Drug Abuse

Three: Experiencing the Body and Body Image

Throughout the psychedelic experience the subject from time to time is concerned in a remarkable variety of ways with his body. In the earliest stages of the session the awareness of the body can involve mainly the presence of disagreeable and sometimes alarming physical symptoms. This is particularly the case when the substance ingested is peyote and some of the physical symptoms are direct reactions to the toxicity of the alkaloids. In the case of LSD-25, where the symptoms are psychogenic or emotionally based, the discomfort is usually comparatively mild and may go almost unnoticed.

With peyote any of a cluster of distressing symptoms appear as the drug takes effect. These may persist from around thirty minutes to one or two hours or even longer. The best known and most troublesome of the peyote symptoms is nausea, often with vomiting. However, the nausea may be reduced and vomiting avoided in many cases with the aid of such a drug as Dramamine.

Other frequently encountered symptoms are feelings of being too hot or too cold, excessive salivation or dryness of the mouth, and dizziness—all possibly attributable to disturbances of autonomic functioning.

Subjects complain, too, in some cases, about difficulty breathing, stiff neck, tremor, headache, pressure around the head, or pains in the vicinity of the heart with consequent fears of heart attack, say, or suffocation. 'There is very often a feeling that the body's surface has been mildly anesthetized, with the flesh becoming "rubbery," as it is frequently described.

Many researchers agree that most of the unpleasant physical symp-toms occur more often and are felt more keenly in a medical setting and with those subjects who are anxious or expect that symptoms will ap-pear. That the LSD and some of the peyote symptoms are nonexistent or much less severe in the case of experienced subjects reinforces the belief that the symptoms are very largely psychogenic.

Disturbing physical symptoms tend to disappe,ar or be readily man-ageable after the first hour or two of the session, when the subject has had time to gain confidence in his ability to handle the novel situation. These distressing symptoms at the outset have led to the oft-repeated observation that with these substances, and unlike alcohol, the "hang-over" comes at the beginning instead of after the intoxication.

It is usually only after the passing of the more unpleasant physical symptoms that the subject experiences those drug-state awarenesses of the body and body image which are the main concem of this chapter. 'These altered awarenesses are extremely diverse and may be entertaining, instructive, frightening, and even therapeutic. 'They may occur sporadi-cally or more or less continuously throughout the remainder of the ses-sion.

The subject may, for example, experience slight or drastic changes in the size, configuration, substance, weight and other attributes con-tributing to definition of the body. He may seem to himself to assume the form of some animal or even some inanimate object; and he may be reduced to a sub-atomic particle or expanded to the proportions of a galaxy. He may experience his body's dissolution and the sense of hav-ing no body at all—the so-called somatopsychic depersonalization.

Some of the changes in body awareness resemble similar experi-ences reported by psychotic individuals. However, considerably differ-ent are the responses made to the changes by psychedelic subjects on the one hand and psychotics on the other. It might be added that the drug-induced changes also resemble those experienced by hypnotic sub-jects, practitioners of yoga and spiritual disciplines, mystics, ascetics, occultists, spiritualists, and a whole host of other persons who cannot be reasonably branded as in every case insane.

The altered avvarenesses induced by the drugs may involve the whole body or a part or parts of the body. Of considerable therapeutic import, not only may a normal body image be distorted, but a previ-ously (pre-drug) distorted body image may become normalized.

Recognition of the altered state of the body or body image comes to the subject in various ways. He observes the altered image in a mirror; he has an altered "feeling" of his body's contours; he looks at some part of his body—say, a hand—and observes an apparent transforma-tion; he "feels" that his body is heavier or lighter, has greater or lesser density, and so on. There is also an "internal awareness" of the bodily functions, particularly of the flow of blood through the veins, the receiv-ing and transmitting operations of the nervous system, and of the activities of the brain.

In addition to changes in the avvareness of the body as a physical entity with a certain size, shape, color, organs and other components and attributes, there may be altered attitudes towards the body or emer-gence into consciousness of attitudes presumably not new but previously not conscious. 'These attitudes may be directed toward either the normal or the altered body or body image.

Attitudes toward the own body commonly verbalized by subjects are numerous. Among the more typical are the following, one or several of which may be expressed from time to time by a subject during the course of one session:

'The body is variously regarded by the subject as an instrument or tool, an operated vehicle, a plaything, an encumbrance, a source of pain and pleasure, a regrettable necessity, a source of wonder, a source of contempt, as the "temple of the spirit" on the one hand, or as a "mere machine" on the other. The body may be thought of as a prison or a trap; as a traitorous agglomeration of imperfectly operating parts (not uncommon when there is chronic illness or sexual malfunctioning); as interactive and co-operative with, or as dominating or dominated by the mind. Keen awareness followed by articulation and analysis of these attitudes can lead to a coming to terms with the body and a strengthen-ing new feeling of at-homeness in the body.

The altered body awarenesses result from a variety of triggering factors: mood, ideation, perception of various external stimuli, along with inferred unconscious factors. For example, a subject may experience his body as abnormally heavy because he is depressed, because he has begun to think of himself as being too fat, or because he is "think-ing weighty thoughts"—in this last case, the verbalization "weighty" being applied first to the thoughts and then to the body; or, as some-times happens, only to the head which "contains" the "weighty thoughts." The heaviness associated with depression is also sometimes the product of a verbalization, as when the subject thinks of himself as "burdened with grief" or "weighted down by sorrows."

Should a subject believe that his substance has been altered so that, for instance, he seems made of glass, the guide's probing may uncover the cause of this transmutation in the subject's feeling that his thoughts are transparent to the guide. Or it might derive from the subject's feeling of fragility; from his having "become" some nearby glass object; or from, as one subject put it, his sudden recognition of himself as being "a pretty cold and slippery sort of fellow."

A subject may experience herself as beautiful or ugly in terms of what she conceives to be the impression she has made upon the guide; as a consequence of anxiety or euphoria; or as a response to a recol-lected estimation of her appearance made by some other person at some time in the near or even the very distant past.

The triggers producing the altered body awarenesses—some of them traceable, some of them not—along with the subject's responses to the changes, will be considered in greater detail in the following survey of some of the more typical varieties of experience of the body and body image within the context of the psychedelic state.

A Taste of Wonderland. Having fallen into one of literature's more celebrated holes, the young Alice tipples from a bottle labeled DRINK ME and soon finds that she has dwindled to a height of ten inches. A little later, she eats some cake and grows to a height of more than nine feet. 'These effects, while they seem awfully curious to Alice, appear modest enough when compared to the contractions and expansions re-ported by some psychedelic voyagers from the depths of their chemi-cally-induced Wonderlands. Time and again these subjects remark of their alternating growths and shrinkages that they feel "just like Alice in Wonderland."

S-1, a twenty-six-year-old male then working as a clerk in a book store, ingested about 80 micrograms of LSD. He experienced only shrinkage, no growth, and reported that he felt himself to be six inches in height. Curiously, the objects in the room underwent a similar and proportionate transformation, while the guide and another observer re-tained their normal dimensions, appearing to him to be giants.

Although an inch taller than the guide, S tilted his head back to look up at her, stating that he felt as David must have felt looking up at Goliath. He also compared himself to Alice after she had taken a drink from the bottle.

At one point S was given a box filled with many miniature Japanese figures. He greeted these with expressions of delight announcing that they were more his own size. Then he clutched the figures to him as if they might help to protect him from the onslaughts of the giants. When the guide approached him he seemed to shrivel and attempted to hide behind one of the figures, which was little more than one inch high Later, he sat "hand in hand" with one of them, the doll's hand being perhaps an eighth of an inch in length. He claimed that he felt the doll's hand as completely filling his own.

Taken outside, S expressed the fear that someone might step on him and crush him. He seemed to take comfort in comparing himself to Stuart Little, the six-inch-high mouse of E.B. White's story, who lived the life of a little human being. If Stuart Little could live a fairly normal life and avoid being stepped on, then so, he thought, might he. But the prospect of crossing the street caused him much anxiety and he re-quested the guide to pick him up and put him into her pocket.

The unusual extended shrinkage experienced by this subject seemed to be a clear reflection of the condition of his ego and his overall life situation: Although gifted and possibly quite brilliant, S had never been able to fulfill his potentials. At the time he was working at a job he considered to be dull and far below his capacities. He felt that his employer and others "looked down on" him; and he was married to an enormously egotistic and narcissistic woman whose behavior intensified his feelings of comparative inadequacy.

While, as noted, in this case the subjeces shrinkage seemed a clear reflection of the state of his ego, in most cases the phenomenon either remains inexplicable or seems to have little relevance to individual problems or psychopathology. Quite a few subjects expect to have this particular experience—because they have heard that it occurs so com-monly in psychedelic sessions. Others compare the "drug world" with Alice's Wonderland and proceed to have their ups and downs on the basis of that analogy. It has not been our observation that, generally speaking, experiences of growth and shrinlcage result from either tran-sient or basic feelings of inferiority or superiority on the part of the subject.

In the case of S-2, a forty-one-year-old male, a drastic reduction of body size was accompanied by an equally remarkable inflation of his already considerable ego. Dvvindling to "micro-nuclear" proportions, he first reported his "atomized" state, then grandly announced: "I am the nuclear image of eternity. . . . I am the original stuff. All universes find their pattern in my being for I am the cosmic infinitesimal." Looking at the guide in a patronizing way, he said, "You are merely an aggregate of me. I am the source, the fountain, the stuff before stuff. Ahhhh it is glorious . . . glorious to be alive here . . . here with Me in Micro-infinity." At that moment the sun came through the window, casting its rays on S, who stretched luxuriously and declaimed, "Ahhhh, you see. A wave-length shower!"

An hour or so later this same subject, body size now normalized, seemed to regard himself as the Godhead or source of creation. The guide noticed him grandly flinging out his arms and inquired what he was doing, to which S replied: "Creating universes . . . making suns . . . Can't you see? With a flick of my wrist a new cosmos begins. Not that I have to [make an effort]. As anyone can see new worlds are bursting from me all the time." He pointed to the "whirling radiance" which, he said, he could see enamating from all over his body. "A while back I was just the essence of everything. Now I am also the existence." And he returned to flinging out stars and planets.

Similar typical "macrocosmic" statements from subjects take the form of "I am Everything . . . It is Me . . . I am It . . . I Am the Universe ... 'The Universe and I are One .. . We are the same . .. It is One . . . One is All . . . I am the It, the One, the All." And so on.

One theory has it that the psychedelic drugs tend to caricature the personality traits of the subjects. In the case of S-2, then, it might be supposed that his feelings of grandiosity were simply an exaggeration of his normal egotism. But why the simultaneous shrinkage of his body in the initial instance (when a great many other subjects, claiming similar omnipotence, assume the proportions of universes, galaxies, etc.)? We could arrive at no satisfactory explanation for this apparent contradic-tion.

With regard to this, we might add that we have met with numerous instances of persons becoming galaxies, sometimes at the suggestion of the guide. Being a galaxy is invariably described as "very hard work." In two of these cases the subjects described themselves as creating new matter and new suns from the "galactic center" and the "galactic nu-cleus." 'This hypothesis for the creation of matter and of suns has been recently advanced by leading astrophysicists.

S-3, a twenty-nine-year-old housewife, dwindled to molecular pro-portions and said she was afraid of falling through the "vast spaces between the atoms. You know what it all is out there? It's mostly spacer When she walked across the floor she insisted on clinging to the arm of the guide, lest she fall through these spaces. When the guide suggested that the arm she was clutching was also composed of atoms whirling about in a vast emptiness, the subject simply ignored the paradox.

Occasionally, body shrinkage is encountered as an aspect of regres-sion to an infantile or even fetal state. With fetalization, there then may occur an experience of rebirth. In a few cases, rebirth is followed by a condensed revivification of the subject's life, the body being experienced as passing through the various stages of growth and development until the subject regains his normal body image at the present point in time. We are familiar with one such case, not our own, where an economist in his mid-thirties regressed to an infantile state. He tore off his clothing and defecated. Then he tried to "get into the womb" of his girl friend, who was an observer at the session. He became rather violent in this endeavor and had to be forcibly restrained. He then began to sob, voided some more feces, and seemed to be unable to comprehend the language of either his girl friend or the physician-guide. Finally, an antidote—in this case Thorazine—had to be administered. In the great majority of cases, however, the experience of rebirth leaves the subject relaxed, tranquil, and happy, and may be a means by which the "re-born" subject "leaves behind" him various of his problems.

S-4, a thirty-five-year-old male, utilized a part of his session to hold a "conversation with God." During this conversation, he experienced "an intense awareness of God's presence." At the same time, he felt his body becoming elongated and angular, an El Greco-like figure with features ascetic and priestly. He estimated the increase in his height as from five to seven inches and reported, as many other subjects have done, that his perception of the room was that normal for a person of the height he seemed to be. In these cases, when the effects of the drug have worn off, the subject may be asked to ascend a ladder and stand on the rung that would enable him to look down from about the same height as he had seemed to look down from when his stature was increased. These subjects insist that they then perceive the room as it was perceived in the body distortion situation.

S-5, another male in his mid-thirties, became a giant and, like Alice, was afraid that the room would be unable to contain him. S feared that his expanding body might crush the guide's body, and solicitously urged that the guide leave the room. Then, however, S chuckled and remarked that "Of course, I'm not really all that big, I just seem to be growing, and I know that it'4 the drug affecting my mind in some way."

This experience lasted only a few minutes, but during it S described imaging himself as engaged in an awesome gigantomachia with other beings of his own size. In this war of giants, he was "very ancient" and belonged to "a breed of giants that walked the earth long ago." While experiencing his vision he stood with eyes dosed and arms folded, face serene, and voice calm. 'The giants, he said, wore caveman-like garments fashioned from the skins of animals, possibly mastodons; and they fought with huge gnarled clubs and with their hands in a strange style of wrestling. Once S picked up another giant and hurled him over the edge of a precipice. S expressed uncertainty as to "whether my people are fighting among themselves, or we have been attacked by a hostile clan." He thought the scene of the conflict was probably Ireland dr Scotland, though it might have been to the south in the British Isles, or possibly someplace in Europe. He could not fix the incident in time, explaining "We had no calendar and thought only in terms of night and day, the waxing and waning of the moon, the changes in vegetation, and the seasons." The gigantomachia was rather quickly followed by a vi-sion of "exquisitely sculpted swans, made of something like ivory and mechanically propelled across a deep blue lagoon that is flecked with gold by the sunlight " Then S found himself restored to normal size.

'The experiences of growth, while they sometimes give a feeling of physical strength and self-confidence, are never as dramatic as the shrinkage and seem to be of comparatively slight psychological interest and importance. Subjects find them entertaining, but rarely in any way significant or productive of anxiety or other strong emotional responses. We are speaking here of experiences of bodily expansion, not of the macrocosmic experience of being a universe, which may yield an intense euphoria or transient feelings of omnipotence. Again, a familiarity with Alice in Wonderland along with expectancies based on knowledge of the previous experiences of others often provide a sufficient explanation for what occurs.

Interestingly, the body does not gradually grow or expand into the macrocosmic state; neither does it dwindle away to nothing to permit the having-no-body experience. These conditions of non (physical)- being and ultimate, total, or plenary being, are preceded by the dissolution of the human body or, in the latter instance, sometimes by a kind of explosion into the macrocosmic state. Alice's fear that she might go out altogether, "like a candle," has never been fulfilled in the experience of our subjects—perhaps because it didn't happen to Alice?

In the case of growth and shrinkage, as with a good many other experiences reported by the psychedelic subjects, it is always difficult or impossible to separate the consciously fabricated events from those occurring on some other level. A subject may, for just a few moments, seem to himself to have dwindled to miniscule stature and then go on for quite a while afterwards having fun inventing adventures for this miniscule body although he has long since ceased to experience his body as actually being the size described. This temptation to "make a good story" seems one to which a great many persons fall prey, despite their wish to make an honest contribution to the guide's research. True, even such persistent fantasies may prove instructive in some sense; but they are less instnictive than are the authentic body image distortions.

Being Non-Human. Transformations into animal forms, becoming inanimate objects or "pure energy," and dissolution into the no-body state are experiences subjects find entertaining, but which they also believe provide them with helpful insights and contribute to their self-understanding and education generally. In the case of the psychothera-pist these experiences, which often may be induced by suggestion, are of great potential value. The experiences also may be instructive to such persons as anthropologists studying the animal metamorphosis rites of preliterate peoples; and, indeed, to almost anyone concerned with the study of human behavior, culture and customs. In this chapter we can do little more than hint at the barely tapped wealth of possibilities afforded in this area by the psychedelic drugs.

Of the metamorphoses into animal forms, one of the most common is the chicken-in-the-egg transformation encountered as one variety of the experience of rebirth. Here the subject becomes a baby chick, breaks out of the egg, and typically beholds a fresh "new world" all around him. He then rather quickly resumes his human form, and will often report that he is seeing this world "with the eyes of a child." Everything looks new and fresh and objects and persons are perceived, in one subject's words, "as a child must perceive them, unblinkered by convention, his vision not yet limited and distorted by conditioning."

S-6, a thirty-seven-year-old anthropologist and author, had a long-standing interest in animal metamorphosis rites as practiced in various parts of Africa and the Caribbean. After several LSD sessions with various guides, he managed to obtain about 500 micrograms and took the LSD in the privacy of his apartment with no one else present. He experienced transformations into goat and lion forms, but the most impressive of his changes involved becoming a tiger:

"I had obtained some appropriate ritual music and lay down and soon became totally absorbed in the recording. I expected (or hoped) that the metamorphosis would take place, but my expectancy was surely no greater than that of those who participate in these rites.

