Estados alterados e espaços fixados de consciência: psicanálise e psicodelia no ocidente moderno

Abstract

This text begins by noting that contemporary psychoanalysis has been absent from the current debate on psychedelia (Rundel, 2022), even though both are modern techniques for accessing unknown records of the psyche. Analyzing this scenario, the paper proposes to reflect on what psychedelia and the experiences it engenders might be, situating them within the broader framework of altered states of consciousness. These states, as a brief journey through the history of drugs in the West reveals, were proscribed and excluded from the subject's possibilities of realization by at least three distinct but articulated movements (Plant, 2001): (1) 20th-century prohibitionism, (2) the witch hunts within the broader context of epistemicide and genocide operated by colonization (Grosfoguel, 2016), and (3) Platonic thought, which served as the foundation for a hierarchical and classificatory ontology (Butler, 2023). Based on Freudian theorization—from his relationship with cocaine in the late 19th century (Cohen, 2014; Plant, 2001) to his social texts such as Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 2023a) and The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 2023b)—traces of these three processes appear in the constitution of a psychoanalytic theory that disregarded ecstasy, reading it as mere religious illusion, and proposed a sober technique for treating modern suffering. Simultaneously, based on an evolutionary anthropology, it interpreted non-Western ways of life through colonial and reductionist categories, at times precluding other readings for the constitution of the subject and reality. Through both psychedelia (Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, 2022; Huxley, 1987; Rodrigues, 2014) and a paradigmatic shift in contemporary anthropology (Viveiros de Castro, 2018; Kopenawa and Albert, 2013), this work seeks to reconsider altered states of consciousness in their positivity and productivity. Following the traces of Freudian theorizations, it looks for elements of another type of psychoanalytic anthropology, less captive to the large unifying categories of Western thought, moving toward the ontological multiplicity of the living. Thus, the text seeks to frame psychedelia as another way of thinking about modern suffering, while asserting its potentiality within psychoanalytic discourse, assessing its limits and complexities. I propose to search the traces of Freudian theory—especially his discussion on animism (Freud, 1996) and the uncanny (unheimlich) (Freud, 2019)—as well as contemporary psychoanalysis (Klein, 2023; Dunker, 2022; David-Ménard, 2022), for opportunities to advance the debate. The 'impossible' of the unconscious and its manifestations emerge as a field of reflection on altered states of consciousness such as dreams, trance, and ecstasy, in an attempt to bridge the fields of psychedelia and psychoanalysis.