Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction
Psychoanalysing the psychedelic phenomena of recovered memories of abuse, birth and alien abduction
From earliest life every one of us is immersed in a world of pure novelty, preoccupied with weaving the fluctuations of experience into a stable and coherent tapestry. We theorise and construct understandings and expectations of space, time, the social world and ourselves within it from the threads of culture we happen upon in our maturation. Yet novelty insists upon us, disrupting all attempts to complete the picture. Protected by only this thinnest of veils, every so often we experience something so apparently novel it creates a hole in the very fabric of our reality. These rips, tears and ruptures can undermine faith in our habitual ways of knowing, our own memories and even our sensory perceptions themselves, demanding suture. In this talk we will draw on contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of trauma, revelation, gaslighting and eye witness testimony to think about some of the more far-out experiences that can be engendered by psychedelics, and one of their unfortunate results, epistemic injury.
Speaker Bio
Timmy Davis is the founder of The Psychedelic Experience Clinic, director of Psychedelic Policy and Regulation at the Centre for Evidence Based Drug Policy (CEBDP), policy director at the Psilocybin Access Rights (PAR) campaign and a trainee at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Curated and hosted by
Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.
Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.
She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.
Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
