Psychedelic Selves
September 26, 2020
Recently I’ve been on the hunt for philosophical work engaging with the phenomenology of psychedelic experience. This has proved oddly difficult, despite the resurgence in public enthusiasm for psychedelics. The conversation seems mostly to be dominated by a combination of neuroscientists, psychotherapists, wellness practitioners and Silicon Valley types, all of whose primary concerns lie in instrumentalising psychedelic experience for some other end, be it psychological health, self-development, or productivity (or often some weird blend of them all). Amongst all this it has been pleasant to discover the work of Peter Sjöstedt-H, who stands apart from this crowd in his adoption of a purely philosophical approach.
A recentish article of his in IAI, for example, considers various attempts to theorise the essential characteristics of the self, then shows how psychedelic experiences can problematise them. Often they do this by inducing states of consciousness in which the claimed essential characteristic is absent, yet in which something we want to call the self still persists. An important theory he addresses understands the self in terms of agency, or the self as constituted by its drives. Sjöstedt-H points out that many psychedelic experiences (particularly some of the most intense) place one in a state of pure passivity, in which one experiences a total cessation of drive. Yet still a subject of experience remains, suggesting that the self is not exhausted by its drives or the conflicts between them.
This relationship Sjöstedt-H points to between drive, self, and the passive subject has got me thinking, and dovetailed with some thoughts about ketamine experiences I’ve been meaning to jot down for some time. By way of a quasi-response to the article (though these thoughts are probably better described as perpendicular to it), here I want to sketch out some ideas about the self and psychedelic experience in relation to Sjöstedt-H’s comments on the cessation of drive, draw some links between this and a heightening of aesthesis which makes an appeal to Brechtian theatre, and finally to consider how the dissociative experience induced by ketamine can be considered as an inversion of the process of drive cessation encountered in ego death experiences.
Now, clearly any theory which attempts to funnel everything we call “the self” down into an essential characteristic is going to be hopelessly reductive—an adequate account would recognise selves as complex structures comprised of perhaps many different components and aspects. That said, it does strike me that this point about drive and its attenuation/amplification can provide a way of thinking about the structural relations between those different aspects. If so, psychedelic experiences could provide philosophical insight not just in the negative sense of revealing what’s wrong with various theories of the self that try to grant a monopoly to one particular aspect, but, through their temporary distortion of the “self structure” and selective bracketing of its various aspects, can help to illuminate its positive content.
Consider this passage, in which Sjöstedt-H discusses the capacity of psychedelics to induce an experience of transcendence of the values of one’s own culture:
What was once unquestioned now seems arbitrary, and one can become emancipated from lingering morally-induced feelings of guilt, remorse, anxiety, and suchlike. One can lose certain values, but this is not to say that one loses the power of valuation. In fact, one tends to heighten the valuation of many aspects of nature, to such an extent that one may weep for the beauty of a leaf – but one is prone to lose moral haughtiness and umbrage. As such psychedelics can be seen as hazardous to certain social orders that strongly depend on unquestioned dogma.
The attenuation of moral valuation is accompanied by a heightening of the capacity for aesthetic valuation. The link between these is not made explicitly, but we can see the attenuation of drive at play here: the outcome of a moral valuation is an action, whereas the outcome of an aesthetic valuation is an affect.
Borrowing some lingo from Freud, let’s call the experience of the transcendence of one’s own cultural perspective (or social conditioning) superego death. This is the moment at which one no longer experiences cultural values as binding on one’s action, but rather as something independent of oneself. Rather than manifesting in consciousness as the background conditions of a space of possible action, those values now enter the foreground as an object of contemplation. It is in this mode of contemplation, in which one steps out of one’s particular locale to view the world from a more universal perspective, that they can be seen to be contingent, accidents of birth and history and therefore with no particular claim on one’s obligation.
Superego death could be thought of as a shift in consciousness from the mode of a participant into the mode of an observer. One advantage of seeing it this way is that it clarifies the link between attenuated drive and heightened aesthesis: immersed in participation the aesthetic mode is simply unavailable. You can’t admire the crocodile’s scales when it’s coming at you. Both the aesthetic response to the leaf and the incredulous response to the cultural values can then be seen as a certain suspension of participation, in which some portions of the self associated with drive or values are shifted out of the ground of the subject and into the figure of the object.
It’s worth bringing in Heidegger here, as it is he who insisted that the subject-object duality is parasitic on the observer-participant duality (and not vice versa). The holding of an object in contemplative consciousness, is, for Heidegger, only possible against a background of framing attitudes which are themselves necessarily withdrawn from consciousness, just as the camera withdraws when one looks into the viewfinder. These are the attitudes he called sorge, or care. This framework makes sense of why the adoption of an increasingly universal perspective would correspond to a loss of drive: the figure and ground (or object and subject) of consciousness are formed by an observational attitude made possible by the suspension of participation, a relationship which is now changing: the figure of observation is swelling, impinging on the ground of participation.
