"Beware of Unearned Wisdom": The Dangers of Premature Shadow Confrontation on Psychedelics
The quote "Beware of unearned wisdom" is widely attributed to Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist, but there's no verified source from his published works, lectures, or letters where he said this exact phrase. The quote does, however, succinctly capture his perspective on the use of psychedelics in a psychotherapeutic context. In a letter to A.M. Hubbard, he stated:
When it comes to the practical and more or less general application of mescalin, I have certain doubts and hesitations. The analytical method of psychotherapy (e.g., “active imagination”) yields very similar results, viz. full realisation of complexes and numinous dreams and visions. These phenomena occur at their proper time and place in the course of the treatment. Mescalin, however, uncovers such psychic facts at any time and place when and where it is by no means certain that the individual is mature enough to integrate them.
This is a very real and dangerous risk that Jung astutely pointed out. It is entirely possible for psychedelic users to come into contact with unconscious psychic material that is too overwhelming for the ego to handle and assimilate. This can have a variety of consequences, but on the extreme end of the spectrum, this can manifest as the trip mirroring a psychotic break and the development of full-blown PTSD after the trip itself is over.In this article, I will use a primarily Jungian lens to discuss the psychological mechanisms by which psychotic breaks on psychedelics can occur, the types of insights people can receive during such a trip, and the impact it can have on people’s lives as a result.
Lowering of the Threshold of Consciousness
In his book, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley referred to the brain as a “reducing valve”. He argued that, instead of viewing reality in its full totality, the brain selectively filters out parts of reality that it does not find salient. Without this filtering mechanism, our senses would become too bombarded with stimuli, and we would struggle to cope.
A more modern, neuroscientific view of this phenomenon would consider the role that the RAS (Reticular Activating System, a network of nerve pathways in the brainstem) plays in this “reducing” function. Through the unconscious mechanism of “value tagging”, the RAS could be likened to a bloodhound that is always “on”, always scanning for things in the environment that are salient to it at that moment in time. The classic example of the RAS in action is having just bought a new car and then seeing it everywhere you go. It’s not that the car suddenly became more ubiquitous; it’s just that your brain now finds this piece of information more salient, and therefore is on the lookout for it.
Whilst the example of the car is quite twee, this same phenomenon of the selective filtering of information also occurs in more important aspects of life. For example, the brain can uphold a barrier that separates what you have experienced in the past from what it allows to rise into consciousness, as a protective mechanism, if that information is too much for the conscious mind to handle. Through the ingestion of psychedelics, however, the strength of this protective barrier can diminish. This is likely due to their ability to reduce function in the Default Mode Network part of the brain, and a consequence of this can be that information that was stored in the unconscious mind can rise up into the conscious mind.
Personal Unconscious
Jung described the personal unconscious as the part of the unconscious mind that stores forgotten memories, repressed experiences, and personal emotions specific to an individual’s life. We do not have conscious access to the personal unconscious; however, it still significantly influences our lives through our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The psyche employs psychological defences such as repression and denial to keep painful or inconvenient truths at bay; however, when the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious is made more permeable via the ingestion of psychedelics, these inconvenient truths can rise into consciousness.
Collective Unconscious
However, it’s not only the contents of the personal unconscious that psychedelics have the power to bring into consciousness. According to Jung’s conception of the psyche, they also have the power to uncover the contents of the collective unconscious.
He described the collective unconscious as a deep layer of the unconscious mind that is not shaped by personal experience or an individual’s life history, but instead consists of shared, universal elements that are common to all humans. Jung proposed that this layer of the unconscious contains archetypes, which are primordial, inherited patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour that shape human experience. Jung described it as a collective psychic reservoir that everyone taps into, albeit unconsciously. It is very mythic in nature and is the reason why similar symbols and motifs appear across different cultures, even those that have never interacted with one another.