"The first phase of my experience was on the human level. As I managed to scribble, before again abandoning myself (appropriate term!) to the recording, this was my first authentic experience of the orgiastic. I was totally there, totally a participant, and what I partici-pated in was a frenzied dionysiac union with a multiplicity of others: the forging of a single will or emotional state, I cannot say which, but perhaps a will to yield utterly to a wild, animalistic sensuality and emotional outpouring—an ecstacy in which particular bodies were abandoned for a single body constituted of us all, a body writhing as if in the throes of an almost unbearable onslaught of sensuality.

"I have no idea how much time elapsed—surely not more than ten or twenty minutes as the clock would measure it—before I became conscious of myself moving across the floor of the apartment, moving as best I can recall by propelling myself along on my knees with my flattened palms also pressed against the floor. At about this same instant I found myself before a full-length mirror and, looking into it, was confronted by a huge, magnificent specimen of a tiger1 Simultaneous, I think, with my perception of this image I became aware of my tiger's body, of emotions that seemed to saturate my being, and of a narrow or compressed kind of consciousness that focused only upon what was being perceived and upon the emotional state on the one hand and basic physical sensations on the other. I was in this body, and felt this body, as I never have been in or felt my own.

"Yet even with what seemed my complete immersion in my tiger-ness, I did retain some infinitesimal human awareness—as if some minute segment of myself continued to stand guard over this strange event and would not perrnit me to escape entirely from my human self. I seem to recall a kind of pull back toward the human condition exerted by this fragment and that I resisted the pull with all the force at my command.

"Confronting the image in the mirror, I knew and yet did not know that this image was my own (although, oddly, it seemed to me later that there was, in the face of this tiger, something of my face). I reacted to the image, partly anyhow, as if it might be another tiger with whom I had come unexpectedly face to face. Yet something in me questioned the reality of the image, and I recall my bafflement when I ran my claws across the glass and touched the hard, fiat surface. All the while I was making spitting and snarling noises and my muscles were tensed in readiness for combat. Finally, I turned away from the mirror and padded restlessly around the apartment, still making those sounds that somehow indicated to me bafflement and rage.

"God knows how much anthropomorphizing I was doing at the time, or how much the experience has been distorted in the attempt to recollect it. But it seems to me I looked at the room with incomprehen-sion and a sense that this environment was alien and not at all where I belonged.

"Still later, how I got there I haven't the slightest notion, I was locked up in a cage in some zoo. It seems that I paced interminably up and down within the barred enclosure, looking out with a kind of flat-tened vision at people like paper cutouts who stood pe,ering into my cage.

"The retum to a human consciousness was by gradations, but fairly rapid, bringing with it a kind of regret. I hadn't been, if one may put it that way, very happy as a tiger; and yet, in some way I won't try to define, I felt that the tiger represented some valid and essential aspect of what or who I am.

"My return to being a person seems to have occurred while I slowly got up off all fours and very slowly straightened my body until I was standing erect. Then I went over to my desk and wrote down a para-graph that, however bizarre sounding, does have, I believe, its grain of validity and meaningfulness for me:

" 'I am a tiger who has learned to tum himself into a man; but the tiger still spends more time as a tiger, emotionally at any rate, than as a man. 'The tiger will have to become more of a man and less of a tiger if he wants to fulfill his human destiny and realize happiness.'
"Reflecting upon my experiences in the zoo, I jotted down a few other memories and words of wisdom for posterity:

" 'The lion is as strong as the tiger and is less the victim of rage and fear. Therefore he, not the tiger, is the King of the Beasts despite his lesser physical beauty. It is his lack of anxiety or lesser anxiety that makes him regal and the proper claimant to his title.

" `The tiger, in the cage, gives always the sense of being imprisoned.

He never ceases to rage against his imprisonment and this passion for freedom invests him with, or contributes to, his dignity. But the lion, somehow, seems much less a prisoner. It is not that he has, like certain other creatures, placidly accepted being caged. Instead, he has managed somehow to transcend the fact of his captivity, and this the (more feline) tiger can never do.'

"Those who have witnessed the transformation rites in such places as Haiti and Rhodesia say that the person who believes himself trans-formed into a certain animal takes on the aspect of that animal. For various seemingly sound reasons this perception by the spectator does not seem to be exclusively the end-product of suggestion and whatever responses are induced by the ritual. Would I have appeared to an ob-server to resemble in any way a tiger? Somehow I think the answer to that is 'Yes.' But probably, I now feel obliged to add, I would only have looked like a silly anthropologist, 'out of his skull' on hallucinogens, foolishly crawling around on the floor and making idiotic noises.

"Looking back from the perspective of several days, I have a few additional words to say. I now seem to have a recollection of a dance in which I participated dressed, like the others, in a tiger skin. Whether this is an afterthought, I can't say with any certainty. The final (for now) term I would apply to the experience is enriching. I am too confirmed a skeptic to let myself go beyond that. But I think I wi// suspend my judgment about what occurs at these transformation rites until such time as I have witnessed some of them at first hand and, I hope, have participated actively in them as well as observing."

This experience is much more vivid than any of its kind occurring in our guided sessions. This fact might be attributed to a variety of fac-tors: the subject's knowledge of and interest in transformation rites, as well as his strong wish for the experience and the recording he had available to induce it. In much more typical metamorphoses, at the guide's suggestion subjects have often become bulls in the ring at Knossos or Madrid. They have vigorously pawed the earth, snorted, and one seemed about to charge, but he promptly and amiably responded to the guide's command that he resume his human form.

