Psychedelics: Psychoanalysis used drugs in Argentina – 10/01/2024 – Virada Psicodélica
Argentine Susana Garcia, now 84 years old, lives in Fortaleza. When she was 18 and still living in Buenos Aires, she was rescued from the bottom of a well into which she had been thrown due to mental illness. Her father was dying of cancer, and she, suffering from severe anorexia and weighing 38 kilos, was reborn into life with LSD.
In other words, not (only) with the consciousness-modifying substance, but with the treatment in which doctor Alberto Fontana sought help from psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid, psilocybin and mescaline to facilitate access to repressed traumas and drives. Garcia arrived in Fontana at the suggestion of his sister, a psychologist, who knew of the fame acquired by the psychotherapist and his methods.
The psychoanalyst was not the only one to use psychedelics in psychotherapy in Argentina, a resource that was close to official consecration in the profession. Suffice it to mention that one of the most prominent figures in the group defending psychedelics, Luisa Gambier de Álvarez de Toledo, was in 1956-1957 president of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), which had been founded in 1942.
Álvarez was a unique character. In addition to being the first woman to preside over the APA, she advocated that analysts use psychedelic substances themselves, for self-knowledge and to experience what they offered their patients. In 1960 he published the article “Ayahuasca” in the Revista de Psicoanálisis, in which he narrates what he experienced in two shamanic tea ceremonies in the Peruvian jungle and compares them with the psychoanalytic context.
“The fantasies that arise under the effect of hallucinogenic drugs, in analytical treatment, lose their ‘reality’ as they are interpreted, achieving greater connection and adaptation to the external world”, he writes. “In return, the sorcerer appears to acquire, reinforce and maintain through the use of the drug an omnipotent fantasy, which supports and gratifies.”
I became aware of this fascinating story through two articles. The first is authored by the French Zoë Dubus, a medical historian who wrote the text “LSD and Ayahuasca in Argentina: The pioneering work of a psychoanalyst in the 1950s” for the Chacruna portal (in English, here, and in Spanish, here).
The other article, by Rodolfo Olivieri and Luís Fernando Tófoli, appeared in the International Journal of Drug Policy as “Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics: The censored story in Argentina”. The title, of course, already gives away the spoiler – the innovative initiative did not yield lasting results.
First of all, it is worth highlighting that the Argentine case was not a rare bird. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Swiss laboratory Sandoz sent LSD, under the trade name Delysid, to doctors who wanted to make experimental use of the drug created in 1938 by its chemist Albert Hofmann. Many dedicated themselves to this – in the USA, Canada, Europe, even in Brazil, famously, by the psychiatrist Murilo Pereira Gomes – until the end of the 1960s, when the drug fell into the favor of the counterculture and ended up being banned.
In Buenos Aires, the marriage of psychoanalysis and psychedelics lasted no more than a decade. After presiding over the APA, Álvarez was ostracized by her conservative peers, who saw psychedelics as an open flank for attacks on the profession.
In 1961, the Revista de Psicoanálisis published a full-page advertisement warning that “deviations linked to the use of drugs –LSD, mescaline, benzedrine, tranquilizers, cortisone, etc.– should not be considered psychoanalytic treatments”, informs Olivieri in his master’s thesis. The defense was in May this year, but the text “Strange Forces: A psychoanalytic collaboration on the visual effect of ayahuasca” is not yet available online.
At that time, psychoanalysts from Argentina and elsewhere sought to differentiate their activity from that carried out by psychiatrists, who in turn were moving towards pharmacological hegemony. Mood disorders, from this second point of view, would be the product of biochemical imbalances in the brain and should be treated with medication, while analytical orthodoxy favored healing through words (with a little reinforcement, come on).
Today, as the Psychedelic Renaissance of the 2000s takes a huge hit with the FDA’s rejection of MDMA psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, it is headed toward a similar dissociation. It wasn’t even about combining psychedelics with psychoanalysis, but rather with less controversial psychotherapeutic techniques, but after the fiasco, investors and researchers preferred to minimize psychological treatment and emphasize biochemical effects such as neuroplasticity.
Álvarez, Fontana and their psychedelic colleagues succumbed in this cavern. They left the APA, but continued with their treatments, which ranged from minimal doses (half a microgram per kilogram of weight) to full doses of LSD, or equivalent doses with other substances. The dosage, or “combined session”, only took place about two months after the therapy began, with the analysand/analyst relationship already well developed.
Another innovation was the use of psychedelics in group sessions, with psychodrama techniques. Susana Garcia says that the pills were given around 8:30pm to 9pm to the gathered patients, who spent the whole night working with the therapists, until 4am or 5am, when they received medication to interrupt the lysergic effect.
They then slept until around noon, in the clinic, and when they woke up they lovingly offered them food.” Those who faced emotional difficulties stayed for an individual session with the analyst, and the others went to their homes.
Fontana explains in detail the methodology used in the book “Psychotherapy with LSD and Other Hallucinogens”, from 1965, which was published in Brazil four years later (Mestre Jou, 1969), translated by the poet and essayist Jamil Almansur Haddad. In total, they treated 1,106 patients in ten years, but in the book they present some data only on the 500 who were still in the clinic, 83% aged between 18 and 35 years, the majority (58%) women.
Before this group, other doctors used LSD and similar drugs, such as the pioneer Enrique Pichon-Rivière. Alberto Tallaferro, who had studied with Wilhelm Reich in the USA in 1952 and in 1956 published the volume “Mescaline and LSD 25: Experiences, Therapeutic Value in Psychiatry”, describes in the work good results obtained in 1,117 psychedelic sessions.
Fontana’s group emphasizes transference (projection of the analysed’s affects onto the analyst) and the influence of psychedelics on this interpretative pillar of psychoanalytic treatment. Notably, he points out that the effect of the drug occurs on both sides of the relationship: “When the psychotherapist proposes the combined session, he loses his omnipotence before the patient, which then passes to the drug.”
“The therapist, at this moment, must resign himself, understand and interpret the displacement towards the medicine of the magic that had previously been placed in him. We say resign himself because countertransferentially the doctor feels a sensation of being stripped of something that protected him and, If you don’t admit and interpret it, you can react with aggression and fear.”
One wonders how much fear there may have been in the aggressive rejection of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy by the biomedical establishment, of which the FDA’s August decision provides a prime example. It is not easy to resign oneself to the loss of an asymmetry that takes so much power from the patient for the doctor’s monopoly, even though in appearance all therapeutic effects are attributed to the drug.
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Psychedelics are still experimental therapies and, certainly, do not constitute a solution for all psychological disorders, nor should they be the subject of self-medication. Speak to your therapist or doctor before venturing into the area.
To learn more about the history and new developments in science in this area, look for my book “Psychonauts – Travels with Brazilian Psychedelic Science”.
Don’t forget to also see the reports from the series “A Ressurreição da Jurema”:
