Assisted Psychedelic Psychotherapy: Rethinking the Paradigms of Psychiatric Care?

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAT) may offer a paradigm for describing and navigating profound transformative experiences of the self. The model challenges current psychiatric care, which has lost capacity to address psychological distress and often reduces treatment to aseptic drug prescription, emptying the therapeutic relationship of meaning. The work examines schools of thought animating the PAT debate and psychodynamic aspects underlying this approach. According to the psycholytic paradigm, psychedelic substances induce regression to non-ordinary states of consciousness where early-life conflicts may emerge, revealing ego adaptations to the environment. The question is whether such therapy can access temporary psychic deintegration and lead to new integrative modalities that broaden self-awareness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Can psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAT) serve as a paradigm for describing and navigating a profound transformative experience of the self? This model of therapy has ignited an intense debate in recent years that seems aimed at calling into question, more than the various currents of psychotherapy, the model of psychiatric care that has lost over time the real capacity to address the psychological distress of people and to interpret the psychological phenomena observed, too often reducing itself to an aseptic prescription of drugs in which the therapeutic relationship has progressively become emptied of meaning. In this work, we will examine the current schools of thought that animate the debate on PAT and the psychodynamic aspects that allow us to better understand the functioning of this specific psychotherapeutic approach. According to the psycholytic paradigm, psychedelic substances are capable of inducing regression to states of consciousness different from its ordinary state. In such states, fundamental conflicts may emerge in the early years of life that have led to the development of an ego that has realized the adaptive functions to the external environment with various more or less functional configurations. Is it possible through this type of therapeutic approach to access states of temporary psychic deintegration and then arrive at new integrative modalities that broaden the subject’s self-awareness?