APPENDIX

The appendix presents two pictures painted by a case (R17), the first after his 8th autopsychognosia session with Ketamine, the second after his 13th. R17 belongs to the group of cases who underwent Sessions exclusively with Ketamine during the period 1972 - 1982.

Brief history of R17: male, 27 years' old, Ph.D., researcher, single. R17 asked to undergo autopsychognosia sessions because he wanted to understand why he could not communicate sexually with women.

Of the first painting, R17 has written: Here you see the rape of my mother from which I, her son, was conceived. Here you see the terrible cruelty of my father who felt not the violence of his own penis because he was entombed in stone of blackest ignorance. Mother's womb cried with burning pain and I burned with her even as my spirit first glimmered into being and I knew I was alive. So I inherit the knowledge of cruelty.

The primitive memories of terror, at first wraiths of formless shadow, are now transmuted into images of terrible clarity by the action of conscious knowledge.

My father was a life removed from life. Denials and repressions overlayed the sufferings of his maddened soul like layered stone beneath the sea that conceals the bones of monsters. He chose not to feel at all in order not to feel hurt, and so his life was cast into the same prison with his pain.   But his prison was also his weapon.   He gained his will against my mother by the force of denial, he refused to be human when she craved humanity. And when Mother seemed broken, his penis sought to enter the womb as a conqueror in a mask of stone and death. 15   But in Mother awoke a spirit fierce and bright. She wielded her terrible will as a great sword and smote the darksome phallus at the threshold of her womb.

Father was desperate. He pressed against the womb. The womb yielded not. His blackened, ruined spirit cried for release. It was not given him. Womb against phallus, the opposing forces balanced - for a mere moment beneath the sun of day, for a thousand millenia of night in the womb. Such was the hour of my conception, expanded into ages of pain by the hate of implacable wills.

There is a power in me that dwells in peace, that knows the terror but stands apart and free. Against the horror of my conception, there is memory of great love from Mother's womb-spirit. Love connects son to mother and connects both to earth and heaven which are the womb of life. Shades of memory flit about my being. I feel the womby sea broad and deep who bore me upon her waves beneath the singing wind and moon and stars. I feel the fire in the hearts of giant suns and all around the Deep of fierce etherial blue. An infant in the womb of love is wreathed in heaven eternal.

Under the shadow of unconscious memories from the strife of my conception I have never had orgasm with woman. Mine was a solitary and desolate orgasm which revived the bleeding womb and the tyranny of my father's blackened, petrific phallus. But what I have suffered is so small in comparison to what I will become. In the memory of love I stand beneath the suns of heaven to speak: Love, I lovingly embrace thee, rejection I cast from me.

Of the second painting, R 17 has written: There is a place in my memory where the natural world shines forth in naked splendour. I was borne upon a Deep of sea and stars streaming under the power of vast unseen but felt energies. In the dark between the stars I saw minds and life coalescing from primitive matter. Mother's womb spirit dwells here. I look upon her spiritual abode. In visions, as in the one presented here, she bears herself in the incandescence of the four-bladed star, sign of her origin in sea and suns. The first conscious memory of my infant life is of the evening star in the red sky after sunset.

I believe that consciousness arises from matter and bears the memories of this origin. My mind coalesced inside of Mother who felt her origins in earth and heaven. Her womb felt to me like the ancient Deep because that was in her nature. Such is the love between mother and son.

That woman who shines by the light of this elemental love bears serenity immemorial. The security of her person radiates itself from her very body. Her acceptance is gentle and not craving, but for all that it is yet emphatic because its substance is immemorially great and does not yield to passions less than itself. In my last hour of autopsychognosia I was so blessed as to glimpse the vision of such a woman. Her eyes bore her immemorial love. So you see her here. I will carry with me the memory of her eyes for all the days of my life.

15 Doctor's note: Represented in the painting by the skull.