Other subjects, receiving similar suggestions, do not participate actively with their bodies but recline or sit and experience the transfor-mation and subsequent events only cerebrally. A few of the LSD sub-jects, spontaneously or in response to suggestions, have undergone a kind of series of evolutionary metamorphoses carrying them from protoplasm up to man—then claiming to have experienced all the stages on life's way. Animal transformations are usually regarded by the subjects as a kind of mental game-playing and minimal significance is attached to them. In fact, this kind of shallow or playful reaction, and similar reactions to certain other phenomena, provide a useful tool for the guide who may employ them to divert the subject or lighten his mood.

'The experience of having-no-body is one that psychedelic subjects tend to place in the category of the ineffable. And how much may be said, after all, about a body one doesn't have? Having-no-body may occur within the context of a "mystical experience." As a physical state (or non-state) it represents, as noted, the end-stage of a process of dissolution, the body breaking down into minute particles which dis-sipate or dissolve. The experience tends to be pleasurable, when not mystically rapturous.

"Thingification" or becoming an inanimate object takes various forms and the subject reaches his condition of thingness or object-being by traversing one of a variety of possible psychical routes. In the most common forms of this experience the subject either identifies with and "becomes" some actual object present in the room, or he finds himself transmuted into some imaginary object. When he effects union and oneness with an actual object, he usually does so by fixing (usually spon-taneously, sometimes intentionally) on the object and emphatically merging with it. As object, he retains consciousness but is rarely aware of any incongruity in that fact. It appears to be an as if sort of con-sciousness—the subject unreflectively thinking and feeling as he supposes the particular object would think and feel: he anthropomorphizes the "consciousness" of the object. When the object he "becomes" is an imaginary one, he behaves in an approximately similar way, although in this case he may place himself as object in the actual environment around him or fabricate another environment to contain the imagined object that he has become. In general, but allowing for numerous ex-ceptions, the imaginary object-self is more revealing of the deeper strata of mind; when an actual present object is chosen, it tends to be more revealing of what is in or near the surface of consciousness.

Relatedly, the subject may become an animate but presumably non-conscious object, such as a plant; he may become earth, fire, water, or air; he may become a humanoid object such as a robot or mechanical man;1 and so on.

Since robotization is a fairly well known phenomenon occurring in schizophrenia, it may be well to point out the differences in schizo-phrenic and psychedelic subject response to the experience. With the schizophrenic, robotization is experienced as a painful deprivation of autonomy and terrifying dehumanization. Of six robotized psychedelic (peyote) subjects observed, four found the identification amusing and entertained themselves for a little while by walking and gesturing stiffly, inquiring as to whether they "clanked," their motors sounded all right, or they needed refueling or winding.

One subject said "I don't want to be a robot"—and at once stopped being one. Only in a single case was there any strong negative reac-tion.

S-7, in her late twenties, the wife of a Navy lieutenant, became a mechanical woman—a "metallic automaton." She is a small, attractive woman with an appealingly elfin and otherworldly quality about her. She is "very religious" and takes an avid interest in such things as visitors from outer space and the lighter side of the occult. S reads a great deal, mostly fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction and nonfiction related to her interests. She is a warm, happy person who has excellent relationships with her husband, two small children and friends. She is active in her city's cultural affairs, especially the theater. Any criticism of her by friends is confined to the affectionate observation that she is "a bit of an oddball."

Becoming a mechanical woman, S described herself as reacting with instantaneous and profound aversion "to this thing I have become." She explained that her "only neurosis," with her for as long as she could remember, consisted of a very deep-rooted and almost phobic dislike of machines. She wondered why, since this was so, she should now have become one; and went on to express her strong opposition to such ideas as "a mechanical universe" and "man is nothing but a machine." She was particularly distressed at the thought that "this mechanizing of myself may mean I don't believe what I've always thought I believed. Maybe this is the way my unconscious has of telling me that I am a machine, or that deep down I think I'm one." Further speculations along these lines increased her distress and she resisted the guide's efforts to divert her, insisting, "No, I have to find out what this means." She sat stiffly in her chair and spoke in a monotone quite different from her ordinary way of speaking.

The guide was able to terminate this experience, which lasted ten to fifteen minutes, by smiling and merrily telling the subject, "I know who you are. Why, you're the Tin Woodman of OZ." He then went on to describe the Tin WOodman, Dorothy, and the Scarecrow as they skipped down the famous yellow brick road. As this narration—an appeal to the subject's affinity for fantasy—proceeded, S vvas caught up in the story and identified with the Tin Woodman. Soon, she was hap-pily looking at some flowers in a vase and seemed to have forgotten the experience that distressed her. She enjoyed the remainder of her session but did not have the mystical experience she had hoped for.

Contact with S was maintained for more than one year subsequent to this session. She herself eventually initiated a discussion of what had occurred and remarked that "It was pretty stupid of me, getting so upset. I guess these drugs can turn you into just about anything." There was never any indication of adverse aftereffects of her session.

Such identifications as with earth, fire, or water are explained by some subjects as deriving from mythic and theological sources—the burning bush, pillars of flame, the creation of man from earth or clay, the notion of elemental spirits, to name but a few. But we have also traced the impetus for "being an ocean" to the subliminal perception of a dripping faucet; and "being a holocaust" to the subject's peripheral perception of a candle flickering in a corner of the room.

The subject, as fire, may be concerned with the fire's warmth—or with its capacity to consume. As water, he may think in terms of a primordial life source—or of floods. One subject said: "I am the oceans. I will inundate all. I will obliterate man and all his works. 'These do not deserve to survive." But then he smiled and jokingly complained about "constantly being tickled by fishes."

Subjects who become inanimate objects claim to have gained in-sights of various sorts into the nature of the object. They may say that they know how the object "feels"—and if told that an object doesn't feel at all, will dispute this or say that they know how the object would feel if it could. Subjects appear to enjoy these dialogues; the guide very quickly finds them boring. What may be of importance is why the subject has chosen to identify with this particular substance or form or combination of the two. Psychedelic subjects, when willing to co-operate, provide insights concerning human-object relationships that will be of considerable value in the development of a "psychoanalysis of things."

