This event, the inaugural event in a series titled “Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics”, looks to initiate a conversation between contemporary psychoanalysis and psychedelic research. It includes access to pre-recorded talks, a panel discussion and Q&A with the three expert speakers who have been engaged at the intersection of these two vast and dynamic subjects.

Psychoanalysis dominated the field of psychiatry when psychedelics first entered into its discourse and practice in the 1950s. Over the next 70 years psychiatry would undergo major theoretical shifts, including a movement away from notions of a psychodynamic unconscious and towards biological mechanistic models of mental disease and suffering - its tools and interventions changing in accordance with its desire for legitimisation as a science through 'evidence based' authority. The incorporation of psychedelics into psychiatric treatment raises questions to which psychiatry must respond, such as how can altered states of consciousness produce psychotherapeutic outcomes? How can they be handled in the clinic? What is the role of the guide? What is the nature of the psychedelic experience? How does meaning emerge? Maybe it is time for psychoanalysis to enter back into psychiatric discourse, providing the tools and specialist lexicon required to begin an inquiry not only into the nature of the psychedelic experience, and ethical psychotherapeutic practice with altered states of consciousness, but also into the nature of the mind itself. This series of events will explore this possibility.