Profs & Points Philadelphia: Ketamine on the Couch

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Ketamine on the Couch,” on how clinicians use a dissociative anesthetic to bring about change at people’s core, with Karen L. Smith, director of Full Living: A Psychotherapy Practice, former instructor at La Salle University and Rosemont College, and author of Prepare Yourself, Your Clients and Your Practice for Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy: A Step by Step Guide.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/ketamine-therapy .]

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is having a moment—so much so that the popularity of therapy using ketamine or other psychedelics can make it look ridiculously trendy or, worse yet, unhinged.

But analytically oriented clinicians use this tool much like dream work—to collect unconscious material, to excavate early relational patterns, and to help people access experiences and parts of themselves that their own defenses had made difficult to reach.

Gain an understanding of how ketamine assists therapy with Karen L. Smith, the author of a well-regarded guide to using psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in outpatient practice and a trainer of clinicians in this area.

She’ll discuss how ketamine-assisted psychotherapy helps people who have already experienced a lot of therapy and already possess knowledge of their inner landscape, but nonetheless have reached a place where they are stuck and not making additional progress. Often in such cases what’s in the way are mind and body defense systems laid down in infancy, before the acquisition of language and memory, which became default mood processing and can block access to a formed thought.

You’ll learn how psychotherapists use ketamine to help clients lower such defense systems, to get past the very stubborn thoughts and body response that get in the way of insights and intention.

Three specific features of ketamine play a role: Being an anesthetic, it offers clients the lived experiences of having a calmer, less defended, safer, regulated nervous system as they explore core themes. As a dissociative, it lets clients simultaneously experience two selves, a “tripper” and an observing ego that becomes stronger through the experience. By being a promoter of neuroplasticity—the hallmark of all the psychedelics—it offers opportunity for new, original thought.

You’ll emerge from the talk knowing much more about why so much attention is focused on this promising new tool in mental health treatment. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3:30 pm. Talk starts at 4:30.)

Image by Canva.