Join us at UT Social Work for an important and free lecture from the Sue Fairbanks Psychoanalytic Academy featuring Kevin Barrett, LCSW, a psychoanalyst from Chicago, Illinois.

Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists value the depth and ongoing nature of therapeutic work, understanding change as emerging gradually through the examination of unconscious processes, transference, and resistance. Psychedelic therapies, by contrast, are frequently promoted for their potential to catalyze rapid transformation. Yet, the relationship between psychedelic experience and psychoanalytic process may be more generative than it first appears. Both share a deep interest in the unconscious and in making previously inaccessible material available to conscious reflection. Psychedelic states may, in certain cases, lower defensive structures in ways that open new avenues for analytic exploration. This talk examines the use of ketamine-assisted therapy within the context of a long-term analytic treatment, exploring the clinical, theoretical, and ethical questions that arise when these two treatments intersect.

At the conclusion of this lecture, participants will be able to:

1. Identify clinical and theoretical questions that arise when integrating psychedelic-assisted therapies, such as ketamine, into psychoanalytic treatment.

2. Explain how psychedelic experiences and psychoanalytic processes may complement each other in making unconscious material accessible for therapeutic exploration.

3. Compare neuroscientific models of the brain with psychoanalytic understandings of repetition and working through.