Sometimes, the lowering of the thresholds of consciousness can occur so suddenly on psychedelics that the onrush of unconscious content, both personal and archetypal, can be likened to the violent eruption of a volcano or the opening of the floodgates of a dam. If the ego is not well developed enough to hold all the incoming content, the psychedelic experience can veer off into the realm of psychosis as it gets swallowed up and engulfed by all the archetypal energies coming into consciousness. This is what Jung meant when he wrote that archetypes:
live in a world quite different from the world outside … No wonder their nature is strange, so strange that their irruption into consciousness often amounts to a psychosis. They undoubtedly belong to the material that comes to light in schizophrenia.
The Danger of “Seeing Too Clearly” on the Personal Level
If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can…successfully…repress, displace, deny, rationalise, dramatise himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes…from painful truth…Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at the point of seeing through the deception of the world of sense, the falsity of reality. He suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living and wholesome but in the refusal of these mechanisms which is just what robs him of the illusions important for living…he is much nearer to the actual truth psychologically than the others and it is just that from which he suffers. — Otto Rank
Coming into contact with the truth of what has been hidden from the conscious mind by the unconscious can be both traumatic and result in ontological shock. Ontological shock is the term used to describe the intense psychological and emotional response a person experiences when their fundamental understanding of reality is suddenly and profoundly challenged.It is a well-known phenomenon for psychedelics to confer users with the capacity to “perceive beyond the surface” of things. For example, they can bolster the ability to detect the disparity between who someone projects themselves to be vs. who they actually are. They can allow people to see beyond the persona, the social mask that everyone wears, and feel more in tune with other people’s thoughts, emotions, and motives, etc.
This is what Stephanie Brinkerhoff experienced on mushrooms. She grew up devoutly Mormon, and after a single 1g trip, said her discernment was permanently heightened. Post-trip, she could feel when something felt off, whereas before, due to the controlling and autocratic way she had been raised, she had lost touch with that aspect of her intuition. She said that after the trip, in reference to the Mormon Church, “it was blaringly obvious that they are manipulating everyone, and I couldn’t see it before, because everything is masked as love, and then all of a sudden I could feel the disconnect”. She said the mushrooms gave her an experience of being able to discern “this is what’s true and real, and this is what’s not” – an experience viewed through a Jungian lens as connecting to the “Self”.
Whilst for Stephanie the initial trip itself was pleasant, she described the ensuing months as “incredibly traumatic” and that the experience had “exploded her life”. Within 4 months, she was no longer Mormon or married. She stated that somewhere in the back of her mind, she had doubts about her relationship that she would push away, due to the inconvenience of them. It’s not unfair to assume this may have been true of her faith, too. It’s also not unfair to assume that had she taken a much higher dose, the trip itself could have also been traumatic.As discussed, when the thresholds of consciousness are lowered, all the psychic material that has been kept hidden by the unconscious can come roaring to the surface. This can manifest as showing users the nature of their relationships in a new/more truthful light, as it did for Stephanie.
Psychedelics have the power to show users how people in their life operate so strongly from their persona, or a place of falsehood, that it can leave them questioning how much they actually really know that person.
Furthermore, the heightened ability to see through people’s false smiles, overcompensatory confidence, and buried shame causes a lot of tumult for both parties. Seeing through a person’s persona is an incredibly uncomfortable experience for the person trying to project a certain image of themselves. It can result in them engaging in what Jung refers to as “shadow projection” – a defence mechanism where the discomfort getting aroused in a person is externalised and projected onto the other. It is an unconscious attempt not to confront the uncomfortable reality getting stirred up within them as a result of being seen through. As Jung put it: “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls”. An increased capacity to see through people’s projections almost turns you into a mirror, and if you choose not to feed into the image a person is trying to project, they can go as far as actually hating you for it. This is because they need that image to be upheld in the eyes of others so they can maintain the image of themselves as being acceptable and therefore feel psychologically “okay”. When their persona is challenged, it unconsciously forces them to confront disowned aspects of themselves, parts of themselves they wished did not exist, which is inherently psychologically destabilising. It’s obvious to see how choosing not to feed into people’s projections can be uncomfortable for the person doing the seeing, due to others feeling threatened by them. Unsurprisingly, this was something Stephanie faced when revealing what she had learnt to her Mormon community. Conversely, however, people can also be drawn to such a person, which can also be destabilising if it starts happening suddenly. On an unconscious level, some people are drawn to those who see through the social facade and choose to no longer interact with it. A part of themselves also longs for liberation from the fakeness of it all, but lacks the strength to do so, and so a shadow projection occurs, but now in a positive direction. George Leonard's concept of homeostasis, as described in his book Mastery, refers to the natural tendency of individuals and systems (like our bodies, habits, and even social environments) to resist change and maintain the status quo. As such, a significant change in any direction (both positive and negative reactions) can be destabilising if it deviates too far outside of what a person is used to.
