Works in Progress is a new monthly workshop where our candidates and faculty can present their work jointly in the institute. Coming together is the heart of our mission, as it creates a space of difference in which new ideas can emerge. These workshops are designed with this aspiration in mind. By resisting the individualistic pull and participating in this space, we could create a potentiality where things can happen organically in the presence of others, rekindling our thinking and the life of our community.
Avishai Rosen
Nathan Gorelick
Psychedelic Lacan
What happens when language and ego collapse in the psychedelic experience? Is it so different from the aim of psychoanalysis, as Lacan defined it? Do psychedelics send us along the royal road to the unconscious, or even beyond—to the spiritual (a word that hardly enters psychoanalysis), or to what Lacan calls the real? Or is the psychedelic experience something else entirely? Might it even be at odds with the experience of the unconscious? In this meeting of our ongoing Works in Progress series, Avishai Rosen and Nathan Gorelick address these questions in light of renewed scientific interest in psychedelics and rapidly accelerating enthusiasm for psychedelic psychotherapy. In this context, Lacan provides some key provocations challenging the biomedical and therapeutic models. From the other direction, psychedelics may occasion new, or newly urgent, opportunities to revisit Lacan’s fundamental concepts and what they mean for clinical practice today.