What Ayahuasca taught me about Jungian Psychology, and what Jungian psychology taught me about integrating psychedelic experiences.
Post by Johann Mynhardt
About fifteen years ago, on the recommendation of a friend and Ayahuascero (Ayahuasca shaman) I attended my first Ayahuasca ceremony. I wasn’t particularly enthused about the idea, but he suggested it might be good for me and in hindsight I probably had (and to some degree still have) issues around control. I was hesitant about opening up the floodgates of the unconscious.
My journey was revelatory and to my surprise I found myself being introduced to my body in a visceral glory I couldn’t have imagined. The so-called mind-body connection become immediately clear. Of course I’d always known I’d had a body, intellectually speaking at least, but the “me” I had always thought I was, had been a tennis-ball-sized “homunculus” located somewhere between my eyes and the centre of my head. Up to that point I’d been floating around the world like a disembodied pair of eyeballs.
I’d always had a deep interest in spirituality and psychology but this experience emphasized how skewed my previous ideas about the psyche had been. I had a rather biased “heady” view of the it all. This awakening was also traumatizing – not only was it existentially shattering but the experience showed me how this dissociation from ta deeply visceral embodied experience had originated – or at least in part, based on early childhood trauma to mention nothing of the cultural, ancestral or genetic components that may have led me to this very limited experience of myself.
Dealing with the after-effects of unearthing this trauma proved difficult.
I did have some great support from my Ayahuascero friend who coached me to calmly stay with the somatic experiences and avoid my tendency to over-think. But despite this and to borrow a term from Marie Louise von Franz, I was still rather full of “white man’s nonsense” – in Jungian terms the propensity to overly identify with my thinking function. This part of my psyche needed to find a rational way to think itself out of its own over-identification with thinking, if that was indeed ever possible!
I searched for answers in philosophy, religion and both Western and Eastern forms of mysticism, that I had been exploring for many years, but it wasn’t until I decided to turn to Jung, and at least several years into my education in Analytical Psychology through the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies, that I began to formulate some of the answers I’d been searching for. To give “white man’s nonsense” some credit, pursuing this nagging thought ultimately enabled me to not only map out and make sense of my own mystical and psychedelic experiences, but led me to devise an approach to integrating these kinds of experiences based on Jung’s ideas.
One of the most important of these ideas was Jung’s concept of psychological types. In its more popularized forms, such as the Myers-Briggs type indicator, it seems to be relegated to pop psychology and career guidance. However, in a television interview in 1957 Jung stresses that his system of typology, first published in 1921 in his book Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types), was not devised to stereotype personalities. Rather it was intended as a diagnostic tool to assist the psychoanalyst in the analytical process. He cautions us that typology is also to be seen as fluid over the lifetime of the individual.
What really correlated with Jung’s typological model and the revelations from my first Ayahuasca experience was that the different functions of consciousness that Jung names as thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation (or sensing), exist at different levels of development for a particular individual at a particular time. The idea is that we have a dominant function – our most highly developed function, or what Jungian analyst John Beebe, (who is something of an expert in Jungian typology) refers to as our hero function. Our ego identity is most identified with this particular function.
Next, we have an auxiliary (or secondary) function, a tertiary function and finally our least developed or most unconscious function, the inferior function – the latter being the seat of our inferiority complex, typically a place of deep psychological wounding. Coupling these four functions with the attitudes of introversion and extraversion, we actually end up with eight functions. So in Jungian terms, rather than speaking about coming to a bodily awareness (I suspect Jung was trying to avoid metaphysics by keeping his ideas in the realm of phenomenology) we might say my repressed introverted sensation was brought to consciousness (by contrast, extraverted sensation would be the subjective experience of the outer world through one’s five senses).
But there’s much more to this and what Jung’s typological structure ultimately points to in this model and so many of his models, specifically those that refer to a four-fold structure (quaternity) of the psyche, is the Self – the archetype of wholeness. Typology therefore provides us with a useful map of how to undertake our journey of individuation (psychological growth) towards a greater psychological wholeness.
In other words, we can think of a highly individuated person, at least hypothetically and from a typological perspective, as being one who would be intimately in touch with their thoughts, feelings and intuitions while also experiencing themselves as deeply embodied in the world and experiencing or expressing these through both introverted and extraverted attitudes.
