The narratives of love and psychedelics - Katherine Cheung

Katherine Cheung's lecture "The narratives of love and psychedelics" from the Psykedeelit 2023 conference held in Turku, Finland on November 23-24, 2023.
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"Narrative identity, or the idea that the identity of a person has the structure of a narrative, is a popular view amongst accounts of personal identity. The therapeutic effects of psychedelics can be understood through this framework: its benefits may come about through changes in our narrative identity. This idea is preliminarily supported by a qualitative survey done by Amada et al. (2020), which suggested that changes to the narrative self may be crucial to the therapeutic effects of psychedelics.
Just as our identity may be a narrative, the psychedelic experience itself may also have a narrative structure - a psychedelic narrative. This psychedelic narrative has numerous similarities with the narrative structure of love. By drawing upon Pilar Lopez-Cantero’s analysis of love narratives (2023), I claim that psychedelics can be understood as akin to love. Their narrative structures, with its subsequent impacts on our self-understanding and narratives, exhibit significant similarities. I argue that this may have implications for how we treat psychedelics within our society - in particular, countering the trend of medicalization and the utilisation of psychedelics solely for medical purposes."
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