The Reflected Image. Psychedelic subjects, looking into mirrors, have many interesting and sometimes enlightening experiences. The image reflected in the mirror may be determined by the subject's physi-cal or emotional state or by what he is thinking. 'The mirror image is susceptible to some manipulation by either the subject or the guide and the mirror thus becomes in this context a possible therapeutic instrument.

A subject looking into a mirror may "think" serenity, anguish, rage, joy, sadness, or whatever; and, although his face remains expression-less, the mirror will seem to him to reflect what he is thinking.
The mirror may, without any effort on the part of the subject, seem to him to reflect his anxieties, wishes, or beliefs about himself. Some religiously guilt-ridden subjects and those who think of themselves as daemonic may find a devil or demon peering back at them from the mirror. Subjects with slightly porcine or equine physiognomies have found staring back at them the faces of swine and horses—peyote or LSD + mind maliciously completing the development of what a more charitable nature only hinted at.

S-8, a twenty-three-year-old university instructor, ingested 100 micrograms of LSD and, looking into a mirror, "aged 2,000 years." It was, she said, "a steady progression of aging. I quickly aged through decades until I was a haggard and white-haired seventy, and then the deterioration really set in. Hundreds of years of ruinous decline made their horrid inroads on my face and figure until at the age of 2,000 I was reduced to a wizened, waxened mummy, eyeless, toothless, and brainless."

S says that she has a morbid fear of aging, feeling that "aging is about the worst thing that could happen to one." Further probing of possible causes of this subject's experience elicited the facts that she had read and seen as a child a film version of Rider Haggard's She, and that these had made a powerful impression upon her. Her mirror image experience, she thought, may have been a visualized recall of the similar scene in the novel and film. A few other instances have been observed where a subject visualizes memory material but cannot recognize it as familiar until the material has been dealt with on a verbal level.

Among the drug-induced changes in physiological functioning are changes affecting visual perception, among these dilation of the pupil of the eye. These changes alone produce some mirror image distortions. For example, the face is likely to be seen as blotchy and with the pores seemingly much larger than usual. It is somewhat as if the subject were looking into a magnifying mirror—where few faces ever appear to good advantage. Difficulties in maintaining focus may be experienced, giving the image an unpleasant fluidity. But the psychogenic mirror image distortions are, of course, the more extreme ones.

In our experience every subject who looks into a mirror experiences a certain amount of distortion; and it would be a conservative estimate to say that ninety percent of the subjects experience at least some of the distortions as unpleasant. Such reactions range all the way from a mild displeasure or distaste to strong feelings of fear and revulsion.

Caricaturing oneself and others, face or whole body, is a common-place. This exaggerated emphasis on selected physical characteristics may make a plump man appear to be grotesquely obese, transform a face with semitic features into a Julius Streicher cartoon, and so on. The suggestion in a face of slyness, sensuality, or cruelty may be magnified to rival the creations of a Hieronymus Bosch. The subject is frequently amused by his caricatured perception of someone else; he is rarely similarly amused when the ugly, vicious, or ludicrous countenance re-flected by the mirror is his own.

Perceiving such a travestied version of someone else, the subject will usually say to himself, "This is just the effect of the drug. He doesn't really look anything like that." But, seeing his own distorted image, he wonders, "Am I now seeing myself as I really am? Is my actual character, if not my actual face, being seen?" And: "Are others able to see in me all the time what I now, the veil ripped away, am able to see in myself?"

The guide reassures the subject, who might otherwise go on to develop further pamnoidal ideation, by telling him that this is a very common or universal occurrence among psychedelic subjects. Or the subject may be told that every kind of tendency is latent in all human beings and visualizing a latent tendency under the present conditions in no way implies that it will become overt. Or the guide may remark that a great deal of experience has shown that these distressing images reveal nothing about the person's character but are only symptomatic of a natural mild anxiety he feels in a psychical environment so different from the one that he is used to. Without such help from the guide the subject will in any case soon go on to something else.

Unpleasant mirror image experiences are almost as various as they are frequent, and one wonders why the distortion of the image is so often in the direction of ugliness and emphasis on character deficiencies rather than fulfilling the wishes of most subjects to be beautiful and healthy and virtuous. Certainly there is no overall tendency on the part of the subjects to produce mainly painful phenomena or to engage in self-derogation. Nor, with rare exceptions, do the mirror images seem to be very closely related to the "unconscious body image" as it is hallu-cinated by disturbed hypnotic subjects in psychotherapy.

One hypothesis might be that the visual perception of any kind of distorted self-image creates doubts in the subject conceming his iden-tity; or magnifies doubts already created by some of the other drug effects. These magnified doubts, generating additional subject anxiety, might then cause the reflected image to be distorted in the direction of the ugly image or the image that threatens by suggesting revelation of character faults or repressed perverted or criminal tendencies. But that is only an hypothesis and further investigation is required.

There are also some pleasant experiences to be had with the mirror image. Some subjects report perceiving a succession of comical distor-tions similar to those produced by the image distorting mirrors so popu-lar at amusement parks. Other subjects are able to see themselves, with the aid of a little autosuggestion, as historical personages, film stars, and other public figures. The ability to "think an emotion" and see it reflected in the mirror is a source of entertainment. In a few cases, vvith and vvithout the assistance of the guide, the mirror image has been useful in contributing to self-knowledge and has even provided insights resulting in amelioration or resolution of long-standing problems. To give but a single example:

S-9. Female in her mid-thirties. 175 micrograms LSD. Several hours into her session, S looked into a mirror and saw a distressing caricature of her face.

In fact, this very intelligent and high-strung woman's face normally appeared to be a kind of caricature. 'The cheeks seemed drawn and held in by a continuous muscular effort, and pursed lips contributed to the general impression of a rigid, puritanical personality.

After discussing her appearance and accurately appraising the im-pression she made on others, S indicated a wish that something could be "done about" the face to make it more attractive. She also felt that the face did not accurately express her personality.