If we have a tendency to perceive life through the world of intuitions and abstract ideas then it’s likely we need to learn to drop into our bodily sensations and our five senses. By contrast if we’re down to earth and practical to the point of banality we likely need to get down and dirty with the abstract world of intuition. If we have a tendency to overly rationalize our experiences then perhaps, we need to drop into our feelings a little more. (Jung means something quite technical by feeling but for the sake of simplicity I’m not going to expand too much on this here). Many schools of psychology already centre on exploring feelings but what if this is already reasonably comfortable territory for us? What’s our path to our psychological growth then?
I’m sure you get the picture…
The importance of the quaternity doesn’t end here and Stephen Anthony Farah, Head of Learning at the Centre, has researched and illuminated the correlation between the Magnum Opus (“Great work”) of the alchemists with its four stages, Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Jung’s views on the approaches of the different schools of depth psychology. Jung viewed alchemy as kind of Western yogic or spiritual practice and he makes the alchemical process of transmutation much more accessible to us by outlining the stages of psychoanalysis pertaining to these different schools, which Stephen has distilled into a simple 4-step process. It’s a model that we use and teach extensively at the Centre and it consists of the stages of:
- confession / catharsis,
- elucidation/amplification,
- education, and
- transformation.
We can take just about any experience, whether it’s a memory based on a lived experience, a trauma, a dream, or a psychedelic experience as the raw material – in alchemical terms, the “prima materia” – and use this to initiate this 4-step process of transformation.
Taking this back to typology, in order to avoid merely circumambulating the psychological material due to the tendency to remain fixated in our dominant or / or auxiliary functions it’s incredibly powerful to combine this 4-step process with a typological approach. We do this by engaging with our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and sensations for each stage in the 4-step process.
If we combine this with the extraverted and introverted attitudes, we have 8 functions with which to engage our 4-step process and while it may not be necessary to engage all of these in any particular situation it can certainly help illuminate our blind spots and point us to our inferior function. If I can paraphrase John Beebe here: A personality has to drop anchor in the inferior function.
This dropping anchor has the tendency to invoke the 5th function, which Jung calls the transcendent function (and which also has a “hidden” function I’ve called the 10th function). This transcendent function is the key to propelling us toward the Self, that archetype of greater psychological wholeness.
And what do we mean by a successful integration of a psychedelic experience anyway?
Surely a movement towards greater internal cohesion and psychological wholeness would be its ultimate measure.
Footnote:
Johann will be leading a 6-week workshop exploring and applying this model starting on Saturday the 26th of October 2024. For more information on this please visit the programme information page Integrating Psychedelic Experiences.
Comments (12)
Thanks, all this is very clear for me and for us astrologers in the jungian way.
Thank you Nicoletta.
Johann,
I very much enjoyed your essay. Typoolgy is so often give no attention when working with archetypal expereinces. Your model is very provocative in that and other ways. I would refer you to the centeniel edition of the Journal of Analytical Pyschology (edited by John Bebee) commerating the publication of Psychological Types. It is Vol 66, #5, Nov. 2021. I have an article included there entitled, “Exploring Whole Type: Living into the Archetypal Self” that could be of interest.
Thank you Angelo. I’m glad you could relate and I look forward to reading your article.
Great article!
My understanding of these “mind-expanding” drugs comes from Avatar Meher Baba who said that they were detrimental of us physically, mentally and spiritually. In the late sixties, Richard Alpert aka Ram Das was in correspondence with Baba and was trying to convince him of the value of LSD. Baba finally said to use them three more times and then be finished. Later in his life, Ram Das said he regretted not following this directive.
Anne it would be a mistake to paint all psychedelics with the same broad brush stroke. Ram Das’ guru Neem Karoli Baba was commenting on LSD specifically (which is manufactured synthetically) and comparing it’s effects to “Moksha”. LSD is not the same as Ayahuasca, Iboga, Mescaline or Psilocybin, which have all been part of various indigenous spiritual practices for thousands of years. That’s not to suggest these should be used indiscriminately but each is unique and may provide a psychological or spiritual benefit depending on the individual’s psychological makeup. Even LSD has been found to be a helpful treatment for anxiety related to terminal illness so it really depends on the specific context.
