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The hyperassociative mind: The psychedelic experience and Merleau-Ponty’s
“wild being”
CSABA SZUMMER
1
*, LAJOS HORVÁTH
2
, ATTILA SZABÓ
2,3
, EDE FRECSKA
4
and KRISTÓF ORZÓI
5
1
Department of Social and Intercultural Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Psychology, Károli Gáspár University of the
Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary
2
Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Philosophy, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
3
Department of Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
4
Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
5
Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Psychology, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary
(Received: November 1, 2016; accepted: April 17, 2017)
Purpose: In contemporary phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar has suggested that the new task of phenomenological
research is to analyze the “alternative representational systems”of fantasy. In line with this program, we propose that
psychedelic experience could also be suitable subject to this project subsumed under the wider category of fantasy
activity. The aim of this paper is to show that psychedelic experiences offer a favorable situation to study the
imagination. Method: The paper applies the conceptual framework of the late Merleau-Ponty, developed in The
Visible and the Invisible, using his mescaline analyses which have been elaborated in The Phenomenology of
Perception.Results: We demonstrate that psychedelic visions and emotional states can be discussed within the
Merleau-Pontian framework of “wild world.”From the viewpoint of phenomenology, we suggest that psychedelic
visions represent an ongoing sense-making and Gestalt-formation process in which the role of the elaborative activity
of the subject is crucial. These –often unsettling –visions show the basic volatility and ambiguity of perception and
fantasy, which also sheds light to the hidden schemes of perception, thinking, and emotion of normal consciousness.
Conclusions: Freud claimed that dreams are “the royal road”to the unconscious. In an analogous manner, while
dreams were the primary psychoscope to the unconscious of psychoanalysis, in contemporary phenomenology
psychedelic experiences may show a possible way to an another kind of unconscious, the phenomenological
unconscious. This unconscious comprises the hidden schemes and basic affective emotional attitudes of the knowing
subject.
Keywords: phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, “wild world”, psychedelics
“[:::] under mescalin [:::] the tick of a metronome, in
darkness, is translated as grey patches, [:::] the size of
the patch to the loudness of the tick, and its height to the
pitch of the sound.”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 253)
INTRODUCTION
In philosophy and psychology, there exists a more than a
century-old history of psychedelic self-experiments. Both in
psychology and philosophy, it was James (1882,1902/
2009) who, back in the 1880s, acted as a pioneer when it
came to research into psychedelics (see Tymoczko, 1996).
His interest lay in how psychedelics could potentially
intensify fantasy, especially religious imagination. In the
1920s, psychiatrists and Gestalt psychologists began to
examine how mescaline could affect perception. During
the 1930s, Benjamin (1927–1934/2006) (see Wolin,
1994) and Bloch (1954–1959/1986) tasted hashish, Sartre
(1978) tried mescaline, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty fol-
lowed his path a decade later. Bergson (1896/1999),
Marcuse (1969), and Foucault (1970) also proposed
psychedelics as a reasonable means to expand the limits
of the mind, albeit Bergson never used them (see Sjöstedt-H,
2015). In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James
declares “that our normal waking consciousness [:::] is but
one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted
from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different”(James, 1902/2009,
p. 349) [“I myself made some observations on [:::] nitrous
oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One con-
clusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my
impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of
consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the
* Corresponding author: Csaba Szummer; Department of Social
and Intercultural Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of
Psychology, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in
Hungary, Budapest H-1037, Hungary; Phone: +36 20 9 464 462;
Fax: +36 (1) 430 2349; E-mail: szummercs@upcmail.hu
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use,
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© 2017 The Author(s)
Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017)
DOI: 10.1556/2054.01.2017.006
First published online July 19, 2017
filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of conscious-
ness entirely different”(James, 1902/2009, p. 349)]. But
what are these “entirely different forms of consciousness”
like? And why do they deserve the attention of psychol-
ogists and philosophers? In this paper, we aim to argue that
being under the effect of psychedelics, one can reach a
state of mind, which may be favorable when it comes
to phenomenological research into perception and imagi-
nation. What once were dreams to Freud, today might
be the psychedelic experience to phenomenologists and
psychologists with a taste for phenomenology. In the
past one-and-a-half decade, a new wave of psychedelic
research has begun in philosophy. There is a handful of
researchers analyzing psychedelic experiences using the
frameworks of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (Horváth & Szab´o, 2012;Horváth, Szummer, &
Szabo, 2017;Lundborg, 2012;Shanon, 2001,2002,2003;
Szabo, Horvath, & Szummer, 2014).
THE LIMITS OF PERCEPTION IN NORMAL
WAKING STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The deceptive idea that objects and things are provided in a
fixed and ready way and that perception is a passive
process is not merely due to a false naturalist epistemology
or the naiveté of the normal everyday consciousness.
One has to admit that perception in a normal waking state
of consciousness does resemble the above: stereotypes,
monotone routines confined by rigid categories. Day-
to-day life requires swift and mechanical processing of
information as well as routine-like decision-making
and behavioral answers to different situations. However,
because of this, the original richness of the experience
becomes scarce or even disappears altogether. Thus, per-
ception turns into a resigned act of enumeration of the
finished and already understood things. However, this
finished state of things and the passivity of perception is
–as Merleau-Ponty (1962,1968) puts it –only an illusion.
How could we make our everyday way of perception free
of its self-righteous confidence? Is there a way to unlock
the ever-frozen things from their plenitude and positivity?
