Tag Archive for: psychedelics

Podcast: Henrik in conversation with Darek Dwanda on values and programs of the MIND Foundation

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Berlin’s MIND Foundation is one of Europe’s largest psychedelic therapy organizations with global aspirations. MIND has a range of amazing programs for therapists, academics, and anyone else interested in new psychedelic therapies. In this episode we discuss a range of issues including European psychedelic landscape, ethics of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies, cultural issues, issues of growth, and many other issues related to healing with psychedelics.

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Conference: #drugscience2017 – Research, practice, and global change in 21st century drug science

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The #drucscience2017-conference presented speakers from medicine, psychotherapy, neurosciences, pharmacology, public health and anthropology to discuss the state of the art in drug science.

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Essay: Ecstasy – Expedition to an Unknown Land in Spektrum der Wissenschaft Spezial: Rituale. Was unser Leben zusammenhält

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Ecstasy derives from the Greek and means something like “being outside oneself” and “stepping out,” which means a temporary shifting of the personal coordinate system. This holds the chance of a new perspective, but also the danger of losing oneself. The general characteristics of altered states of waking consciousness include changes in self-, world-, and time-perception, especially emotionalization, intensification of visual and auditory experience, bodily perceptions, and intensified experience of meaning. As a rule, in such states the experience shifts away from the ego-like controlled, to the intoxicating being carried in a stream of fragmentary inner events. It is precisely this passive “being carried” that can have a seductive and “habituating” quality for unstable people.

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Conference: The Globalization of Ayahuasca – researchers meet those who use the Amazonian concoction

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The conference “The Internationalization of Ayahuasca” combined discussions about emic and etic perspectives on Ayahuasca practices. Participants debated about the status of this Amazonian brew as it continued its expansion throughout the world.

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Medicine of Interactions – What modern Medicine could learn from its historical Encounter with “Animal Magnetism”

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Whoever deals with the person, work and history of Franz Anton Mesmer is confronted with the difficulty of facing a personality whose many facets make it difficult to force him into a uniform image. Mesmer seems to evade this attempt to grasp him light-footedly, like one of his much-vaunted fluids.
Franz Anton Mesmer gave impulses for the most diverse disciplines and topoi. Examples are the development of anesthesia, psychiatry, psychosomatics, hypnotism and psycho-therapy. – For the sociological formation of the latter, his unintended influence should not be underestimated. Beyond that, however, his teachings had an effect in the fields of parapsy-chology, spiritualism, which returned to Europe via America, spiritual healing, stage hypno-sis, and in an extensive way in the history of literature, especially German Romanticism.
What can medicine learn from its encounter with “animal magnetism”? How would it react to esoteric and metaphysial theories that evolve around an otherwise “rational” and effective therapy TODAY?a

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