Torsten Passie, MD, PhD
Hannover Medical School; Gotha-University Frankfurt/Main
"ICPR is, to my eyes, the most informative and well-organized conference on psychedelic research. It is serious in its focus on science and all-encompassing by including the humanities and other academic disciplines."
Speaker Bio
Torsten Passie MD, MA is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Hannover Medical School (Germany) and Visiting Scientist at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main (Germany). He studied philosophy, sociology (M.A.) at Leibniz-University, Hannover and medicine at Hannover Medical School. His prize-winning dissertation was about existential/phenomenological psychiatry. He worked at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Zürich (Switzerland) and with Professor Hanscarl Leuner (Göttingen), a leading European authority on hallucinogenic drugs and psycholytic therapy. From 1998 to 2010 he was scientist and a research psychiatrist at Hannover Medical school (Germany) where he did research on the psychophysiology of altered states of consciousness and their healing potential, including clinical research with hallucinogenic drugs (cannabis, ketamin, nitrous oxide, psilocybin). 2012-2015 he was Visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA). He is an expert on the pharmacology and clinical/therapeutic use of hallucinogenic and entactogenic drugs. His publications appeared in Journal of Psychopharmacology, Neuropsychobiology, Addiction Biology, Addiction, CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics and others. He has published around 20 books, including The Pharmacology of LSD 2010 and The History of MDMA 2023, both by Oxford University Press.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Should controlled self-experience with psychedelic drugs a part of the training of psychedelic therapist?
During the early years of psycholytic and psychedelic therapy research (1955-1969) there was an international consensus, that therapists eager to use these drugs in psychotherapy should have experienced the effects of these drugs on themselves. The European Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy (EPT) made it a requirements for the training of psychedelic therapist that they should have been through five of those experiences, at the time usually with LSD.
More recently, a debate is ongoing if such a kind of self-experience should be a part of the training of psychedelic therapists.
To look at this debate more comprehensively, the author has done extensive studies on how this issue was handled in the past and what researchers and therapist have said about it and to what conclusions they came. It was astonishing, that even studies about this issue have been conducted in the past, but are virtually unknown.
The lecture will give in comprehensive overview about the issue of self-experiences in the training of psychedelic therapist, and evaluating arguments which could be made in favor or against this component of a training of psychedelics therapist.