The guide suggested to S that she try to work with the mirror image. She should try to fill out the image, not only of the face but of the whole body, which was thin and shapeless. Following the suggestions, S worked successively with various features of the face and then the rest of her body, managing to change the mirror image into something much more to her liking.

'The guide then suggested to S that she take this new mirror image for her own image. She agreed and at once her lips relaxed, giving her a softer and more attractive appearance. She then lay down on a sofa and practiced relaxing her musculature and experiencing her body in terms of the mirror image she had created. S was repeatedly exhorted to continue after the session to practice envisioning the new image and identifying with it, and also to practice the techniques of fractional relaxation taught her by the guide.

S adhered to this regimen and several months later presented a much improved appearance. Her cheeks seemed filled out, her mouth and general expression were relaxed, and even her body appeared to have become somewhat more rounded and less angular.

S always had been a fairly heavy eater, but never had been able to gain weight. Now she did begin, gradually, to gain weight without in-creasing her food intake. She became less high-strung and it seemed as if the muscular relaxation was accompanied by a kind of "metabolic relaxation." Without reducing her overt physical activity, she seemed to be able to "keep" more of her calories and thus to fill out.

When transformations of this kind occur, they seem to have been too easily achieved. But the psychedelic experience provides one con-text—and there are a variety of others—in which such abrupt and dramatic changes in a person's life do sometimes take place or receive their first decisive impetus.

The ordinary ways of looking at one's body are to look at it directly, seeing those parts accessible to inspection, or to look into a mirror or mirrors where larger body areas may be seen at a glance and where some parts of the body may be seen that are not accessible to direct observation.

Direct observation of the body, which cannot of course include observation of one's own face, is rarely if ever as disturbing or as interesting as the mirror image may be.

With direct observation one's own body is seldom rendered more aesthetically delightful by the drug-induced distortions. A subject may perceive the hand or some other part of the body of a loved one or a friend as exquisitely sculpted from ivory or alabaster; but the subject's own hand is much more likely to appear coarse-textured, fattened or shriveled, and crudely made. One wonders if the unpleasant sensations experienced early in the drug session might not partly account for all this implied hostility to the own body and the perceptual revenge wreaked upon it?

Distortions of spatial perception when applied to the body some-times are amusing. A subject may lie on his back and look at his feet—which may seem to be five yards away or just under his chin. Such a distortion may or may not be accompanied by a sense of the body's elongation or foreshortening. An arm may also be perceived as absurdly long or short—so that if the subject relied on the visual evi-dence alone, he would think himself capable of reaching the whole length of the room to pick up some object 20 feet away. But this sort of distortion is almost always accompanied by an intellectual recognition that the perception is a distortion and such a feat therefore impossible.

Some psychedelic subjects "see" their own body by spontaneously or intentionally employing means other than direct observation and looking into reflecting surfaces. Some are able to project an image of their own body on a wall or into a crystal; or they may close their eyes and envision their own body image. The image projected on a wall is usually perceived as "flat," as in a painting; the image in the crystal is seen as dimensional, having depth; the image seen with the eyes closed may be perceived as either flat or dimensional, the subject often ex-pressing uncertainty as to which. A few subjects spontaneously see, or claim to be able to project, an image in space—for example, an image that stands next to them or confronts them and may or may not possess some degree of solidity. One subject claimed to be able to "multiply" himself several times, simultaneously perceiving several images, replicas or doubles of himself that could occupy any position within his field of vision.

'There is also a fairly common experience where the subject seems to himself to project his consciousness away from his body and then is able to see his body as if he were standing off to one side of it or looking down on it from above. A few subjects feel that they are able to leave the "material body" and move about in something like the "astral body" familiar to occultists. This astral body is described as being diaphanous and almost, but not quite, immaterial. It may be composed of "energy," "electrical impulses," and so on. Some identify this astral body vvith an "aura" they earlier had perceived as radiating from them, an "energy force field" surrounding the body. The perception of the aura by psychedelic subjects is very common.

One subject, having silently reclined with eyes closed on a couch for several minutes, sat up and reported himself able to travel in his astral body and to pass through walls and other solid obstacles. He had just been down on the street, he said, and described very vividly what he had seen there. But asked to pass through the wall into the neighboring apartment, vvith which he was not familiar, and to describe its furnishings, he declined. He found the request insulting and said that it impugned his integrity.

'The experience of observing the body as if from a distance is, however, real enough and is common in the drug-state. It occurs in non-drug situations too—with both psychotic and non-psychotic persons—but with the drug subject it ordinarily generates none of the anxiety felt in certain other contexts. The experience may involve a whole series of self-images, the subject looking at his body looking at his 'body looking at his body, and so on. It is the familiar picture within a picture within a picture effect, sometimes achieved by employing a series of mirrors.

Body Alchemy and Other Wonders. The psychedelic subject may "feel" that his body has been altered in a variety of ways. He may feel, for instance, his normally flesh-and-bone body transmuted into some other substance, as if by a psychedelic alchemy. Then he will experience himself as made of wood, of metal, of glass, or whatever.

Experiencing such a transmutation of substance, the subject will, however, continue to regard this body he occupies as his own. To experience one's body as metallic in substance may thus be a thor-oughly different experience from that of robotization previously discussed. That is, the robotized man may become something other than himself: he may be a thing. He has lost his autonomy and must exist in accordance with whatever restrictions govern the existence of what he has become. The "metallized" man, on the other hand, continues to function largely as before. Rarely does being metal (or whatever) inter-fere even with the flexibility of his body. It is simply a feeling as to one's substance—probably impossible to convey to one who has not experi-enced it or at least observed a subject experiencing it.

Any perceptual distortions will be tactile. Picking up an object, the subject may feel as if the contact were that of two hard objects touch-ing. The subject may, if metallized, feel that the surface of the body is colder and slicker, as well as harder than before.

