Lacan and Psychedelics

Abstract

This article revisits Lacan’s skepticism toward the psychoanalytic value of drug-induced altered states of consciousness in light of the contemporary surge of scientific, therapeutic, and pharmacological investment in psychedelics. Beyond any prescription, interdiction, or theoretical insight, the author shows how Lacan offers a necessary ethical corrective to the use of psychedelics within the biomedical paradigm, to their absorption into the modern wellness industry, and to practitioners eager to integrate psychedelic experience into a Lacanian clinical model. The crux of this corrective is Lacan’s emphasis on the paradoxical dimension of psychoanalytic praxis, namely that the language of psychoanalysis is only ever an index of its failure to articulate its own object and cause. It is in this default of the signifier, as against any diagnostic schema or treatment model, that the author locates a possible affinity with psychedelic experience. Inasmuch as such experience bears upon any and every subject’s interminable resistance to representation, psychoanalysis is on the side of that resistance.