedelic experience with the content of ancient sacred texts were T. Leary, R. Metzner and R.Alpert “The psychedelic experience”, 1964, where the psychedelic experience was connected to passages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Some few concepts from Leary’s book will be examined.
In more recent times, the field of Analytic Psychology working jointly with Egyptologists have produced detailed analysis of the New Kingdom egyptian funerary texts, showing that they were nothing less than immersion of the conscious mind in the depth of the unconscious, the egyptian Am-Duat. The aim of those travels in the underworld is the same of any psychotherapeutic treatment, to achieve healing and personal evolution, what C.G. Jung called “Process of Individuation”.
In the lecture we will go in more details about some specific psychological topic. For example, examining and finding the correlation between Ann Shulgin’s technique of using MDMA to proceed with the “meeting of the Shadow”, a fundamental step in psychotherapy, and C.G. Jung’s first step of the “Process of Individuation”. The egyptian texts and figures that will be shown will confirm as ancient Egypt had a detailed knowledge of such a process and possibly open the way to a better understanding through the decoding of the numerous details they seems to have.
Link to Psy-FI Festival website: https://www.psy-fi.nl/sacred-island