In this way we can imagine the psychedelic experience bringing about a narrowing of the “thick” self—the self that includes all the internalised values and drives endowed by one’s own socio-historical context. As the narrowing continues one might encounter ego death, the flight of drives associated with one’s personal ambitions as a temporally extended individual from the ground and into the figure, as one steps further and further out of the space of participation. Continuing to use the Freudian scheme we can then imagine id death occurring, as even fleeting moment to moment whims and impulses disappear. At the limit of this process is the total cessation of all drive, a pure observer—the Husserlian transcendental subject stripped of all normative entanglements. The unmoored point of subjectivity that floats through DMT space, free to see everything because it participates in nothing.
I suspect that picture is going to seem unappealing to those seeking spiritual value in these experiences. Isn’t ego death supposed to involve an experience of profound unity with the cosmos? How does this square with a picture that portrays ego death as a state of pure detachment? This is the point at which I think Brecht has something useful to add. One of Brecht’s criticisms of Western theatre was that its insistence on “realism” relies on a sympathetic identification of the audience with the character (in contrast with, for example, Chinese opera). This is when the affects of the audience member reproduce those of the character, as when one cries or laughs with the person on screen. Brecht emphasised that sympathetic identification is something we can only do when we are detached from the space of participation of the character—when a fourth wall separates the space of narrative action from the space of observation. When one inhabits a space of participation with another, sympathetic identification is a peculiar mode of engagement. If a friend starts crying next to you, it would be strange to start crying yourself—you would probably just ask what’s wrong. The primary orientation within a space of participation is to act, rather than to feel (in the sympathetic sense). The moral valuation precedes the aesthetic valuation.
This notion that detachment can enable identification makes sense of how an experience of absolute detachment could correspond to an experience of universal identification. Only from the view from nowhere can one sympathise with the entire cosmos. According to this line of thought, it is precisely the fact that one is suspended from participation in anything that allows one to experience an identification with everything.
Along with ego death, it is also common to hear deep psychedelic states described as involving a “merging of subject and object”. The situation I’m describing here is not exactly a merging, but rather the asymmetric limit case in which the figure swells so as to completely engulf the ground. That the subject-object distinction still remains in tact is reflected in the fact that the figure still remains as figure—as a space of observation, rather than as a space of participation. While the drive- or value-endowed self of the id, ego or superego belongs to the participatory ground of consciousness, the transcendental ego shows up here in the difference between figure and ground, the suspension of participation as condition of observation.
The asymmetry of this situation suggests the possibility of the reverse process, in which the ground swells up to engulf the figure. What might this feel like? Firstly, it would involve a collapse of the suspension that constitutes the observational viewpoint, a kind of plunge into the space of participation. There would be an attenuation of detached contemplation and a heightening of drive as the transcendental ego begins to dissolve into the superego. There would be an amplification of yearning and obligation, a sense of being buffeted about by the winds of destiny. In short it would be like being swept up in a drama, as the fourth wall of subjectivity itself comes crashing down. The loss of the universal perspective would entail a diminishment of one’s capacity to sympathetically identify, an experience of detached objective unity fracturing into a situated social multiplicity.
This sounds to me like a pretty good description of the ketamine experience. Journeys into k-space often feel less like a modification of the content of consciousness than a kind of shifting and permutation of the conditions of observational distance. Ketamine is the most Brechtian of psychedelic experiences, a stepping across an unending series of fourth-walls in which the staging apparatus upholding the division between the space of observation and the space of participation is in a constant process of reconfiguration. Without changing significantly in visual appearance, what is one moment an inanimate object may take on normative clothing, suddenly present as a social actor. The sense of space is commonly infused with a nostalgia indexing the particular familiarities of home and history. The experience of music is characteristically one of total narrative submersion. The extreme difficulty of describing the ketamine experience seems to have less to do with the inherent indescribability of its content, but rather with one’s total participation in it. It is the difficulty of painting the rattlesnake when you’re in the tank with it, not dissimilar to the loss of self and memory that accompanies the deep flow states of musicians and athletes.
So, a hypothesis: the psychedelic experience of ego death associated with DMT (for example), is a total subsumption of the drive-endowed self into the object of the transcendental subject. This is an experience of perfect universality, a subjectivity evinced of all particularity. The dissociative experience exemplified by ketamine is in a sense the inverse: it is the collapse of the suspended universality of the transcendental subject as it dissolves into the radical particularity of participation. These two categories of experience therefore represent two distinct dissolutions of self that move in precisely opposite directions.