Radical Adventure: An Inquiry Into Psychedelic Psychotherapy

Andrew Feldmár trained under R. D. Laing and worked with Stanislav Grof and Paul Watzlawick. A pioneer of psychedelic psychotherapy, he presents its history, his personal experiences, and his wishes for the future of this radical practice. His aim: to prevent its medicalization and to show that at its core is an organic relationship of two people. At age twenty-seven, Andrew Feldmár accepted a tentative offer from his supervisor, Zenon Pylyshyn, a participant in the first experiments with LSD-25, to experience an LSD trip. Following that initiation, he took various other substances, always returning to LSD. During his apprenticeship with R. D. Laing, he was trained in Laing's approach to LSD-therapy. A few years later, the use of these substances was prohibited. Now, after more than forty years, research has begun again into the healing possibilities of psychedelic psychotherapy. A movement has begun to have psychedelics, entheogens, and empathogens accepted worldwide as legal. However, training in how to use them varies. Feldmár details fascinating stories of patients whose recovery hinged upon their use of LSD. He talks of how a single session of MDMA assisted many to attain insights that enabled their psychotherapy to proceed faster and deeper than before. He wants his experiences to help the next generation of psychedelic psychotherapists. They demonstrate that the most important aspect of psychedelic psychotherapy is the human connection: being involved and engaged with the other. There cannot be a protocol to follow, programmed music played, orders given. The therapist needs to feel at home within the altered state of consciousness of the patient during the session. The only way to learn this is through apprenticeship and time is running out as the older generation who worked in this way is dying out. The gains are high with this type of therapy, but so are the dangers. Thus, the focus needs to be not on the drug, but on the relationship between the therapist and the patient. Psychedelic psychotherapy is not for everyone but done well with the right patient and therapist, it can be transformative. AUTHOR: Andrew Feldmár is a Vancouver-based psychologist and psychotherapist. His approach to therapy seeks to reconnect patients to the joys of everyday life through relying on loving, living relationships, rather than the alienation of the classical doctor patient relationship. He was born in Hungary during WWII (1940), and after the 1956 revolution was defeated, he immigrated to Canada on his own at the age of 16. He graduated with honors from the University of Toronto with a BA in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, as well as an MA in psychology from the University of Western Ontario. He has been a psychotherapist since 1969.