(October Gallery London – October 2014)

After 30 years of research and clinical practice with madness, I will discuss what psychic, psychotic, and psychedelic experience have in common and what they can teach us about psychic reality. I will then sketch out what the future of psychiatry will look like from my own current practice and delineate a brief esoteric genealogy of its existence drawing on psychoanalytic, medical, ontological, and occult praxis.

The method of Integral Psychiatry I have developed was influenced by the psychedelic movement. “Substance, set, and setting” and “guided journeys” form the basis of the ancient therapeutic methods of shamanism and are applicable to modern medicine. I will discuss how I have worked with psychosis and what we can learn from “psychotomimetic” substances. Psychedelics have taught us much about the deep core of our psyche as well as the transpersonal dimensions we can attain. Using legal psychedelic or “psycho(ana)lytic” substances and practices as catalysts in conjunction with psychodynamic therapy forms a method of “substance, set, and setting” for the modem age and a new era of medicine.