Thank you for your informative response Johann. Meher Baba did give the caveat that LSD would be used in the future medically. As a 70s LSD etc. hippie I had really good trips, but at a certain point realized that I had to do the inner work. At least LSD clarified my direction toward spiritual awakening, but I saw several friends go down over their psychedelic use.jTwo years ago, I saw a beautiful, healthy young woman experience psychological issues after using ayahuasca. I was staying next door to her in Mexico and she worked with a therapist every day over the phone. How does one know if they can handle it? That is the question and concern for me. And I’m sure you know of Jung’s correspondence with Victor White where he expressed great wariness about opening the door wider to the unconscious.
Hi Anne,
Yes you’re raising a good point this was a big concern for Jung. I think given what appeared to be something of a psychotic break that he suffered after his rupture with Freud as well as having worked with schizophrenics one can understand this position. On the other hand we also have individuals of a more neurotic disposition, myself included, that may benefit greatly from the temporary softening of ego defences brough about by psychedelics, provided adequate preparation, mindset and setting are in place. It’s difficult to predict exactly what kind of individual might benefit and under what circumstances but we certainly know that any tendency for psychotic disorders or a family history of these would be contra-indicated. The problem is that a psychotic disorder could also be latent for an individual and we wouldn’t necessarily know until it’s too late.
That said, for many individuals, working with psychedelics can be life-saving but requires careful consideration and there’s no panacea or a one-size-fits-all solution. We need to understand more about these medicines, how they work and what benefits they might provide for specific circumstances, how to adequately prepare and then later integrate these experiences. Hopefully the more that we can understand and work with them, the less they will be used haphazardly. So I wouldn’t promote psychedelics as a panacea but I do think that given the general state of soullessness in the modern world, when used in the right context they can be very healing in that regard, which is certainly true in my own case.
💖
I appreciate your article and am curious to read more. In particular, where might I read more about the “10th function”?
I find myself curious about your final assessment of the success of a psychedelic experience being “a movement towards greater internal cohesion and psychological wholeness.” While I would agree with that, (and am certain even in saying so, that I can not profess to completely comprehend what your words point to in lived experience), I am also curious to know what language you might have about experiences that transcend the ego, experiences that reveal the transitory and impermanent nature of our egoic structure, and the implication of that on how we define “internal” and “external”, “self” and “other” “world”, and how that alters the constellation of our sense of the “real” that is both an egoic death and a rebirth of conscious awareness embedded within the context of a larger transubjective field..?
Many thanks again, and if what I offer here makes no sense, feel free to disregard.
Best wishes and blessings to you along the way~
Hi Abigail.
There’s nothing published about the 10th function (as yet) as this is my own naming convention, however you will find Jung referring to the process of psychic differentiation at length in his work. For example the very process of the Self manifesting through consciousness via the four / eight functions is and example of differentiation without which the transcendent function as a process of the uniting of opposites cannot arise.
I appreciate your comments on the idea of greater psychological wholeness since Jung’s idea of the Self as the archetype of wholeness can be fairly abstract and is also to a degree a moving target, giving that life is dynamic and continues to unfold each moment. It’s difficult to ground this idea in the practical and experiential and to do so also risks reducing that which is seemingly infinite to something finite. Yet that’s not helpful either because keeping the Self as an abstraction can cause it to remain inaccessible to us. This is why I find the concept of differentiation through the four (eight) functions so useful because it makes the Self accessible – it’s what Jung might describe as a “squaring of the circle”. For example if my inferior function is introverted intuition then perhaps I could explore this function through something like dream analysis, active imagination, sand play therapy or art therapy and so on.
I suppose this is really only way to approach psychological wholeness in that we could work to integrate our functions but still have a pretty thick shadow but in the same breath if we look at John Beebe’s work we find that the archetypes map to the functions in such a manner that working with the functions themselves should at least expose us to our shadow, anima / animus and so on. These too can be fairly abstract to grapple with and attempt to integrate.
In terms of transcending the “ego”, at least in the psychoanalytic definition of ego, considering that an egoless state would be akin to psychosis I think what we’re really aiming for in terms of integrating what psychedelics show us about the ego is in cultivating what Jung calls the ego-Self axis. In other words the ego needs boundaries on the one hand yet these need to be permeable on the other hand. We want to have a relationship with the Self, the divine, the infinite but with out feet planted firmly on the earth while remaining grounded in our humanity. The challenge with this is that it produces paradoxes that seem difficult if not impossible to integrate. In other words should I just walk in front of a moving bus if my experience is “All is One”? Well, paradoxically, my experience of being separate from the bus is also “The One”, so that must also be accounted for and I guess we have to find a way to live with this kind of paradox.
Thank you for these great questions and reflections.