Reading Michael Pollan on Psychedelics in the Context of Therapy
June 2019
I generally wash the dishes and my companion in the headphones is often Joe Rogan - so have heard snippets of interesting interviews with folks like Andrew Weil, Paul Stamets, Dennis Mckenna and other proponents of psychadelics as other than purely recreational ‘experience’ drugs. Rogan also has had Alex Jones, conspiracy theorists and flat earthers on - so its a mixed bag. And he had Michael Pollan on recently talking about the use of psychedelics in context of psychotherapy. I’d already picked up the book but hadn’t gotten to a real reading of it. Decided to fix that.
I’ve read articles and books by Michael Pollan over the years and generally have liked them. He has a sober, rational and calm take on things and is able to show how simple ideas like: “Just eat real food” are really quite profound. He is also a good writer in the vein of the best stuff that NYTimes, Atlantic, New Yorker occasionally puts out. When I saw this book on psychedelics I was intrigued. (“How to Change Your Mind”) One test of a book like this is to ask - was it worth reading after reading the NYTime/Atlantic/NewYorker article or viewing the Ted Talk, etc? I’ve been blown away by a long form article which then turned out to be just a condensed version of the book. Not so in this case.
The trajectory of the story is this. In the 1950s and 1960s there was interesting psych research on various compounds in conjunction with therapy. Then the general view of these psychoactive compounds took a weird turn in the mid 60s with polarizing figures like Leary and they became associated with the counterculture and recreational use. In addition they were swept up in the regulation of drugs in general and became “schedule 1” drugs which means they were considered to have no therapeutic value and were dangerous with a “high potential for abuse”.
I am hugely oversimplifying here but substances that were in some cases traditional and perhaps sacremental in some cases or more recently an intriguing research tools became associated with crack and bath salts…
In recent years there has been a quiet resurgence of research in this area. It seems cautious and under the radar - avoiding the Dennis-Hopper-in-Apocalypse-Now enthusiasm associated with a Timothy Leary. Large studies at places like NYU, Johns Hopkins, Yale, UCLA have looked at the use of psilocybin to treat: depression associated with terminal cancer; PTSD; addictions. Like they are picking up the ball dropped around 1965 and looking at this interesting subject.
This is why Pollan is a good writer ( and an excellent writer on this subject ). He does not gush and makes his skepticism clear.
I can see how it is easy to lose your reserve and dive into this stuff. For example the patient accounts in the cancer study are very moving. The relief here is not oblivion. My mother passed away exactly 4 years ago today (20 June) and the end of her life was moderated by morphine in little glass vials - appropriate for the pain she was in. Guided psilocybin therapy is different - in many cases, a patient’s perspective changed. It doesn’t make anything better, this therapy. No stories of cancer remission. A period of some peace in conjunction with meaning. An understanding. Temporary but an experience which may become a touchstone that one could go back to.
At a later date I should write about how this has shifted my thoughts on religion, specifically CHristianity in my life. But it feels premature. It has made me think of Bloch’s assertion that the ‘atheist is very close to the Christian’. I believe the impulse.[1]
Reading about this brought me face to face with some conceptions I had. Carlos Castenada. Was given one of his books by a dirty hippie some years ago back when I was a semi-clean college student. Read 5 pages and put it aside, forever. Read Burroughs and like him - but that is such a different perspective. He mentions psychadelics like Yage but heroin is the dominant drug in his writing. Burroughs today feels like Gonzo journalists or Tom Waits. Very talented, sometimes hilarious, maudlin. Burroughs phrase “tourist with a typewriter” captures the perspective.
At no point in this perspective is the self ready to give up the ego.
The book mentions a conflict of interest which is stunning. At the level of the individual and society.
The DSM does not recognize ‘existential dread’ Pollan wryly notes at one point (or I imagine he did). This therapy in some ways is out of the bounds of psychotherapy and there are many minefields. And this will probably not yield a pharmaceutical company any patents or intellectual property as many of these are ancient, plant or fungal derived substances. In the realm of spiritual guidance there are so many fakes and criminals that it would be impossible to begin to regulate spiritual practices in any way. And the whole morass of new age thinking which I imagine Ginsberg was referencing in “Howl” as the ‘whole boatload of sensitive bullshit’.
