Paper short abstract:

Resurgent psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy is subject to contemporary scientific imperatives. Yet psychedelics are unruly, producing unpredictable experiences. By combining surprise and prediction, the skillful configuration of psychedelic therapy is able to shape wider spiritual practices.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst the proliferation of esoteric and occult practices and discourses in the global North, there has been a resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelic psychotherapy. Utilizing substances such as psilocybin, LSD and MDMA, university-based research trials are seeking to stabilize and optimize experimental systems that harness psychedelics in the treatment of clinical targets including depression, anxiety and addiction. Yet psychedelics are inherently unruly substances, producing experiences that defy prediction. The activity of support staff - variously known as 'therapists', 'guides' and 'monitors' - tends to be backgrounded in the writing up of scientific studies that foreground drug effects. The configuration of psychedelic psychotherapy is also influenced by legacies of understanding the psychedelic guide in an earlier wave of overground experimentation, models emerging from the illicit underground use of psychedelics, shamanic practices and biofeedback-based automation technologies under construction.

I draw on data collected during ethnographic stints with psychedelic researchers on the east coast of the United States from 2013-present, to demonstrate how psychedelic psychotherapy is being shaped around the very unpredictability of psychedelics. Weaving ethnographic data with theories of surprise (Sedgwick) and trickery (Taussig), I show how the mode of psychotherapy being provided celebrates the unexpected in ways that nevertheless manage to complement the narratives of predictability demanded by the agenda to medicalize psychedelic psychotherapy. In so doing, this highly singular model of psychedelic psychotherapy is authorized as 'scientific', enabling it to shape wider practices for producing and navigating altered states in the return of a new 'New Age'.