What really happens during a Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy session? Clients who have worked with a compassionately curious psychotherapist remember special moments of authentic, person-to-person connection with the therapist, moments that altered their sense of themselves. They tend not to recall specific interpretations but rather a feeling of knowing themselves while, at the same time, being known by their therapist. This is what Lawrence G. Fischman describes in his insightful paper Knowing and being known: Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy and the sense of authenticity.
In Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, something similar happens between you and your therapist. You experience a special way of being with another that allows you to know yourself at the same time you’re feeling known by the trusted other.
Some of us may not have been as fortunate as the beautiful baby girl responding to her tender, compassionate mother in Ed Tronick’s Still Face Video. The most moving moments in this video are when we witness how joyful the young mother is as she responds to her child. The baby girl, being seen and known in these ways by her mother, will eventually become the ways in which she feels and knows herself.
The same thing happens between the pediatrician, Donald Winnicott, and the Piggle, a delightful toddler playing with toys in Winnicott’s playroom. See my paper on Pediatrician Donald Winnicott’s Work with the Piggle. The pleasure the Piggle sees in Winnicott’s eyes as he watches her play with the toys will eventually become the pleasure she feels in being her true self.
For those of us not as fortunate as the baby girl cooing and giggling from the loving attention of her mother in Tronick’s video or the Piggle gleefully playing with her toys in Winnicott’s playroom, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) with a compassionately curious therapist can make a crucial difference. A therapist who has learned about you and can see and know who you are in ways you don’t know yourself. A therapist who has completed a detailed genogram or family tree that identifies your parents, siblings, grandparents, extended family members, and your feelings about them. Above all, a therapist who can see and reflect back to you who you really are.