It seems hard to step in this pool without losing coherence. But what are the pearls we clutch so tightly in this case?
Existential dread takes Pollan back to Freud and ‘the ego and its discontents’ because though psychotherapy does not address it, this underpins all of the malaises that occur. And which there may be no fixing. When he references David Foster Wallace giving a college graduation speech its clear that there is not always a good outcome to wrestling with this dread. It made me wonder if there is an aphasia for this in psychology because this is an older complaint. Something like what Ernst Bloch referred to as a non-synchronous contradiction. Something of an older (or potenially more advanced) era that is kicking around in the present. We don’t actually have the tools to fix it. Our attempts often make it worse.
This is also why we might look to shamans (and why we cannot distinguish shaman from charlatan). They are not of our time. The idea that a member of the tribe could sit you down; brew some tea and guide you on the trip where you engage your dragons - this idea has not lost its relevance even though I might have lost the ability to do this.
There are few things I love as much as Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and in a way my mind has never left its orbit since I found a used volume with the poem in high school. It is a ghostly poem which pulls all into its own gravity - I see it as a companion to Pound’s “Mauberly” which distills western civ:
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
A black maw which draws all in.
Waste Land is a poem constantly reaching for transcendence and falling back:
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
This is not new - its at least as old as Beowulf and would find expression after.
But why?
How does our great strength become a crippling weakness? The key and prison become the scaffold of meaning because they seem the most real.
Pollan introduced me to the idea of “default mode network” and made me think of the obsessive chewing over of ideas. The example of David Forster Wallace is humbling. There are things we can’t escape. He alludes to the fact that the mind can a good servant and a terrible master. The weight can be too much.
In high school, possibly due to the various directions “The Waste Land” pointed, I discovered Zen Buddhist stories. In no small part was this a rebellious gesture towards the all boys Catholic high school set in a wooded monastery which I attended by walking about a mile through said woods. Senior year I wrote a poem for a poetry competition.
I’ve lost the poem but it was a first person perspective of one of the Athenian youths that were given in tribute to the Cretan king for the Minotaur every year. It was an angry poem. Angry at a high school who pretty ignored the chaos of divorce and insanity my family was in. And angry at the family itself. And angry at myself. Despite all this the poem was good for a 16-17 yr old.
I think it was 15 - 20 3-line stanzas with heavily wrought phrases like: “the Queen’s bestial infidelity “ and the “stench of the beast’s breath within…”
I do remember the last stanza being something like: “wild berries grow by the entrance/ I pluck one / How sweet it tastes!”
which was taken from a zen story of a man hanging from a cliff with a tiger above him and the abyss below.
Its a nice memory. I was able to express something however imperfect and plagarized (though in the spirit of the constant echoing of older stuff in the Waste Land). I don’t know if almost 40 years later I have grokked this insight. My favorite aspect of the poem is how I took this vertical image: tiger; man hanging from branch; abyss and made it horizontal: adults pushing youths towards cave; youth at cave; Minotaur within cave.
The loss of the poem is no loss for humanity. I think it got second place in the competition so the Benedictine monks were not overly taken with it. I like the fact that it has stayed with me as a marker. A moment which had meaning and which has rippled out across memory and lets me smile on a past self for the attempt.
I see how (what I understand as) the default mode network can be a prison and critical thought is the key made of the same metal as the prison. I also see that the impulse to escape doesn’t work. It further defines the prison and drags it along with it.
A key insight from the book is that no one takes psilocybin and is cured. It is not a panacea or even a cure. There is something at work here which is akin to the zen koans where you try and try for enlightenment… Seems like the message is that it can show you meaning outside of the ego but when the ego is ‘back at the wheel’ some other daily discipline of meditation/ prayer needs to kick in.
1) Lately have been haunted but the Rolling Stones song “I Just Want to See His Face”. A wonderful snippet of a song. Feels dark and the smoke of a fire somehow. Vocals are indistinct a lot of the time. The song is calling for a sort of oblivion. In Exodus we learn “no one sees my face and lives”. So what is this song asking for?