Psychedelic Narcissism
Key Term: Psychedelic Narcissism
Narcissism refers to a "pervasive pattern of grandiosity," which is characterized by arrogant or haughty behaviors and feelings of entitlement and superiority (APA Dictionary of Psychology). The immediacy and salience inherent to the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience often prime inexperienced or unskilled people to mistake very powerful and meaningful subjective insights for objective and ultimate truths that apply to everybody, often leading to ego inflation.
Most modern psychedelic and plant medicine "practices" are embedded within frameworks that dictate their proper uses and provide metaphysical, spiritual, or psychological explanatory systems that help us navigate and make sense of our experience. They provide us with guidelines for safe, responsible, and grounded use.
Learning from various traditions, teachers, lineages, and therapeutic schools has immense value. However, it is essential to remember that the map is never the territory, and nobody has a monopoly over Truth. Getting too attached to any one interpretation (whether borrowed or uniquely ours) can be counterproductive, as we run the risk of becoming dogmatic, rigid, arrogant, and less able to navigate the ego-inflation and messianic phases that are common amongst psychedelic and plant medicine users afflicted with too-much-Certainty.
While a psychedelic experience can feel "more real than real" and a source of direct, infallible, and objective knowledge, our interpretations are also framed by cultural and social expectations, metaphysical and ontological assumptions, the flexibility of our underlying belief systems, and our personal ability to process new information and make meaning out of weird and ineffable experiences.
This requires various degrees of courage, openness to experience, intellectual interdisciplinary knowledge, critical thinking skills, and an awareness that explanatory frameworks are culturally, historically, and socially situated. Our interpretations of psychospiritual phenomena are always just that: interpretations, whether we are Euro-American, Shipibo, Mazatec, or Tibetan. Epistemic diversity is important, but idealizing and romanticizing other cultures can be another subtler form of colonialism and racism.
Whether we adhere to a Western clinical paradigm, a medicalized therapeutic framework, a hedonistic, libertarian DIY festival culture, a structured, ritualized, and hierarchical religious group, or a long lineage or tradition of plant medicine healers, it’s essential to remember that different people have different needs at different times and that there’s a variety and diversity of reasons why we seek the sort of experiences these plants and substances provide.
Learning to be comfortable with radical uncertainty and epistemic humility and diversity allows us to be more inclusive, empathetic, and tolerant of each others's needs, beliefs, and interpretations while protecting ourselves from an inflated sense of purpose and self-importance, obsessive and maladaptive self-analysis, plant-medicine consumerism, potential cult-like dynamics, institutionalized gaslighting and, of course, psychedelic narcissism.
Example:
“That medicine circle is not ideal for me. They are very dogmatic in their conspiritual explanatory framework and rife with cult-like dynamics. You are expected to use the right language, attribute all agency to a colonial and decontextualized construction of "plant spirits" that has little to do with the nuance present in actual indigenous ontologies, you're supposed to accept that "healing" is EXCLUSIVELY a result of "looking at our childhood trauma" and "doing our individual work" with zero attention to relational or contextual factors. Any valid criticism or resistance is turned around on the person who is asked to "look at their own shit" instead. It's just an established culture of gaslighting, spiritual fantasy, and psychedelic narcissism that I’m not vibing with.”
