OPEN Foundation

The sad news has reached us that Andrew Sewell passed away on Sunday July 21st while he was recovering from surgery. R. Andrew Sewell, MD, was assistant professor of Psychiatry at Yale University where he conducted fascinating research on psyche

delics. We had the pleasure of meeting Andrew at our 2010 Mind Altering Science Conference, where he presented his research as one of our invited speakers.

We will remember Andrew Sewell as a cheerful, optimistic and talented researcher with a gift for inspiring others through his lectures. We feel that his passing away is a great loss for the psychedelic research community. Our deepest sympathies go out to Andrew’s friends and family.

Among other things, Andrew was responsible for writing the well read and sobering manual on how to become a psychedelic researcher, entitled ‘So you want to become a psychedelic researcher?’, a must read for aspiring scientists wanting to study psychedelic substances.

Thank you Andrew, for your contributions to psychedelic research and for your inspiring lectures, filled to the brim with information, delivered at high speed. You’ll be missed.

Carl Gustav Jung pioneered the transformative potential of the deep unconscious. Psychedelic substances provide direct and powerful access to this inner world. How, then, might Jungian psychology help us to better understand the nature of psychedelic experiences? And how might psychedelics assist the movement toward psychological transformation described by Jung?

Jungian depth psychology and psychedelic psychotherapy are both concerned with coming to terms with unconscious drives, complexes, and symbolic images. Unaware of significant evidence for the safe clinical use of psychedelic drugs, Jung himself remained wary of psychedelics and staunchly opposed their therapeutic use. His bias has prevented Jungians from objectively considering the benefits as well as the risks of using psychedelics for psychological healing and growth.

Confrontation with the Unconscious intertwines psychedelic research, personal accounts of psychedelic experiences, and C. G. Jung’s work on trauma, the shadow, psychosis, and psychospiritual transformation — including Jung’s own “confrontation with the unconscious” — to show the relevance of Jung’s penetrating insights to the work of Stanislav Grof, Ann Shulgin, Ronald Sandison, Margot Cutner, among other psychedelic and transpersonal researchers, and to demonstrate the great value of Jung’s penetrating insights for understanding difficult psychedelic experiences and promoting safe and effective psychedelic exploration and psychotherapy.

Scott J. Hill, Ph. D., lives in Sweden, where he conducts scholarly research on the intersection between psychedelic studies and Jungian psychology. He holds degrees in psychology from the University of Minnesota and in philosophy and religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian Depth Psychology and Psychedelic Experience, by Scott J. Hill, Muswell Hill Press, 252 pages.
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Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research among the Navajos, this book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of an indigenous postcolonial healing movement called the Native American Church (NAC), which arose in the 19th century in response to the creation of the reservations system and increasing societal ills, including alcoholism. The movement is the locus of cultural conflict with a long history in North America, and stirs very strong and often opposed emotions and moral interpretations. Joseph Calabrese describes the Peyote Ceremony as it is used in family contexts and federally funded clinical programs for Native American patients. He uses an interdisciplinary methodology that he calls clinical ethnography: an approach to research that involves clinically informed and self-reflective immersion in local worlds of suffering, healing, and normality. Calabrese combined immersive fieldwork among NAC members in their communities with a year of clinical work at a Navajo-run treatment program for adolescents with severe substance abuse and associated mental health problems. There he had the unique opportunity to provide conventional therapeutic intervention alongside Native American therapists who were treating the very problems that the NAC often addresses through ritual. Calabrese argues that if people respond better to clinical interventions that are relevant to their society’s unique cultural adaptations and ideologies (as seems to be the case with the NAC), then preventing ethnic minorities from accessing traditional ritual forms of healing may actually constitute a human rights violation.

A Different Medicine: Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church, by Joseph D. Calabrese, Oxford Ritual Studies series, Oxford University Press, 256 pages.

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Entheogens, Society & Law takes a major step towards a comprehensive understanding of the human condition, elucidating how empathy, meaning and purpose emerge from three intersecting areas of human life: biology, consciousness and culture.

The term “entheogen” designates a class of psychoactive plant and substance uses that have played, and continue to play, an important role as catalysts of experiences of the “divine,” “sacred” or “numinous,” as well as in divination, healing and, more recently, psychotherapy. The authors expand on these ideas, borrowing from a wide range of disciplines — pharmacology, neurology, consciousness research, psychology, semiotics, theology and mythology — and immersing the reader in a radical and empowering exegesis of influential cultural myths such as that of Original Sin. The resulting insights have practical and ethical implications in many areas of contemporary society, including education, mental health, human rights and law.

Much of the literature on psychedelics and altered states of consciousness remains firmly entrenched in the dualistic logic of prohibition discourse. Unfortunately, this detracts from its ability to engage with the broader existential, ethical and humanitarian questions that, the author’s argue, any bona fide religious or therapeutic tradition needs to address. With its focus on ethics, Entheogens, Society & Law pursues a pragmatic inquiry guided by one paramount question: how can individuals take responsibility for their own lives and wrest power and authority from institutions that deprive them of the very liberties, e.g. to explore consciousness and alter mental functioning, upon which the exercise of responsibility is premised? This question leads to a critical examination of contemporary discourses on emergent ‘technologies of the self,’ human rights, the ‘common good’ — and the extents of state interference with the self-defining choices of sovereign individuals.

The theoretical questions raised by the meta-analysis presented here propose the possibility, if not necessity, of addressing the crises of modernity, including problems surrounding drug use, as a series of contingencies generated by the competing interests of individual’s search for a meaningful existence and powerful institutions exercising hegemonic control over what we can and cannot do towards that ends. This ethical inquiry exposes the faulty premises of exercises of authority and power by demonstrating the central role of human consciousness in the generation of values that ultimately define us and determine what we become. This places discussion on the nature of ‘mind-altering substances’ at the heart of contemporary discourses on human rights, offering empowering and inspiring insights into the future of humanity.

Entheogens, Society & Law — Towards a Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy & Responsibility, by Daniel Waterman, Melrose Books, 496 pages.

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