The destabilisation is further compounded by the fact that if a person has a greater capacity to see through people’s projections, then it means they also have a greater capacity to see the pain that resides underneath that projection. They may find themselves permanently more attuned to the energy of a room or the negative emotional states of others and may feel as though they actually take on the burden of that pain. This can be a huge source of burnout and compassion fatigue.
Overall, choosing to no longer adhere to the social facade is a very difficult position to be in. Once a person has seen what they have seen, they can’t unsee it. Stephanie can’t unsee what she saw about Mormonism, the foundation upon which her life was built. Newfound ways of perceiving the integrity of society following psychedelic trips can leave people feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place – too attached to truth and authenticity to be able to go back to living in delusion, but still needing to navigate the reality of personal relationships and jobs which exist in an environment still deeply entrenched in the social facade.
The Danger of “Seeing too Clearly” on the Collective Level
So far, I have discussed the dangers of “seeing too clearly” mainly on the personal level. However, this same phenomenon can also occur on the greater, collective level. In the way that psychedelics have the ability to uncover inconvenient truths about the nature of a person’s personal relationships, they also have the ability to do the same with regard to the nature of a person’s relationship to society. They can lead to the sobering realisation that the personal forms the foundations of the collective, and if so many aspects of the personal are fractured, then so too must be the collective.
They can allow a person to see through the illusion of integrity and competence that many people project onto the institutions that hold great sway over their lives. When the realisation that many institutions which make up society may have feet of clay and be built upon foundations of sand, it can invoke a crushing sense of despair as the illusions of control and safety dissolve away. The revelation of the precariousness of the threads that bind the fabric of society together, for the unprepared mind, can hit strongly enough to provoke a profound sense of nihilism at the inauthenticity and fragility of the society in which they live.
Ultimately, psychedelics can lay bare the truth behind Terence McKenna’s assertion that “culture is not your friend”. That culture can, instead, oftentimes function as a mechanism of control that stifles both individual and collective growth. What we call “culture” may actually be little more than a fabricated illusion that we all unconsciously subscribe to. Most importantly, beneath it all lies the realisation of the profound disconnection from the natural world our primitive DNA is built for and still expects, which is at the root of so much of the mental and physical unwellness that is rife in Western society.
Living in Truth
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. – Jiddu Krishnamurti
When such truths are revealed to a person, they are inevitably forced to analyse their values and belief systems about the world, and see whether they fit in with the values and beliefs of the culture that surrounds them. Usually, the answer is “no”, and this is inherently psychologically destabilising, as it was for Stephanie. Upon this realisation, the person must embark upon a journey of living authentically in a society where doing so can come with many consequences.However, living inauthentically can also come with its own host of risks. In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware documented that the number one regret of the dying was that they wished they’d “had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”. Likewise, regret number three was “I wish I had had the courage to express my feelings”. In a similar vein, in his book When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté (who also worked in palliative care) argued that when people habitually suppress their emotions, the body "says no" in the form of disease such as autoimmune disorders, cancer, and other conditions. So yes, whilst going against the cultural zeitgeist and predominant grain of society can be very frightening, so too can be the consequences of not doing so. It can actually be likened to a form of the “Hero’s Journey”. In the next article, I will discuss in depth how psychotic breaks on psychedelics are actually an inner form of the Hero’s Journey and the psyche's attempt at a move towards psychic wholeness and “individuation”.
“It is not for nothing that our age cries out for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the grip of the collective psychosis and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in extricating himself from the fatal identity with the group psyche.” – Jung