The Transference and Counter-Transference in Psycholytic Therapy

By Janine Rodiles - September 2, 2009

 

Stuck in a sleeping bag one winter’s night in the middle of an LSD-25 therapy, I experienced my birth. My whole body moved abruptly, possessing a pulse-emerging imperative - I have to be born. “Yes? So, how?” A voice replied, "To be born you must accept that you will die. Along with the life I give you, I also give you death." “Then, I will not be born," I said with fear, feeling my jugular vein and my heart would explode at any moment. Suddenly the following image came to me: a bridge across a field, the bridge spanned the two extremes: life and death. I had to cross the bridge. The voice said, “This is life and death, but there is a bridge, the bridge is love and that's what you come to cross: the way of love.” Then I could be born.

I had this session in the year 1992 with the famous and controversial Mexican psychiatrist Salvador Roquet (1920-1995) who pioneered therapy with entheogens. He developed a treatment that bound, for first time in human history, the modern field of psychiatry/ psychoanalysis with the ancient Mexican traditional medical practice that utilizes power plants, dating from some 3,000 years ago.

When therapy with entheogens was a scientific project sponsored by Sandoz Laboratories, in the decade of the 50's, part of the experimental scientific studies that were conducted, worldwide, concluded that a problem in the use of these substances in therapy was a potentiation of transference and counter-transference as the patient could see his therapist as God or devil. As we know, entheogens are vehicles and keys to and from the unconscious, so that the projections that naturally occur in therapeutic work are much more intense and powerful.

In this therapeutic field, the communication becomes multidimensional as many channels are open (neurobiochemical and sacred), therefore it becomes very risky for people with a purely scientific orientation to offer these treatments, since the morphogenetic field that sacred substances evoke is exactly what in the sacred traditions is known as “spiritual transmission”. Therefore, a therapist who lacks mystical knowledge and purity of heart does not really achieve what is known as deep psychotherapy with entheogens.

Roquet traveled to Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico in the year 1967 with a group of his patients. They went to the shamaness Maria Sabina, to reach a new state of healing. Roquet realized the therapeutic tools that are needed to protect the process of transference and counter-transference. These tools are firstly, the sacramental preparation of the therapist, being aware of her/his injuries and her/his present, and especially for the therapist to offer this work fully to the Ultimate Source of Being. Secondly, instead of using direct dialogue with the patient, the entheogenic therapist, helps facilitate the patient in reaching a deeper level of connection with him/herself. This therapy overcomes the fear which dominates a person in their struggle to overcome unconscious forces that prevent him/her from contacting the real pain or blockage. Thirdly, indirect incentives are utilized, incentives full of intention and wisdom (in an ontogenetic semantic sense), like songs, pictures, objects, and music, so that the patient may have the keys to safely open the archetypal personal files required for each session. Another aspect of the entheogenic transmission healing is the integration phase, which is a work with the re-weaving of the person, once the effect of the substance has passed. Then through pictures, letters, music and biblio-therapy, the person can be reborn into a new core of existence and to recognize his or her true nature.