Encore episode: Avoiding the Traps of Psychedelic Self-Absorption with Adam Aronovich, PhD(c)

In this episode of the Psychedelic Medicine Podcast, Adam Aronovich, PhD(c) returns to discuss issues of psychedelic self-absorption—and how to avoid these traps. According to Adam, he is a PhD candidate in medical anthropology, the creator and curator of Healing from Healing, a trophy husband and dad.

In this conversation, Adam revisits his previous discussion of psychedelic narcissism and explains why he’s now somewhat more critical of the term. However, Adam still sees issues around cultivating epistemic humility and acknowledging the political dimensions of healing in psychedelic contexts. He explains the issues he takes with forms of New Age, Neoliberal spiritual perspectives he sees as pervasive and typically unacknowledged amongst many engaging with psychedelics. He also discusses how some pop psychology terms have worked their way into the psychedelic realm and what impacts that has had.

 

In this episode:

• The “spectacle” of filmed psychedelic experiences on social media
• The intersection of medical and spiritual cultures in psychedelics and how this can create issues of access
• The cheapening and overuse of the idea of “trauma” in popular discourse and the birth of “traumadelic” culture
• Why approaches focusing on excavating supposed repressed traumatic memories from childhood should be approached with a degree of skepticism

 

Quotes:

“One of the main things with plant medicine—particularly when people are sharing about it—is that people want to be really vulnerable and people want to be very authentic… But at the intersection with the spectacle, that vulnerability and authenticity become part of the spectacle in the sense that they become 100% performative.”  [19:01]

“The people who don’t have that modicum of self awareness and epistemic humility to really understand, with intellectual honesty, the scope of their understanding and knowledge, then it is very easy to overdo it. And then we do a disservice, not only to the actual traditions that we purport to be portraying, but also to the people that we’re working with.” [37:56]

“If you don’t understand that your healing is political, because individual health, and individual happiness, and individual everything is intrinsically related to collective health, and social health, and cultural health, and environmental health, then you need to go back to square one because you haven’t understood anything. ” [40:02]

“If we can’t even fathom that perhaps my own wellbeing is in constant dialogue with the wellbeing of a society, and the wellbeing of a culture, and the wellbeing of an environment—that nobody can be healthy and happy unless everybody else is relatively healthy and happy—then we are in big trouble and we haven’t really learned everything.” [40:20]

 

Links:

Healing from Healing website

Healing from Healing on Instagram

Healing from Healing on Facebook

Adam on Instagram

Society Of The Spectacle by Guy Debord

Wikipedia entry on the Satanic panic

Previous episode: Navigating Psychedelic Narcissism with Adam Aronovich