The symbolism of these particular transformations is usually readily accessible. Subject and guide discuss and analyze the significance of the substance and why it was selected by the subject. The transmutation is rarely experienced as unpleasant, but the subsequent analysis proves disturbing in some cases. Substance transmutations not suggested by the guide have occurred in less than five percent of the subjects.

Subjects very frequently experience the body as slightly heavier than usual. This feeling of heaviness may persist through most or all of a session, may be intermittent, or may appear only at the beginning in combination with the other physical symptoms common at that time. Experiencing the body as excessively heavy is infrequent. One subject reported himself unable to get out of his chair, so heavy was his body. He "weighed a ton" and felt as if he were "made of lead"—referring to his weight, not to any change in substance.

Feelings of lightness are often reported. 'The most extreme version of this experience is "weightlessness," which may be accompanied by a feeling that the body has levitated. Weightlessness sometimes precedes or accompanies ego and/or body dissolution and the religious and mys-tical experiences.

S-10, in her fifties, with mystical tendencies, reported her progress toward the weightless condition in the following euphoric terms: "--[subject's name) is no more. The small self has departed. Ohhhhhhh . . . my body is lightening. (Much laughter.) Her body is lightening. Now she is egoless. Now she is weightless. Ohhhhhhhh . I have finally . . . finally come to MYSELF. And I have another body. It is a body of bliss. A pure body of light and eternity. Ohhhhhhh . . ." and so on.

The experience of a "consciousness" localized in some part of the body—say, in a fingertip—is not uncommon. This localized conscious-ness may coexist with the subject's usual consciousness or the usual consciousness may have "shifted its place of residence" to the fingertip. When consciousness is localized in some body part, an unusual increase in that part's sensitivity or responsiveness to stimuli is claimed by the subject.

A subject may "feel" the interior of his body, either experiencing his internal structure and processes as he understands them, or experi-encing them as altered in some way. "Feeling" the "interior landscape" is one variety of the latter. For example, several subjects have felt the inner body as consisting of trees and vines, streams and waterfalls, hills and valleys. One subject could "feel" his "parental heritage," the re-spective maternal and paternal contributions to his "cellular structure." This was a "revolting and grisly" experience. He said that "I knew just what in my body came from my mother and what from my father. I could feel my mother and father in my body and I felt that I knew what my mother's body feels like to my mother and what my father's body feels like to my father. I lost for a little while most of my sense of my body as my own. Experiencing so much woman in my body was especially awful."

Occasionally a previously held abnormal "feeling" about the body, as well as an abnormal image of the body, may spontaneously be nor-malized in the course of a psychedelic session.

S-11, a businesswoman in her forties, had for many years experi-enced her body and her "mind and brain" as being literally "tied up in knots." She could "plainly feel" this knotting, which she felt to be related to her "tenseness." For more than five years she had been familiarizing herself with literature concerning psychedelic drugs and believed that a psychedelic session was "the only means" by which she could free herself from her tensions and the feeling of knottedness. Hers was an extremely unusual experience.

About one hour into her session, when ordinarily the various dis-tressing physical symptoms would be experienced, S began speaking of a "great but wonderful pain . . . my body is becoming unknotted." One by one, as she described it, the knots in her body "untangled." Later, in a second (LSD) session, the knots in her "mind and brain" also be-came "untangled." This second "unknotting," like the first, was expe-rienced as "excruciatingly painful . . . also quite glorious." This relief appears to be permanent. Six months later, S had developed no new knots.

In a written report on her experiences, S describes them in a not-too-detailed but interesting way:

‘`. . . they [the LSD sessions] were essentially instinct and emo-tional level. Also each day since brings something new. In the first experience, the incredible unknotting of my whole body was the out-standing thing. All the fusion of the senses happened too, and I felt whole and full of wonder in nature as I remember feeling as a child. My muscles, nerves, and bones seemed to relax—almost relent—in a way that was infinitely right and to be desired. As you know, there were floods of tears, also right and a 'giving way,' which had to do with grief yet were an impersonal thing as well. The removal of the 'personal' actu-ally made all this physical release possible, I feel. I had no desire—in fact, had a definite antipathy—to disciplined thought of any kind. I simply wanted to be, and flow with the tide. Afterward, my whole body was sore in a delicious way for several days, and I slept as I have not slept since childhood.

"'The second [session] was strangely like the first in that it again involved release and relenting, but this time in my head. 'There was great pain, as though adhesions were being pulled loose, and the pain continued for about twelve hours afterward. I felt no desire to 'cope with' this pain, although, as the LSD wore off, in the late afternoon, it made me almost nauseated. Yet it was good, I knew, and to be wel-comed rather than resisted . . . Thinking was not ruled out this second time. WHAT was thought I cannot say. It was more a matter of letting thoughts come and go where they would. It was at times a conversation, but inner, and not needing to be said. I found it a great comfort to be in the room with my husband, although practically nothing was said. I felt a smoothing of both of us, as though we were flowing side by side in a river ..."

A striking example of normalization of a distorted body image will be given in a subsequent chapter.

Concluding Remarks. The body and body image experiences dealt with in this chapter represent only a small segment of the body phe-nomena encountered in psychedelic sessions. For the most part the materials just considered might be termed the oddities, the exotica, of psychedelic experiencing of the body.

We have been largely concerned, for example, with the body only as it exists for the person himself and outside of other contexts than that of the psychedelic session. Drug effects upon ordinary sense perceptions have been virtually ignored and will be discussed in a future chapter. The body as experienced in a variety of relationships with others and to the world generally will also be discussed in much greater detail in the chapters to come.

In terms of any measure of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual depth or quality, such experiences as Alice-in-Wonderland distortions of size, metamorphoses into animal forms, and observing image distortions in mirrors, would probably not rank very high. This is not to say that such experiences lack value for the subject or fail to provide important data useful not only to the psychotherapist, but also to workers in many other fields and to mankind generally. But there are, as we will see, available to the subject a great range of other experiences—broader, deeper, and qualitatively of a higher order than those presented here.

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