How can we help our patients/clients make constructive use of their profound but hard to articulate psychedelic experiences? How do we encourage meaningful exploration of psychedelic experience in the face of public and even personal doubts about the validity of psychedelically-attained “insights” or “knowledge”?

This experientially-based class will focus on techniques that psychedelic therapists can use to help the individuals they work with put the ineffable into words, and explore and deepen awareness of psychic states that are outside of language. We will be learning and practicing the kinds of questions and exploratory strategies that open rather than constrict narratives and focus on the process of experiencing rather than the objects of experience.

Claire Petitmengin’s micro-phenomenological interviewing method, from the text: Petitmengin, C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(3-4), 229–269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9022-2, will be a core reference for the group process.

Each week,  a member of the class will interview another member about a significant subjective experience drawn from a psychedelic journey, a vibrant memory, or an encounter with a work of art or musical experience. Petitmengin’s approach is rooted in phenomenology and informed by cognitive science, drawing on techniques from mindfulness and psychotherapy to create a replicable framework for accessing and describing subjective experience.

Through readings, dyadic practice, and group exploration, therapists will refine their skills to better support their clients in finding meaning in transformative experiences. The goal of this approach is the facilitation of contact with those aspects of pre-reflective experience which are often left out of narrative and conversational discourse. This unwavering focus on evoking details of the individual’s lived experience enables a trusting relational ambience often labeled as “holding space.”

This class will help therapists actively learn how to deepen, clarify, and validate experiences in the individuals they are working with. Through assigned readings, observation of dyads, and exploratory group process, students will learn a form of listening presence to use in clinical work. We will aim, as Edmund Husserl, an Austrian philosopher who wrote about phenomenology, stated: “to bring the as yet silent experience to purely express its own meaning” (Husserl, 1950, p. 77, quoted in Heimann, K., Boelsbjerg, H.B., Allen, C. et al., 2023).

A limited number of Diversity Fund scholarships are available, please complete this application, in addition to the course application.