With Merleau-Ponty’s words: “[:::] the question: how can
one return from this perception fashioned by culture to the
‘brute’or ‘wild’perception? What does the informing [of
culture] consist in? By what act does one undo it (return to
the phenomenal, to the ‘vertical’world, to lived experi-
ence?)”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968,p.212).Theaimisto
“subject our perception of the world to philosophical
scrutiny,”but we cannot do it “without ceasing to be
identified with that act of positing the world, with that
interest in it which delimits us, without drawing back from
our commitment which is itself thus made to appear as a
spectacle [:::]”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 253). The normal
waking state of consciousness makes this “drawing back
from our commitment”an almost impossible task. Though
there are some ways of observation that could potentially
open up ways to the original openness and potential
richness of the experience, covered and incapacitated by
the routines and sedimented forms of normal waking
consciousness. Psychology and philosophy use at least
four kinds of observational methods and situations. First,
there is the examination of visual perception in Gestalt
psychology; second, we find Freud’s way of using dreams
as a radically different state of consciousness; then there is
the observation of human imagination in a normal waking
state of consciousness or daydreaming in a slightly altered
mental state; last but not least, we have the radically altered
states of consciousness which are induced in a chemical
way using psychedelics.
FOUR WINDOWS TO THE UREMPFINDUNG:
AMBIGUOUS FIGURES, DREAMS,
IMAGINATION, AND PSYCHEDELIC VISIONS
During the beginning of the 1910s phenomenology,
Edmund Husserl’s new philosophy, greatly inspired
Gestalt psychologists. By the time Husserl proposed his
ideas, some of these psychologists already had good
knowledge in philosophy. These experts managed to create
experimental situations that could empirically corroborate
the phenomenology of Husserl. The most spectacular and
promising experiments exploited the visual effects of the
ambiguous figures. These figures are balanced in our visual
perception in a sophisticated way so that perception alter-
nates between two equally “strong”Gestalts. The subject
switches from one Gestalt to the other in 10–20 s intervals,
for instance, one sees a rabbit that is quickly transforming
into a duck. During this experience neither the figure
nor the position of the person changes. The ambiguous
figures, the Müller-Lyer illusion and other special visual
effects in the experiments of Gestalt psychologists, prove
that –in Merleau-Ponty’s words –“the perceived, by its
nature, admits of the ambiguous, the shifting, and is
shaped by its context”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962,p.9).The
experiments of Gestalt psychology greatly affected a
handful of eminent philosophers. Husserl spoke highly of
the works of two Gestalt psychologists, Oswald Külpe and
Karl Bühler. In the 30s and 40s, Wittgenstein and Merleau-
Ponty realized that the ambiguous figures are not some
strange and exotic types of perception but actually shed
light on how perception works; these figures proved that –
just as Husserl proposed earlier –perception determined by
the object is merely illusion. Behind this illusion hides a
vibrant dynamics where the subjective and objective sides
of perception intertwine.
More than one decade before Gestalt psychology
appeared, Freud had already drawn attention to how dreams
could be a very fruitful way of observation for psychology.
The dream, as stated by Merleau-Ponty, is a bodiless
existence “without ‘observation’or rather with an imagi-
nary body without weight”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 262)
[“/:::/ understand the dream starting from the body: as being
in the world (l'êtreau monde) without a body, without
‘observation’or rather with an imaginary body without
weight”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 262)]. The dreamer is
freed from the monotonous tasks of waking life and thus is
no longer obliged to use the rigid categories of waking
perception. These routines –as stated above –are for quick,
effective, and mechanical decision-making but at the same
deprive experience from its potential sensual richness. Freud
56 |Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017)
Szummer et al.
thought that dreams were the royal road to reach behind
the facade of consciousness, later Jung, Bergson, Ludwig,
Binswanger or even the contemporary Daseinanalysis
followed Freud’s footsteps in using dreams to achieve the
same. But their concept about the unconscious greatly differs
from Freud’s, which, by the way, as Rudolf Bernet points out,
holds pretty heterogeneous concepts together (Bernet, 1997).
Dreams, however, have their own limitations when we look at
them from the perspective of phenomenological analysis. A
classic phenomenological investigation always begins from
the viewpoint of reflecting consciousness and it puts the
psychological paradigms in parenthesis (including and espe-
cially the problem of unconsciousness). Is it possible to
analyze dreams phenomenologically? This kind of analysis
demands the operation of the reflexive consciousness of the
subject. In dream state, it is almost impossible to maintain the
functions of the reflexive consciousness. In case of lucid
dreaming, the required awareness is present to sustain
“reflective seeing,”however in the normal channel of dream-
ing this awareness is mostly missing (Hobson, 2007,p.110).
Another problem is that, for an unexperienced (lucid)
dreamer, it is difficult and unpredictable to recall dreams.
In psychological analysis, the psychedelic experience is
often compared with dreams and fantasies. At the same time,
fantasy in itself is slowly becoming an important topic of
contemporary phenomenology (Horváth et al., 2017;
Lohmar, 2008,2010;Richir, 2004;Ullmann, 2012). Ull-
mann argues regarding imagination: “it occupies a tempo-
rary space between the raw and shapeless impression of
sensory input and the intentionality of conceptual meaning”
(Ullmann, 2012, p. 146). He proposes that imagination
may have a similar significance as intentionality or time
consciousness when it comes to basic functions of con-
sciousness. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 308) says about
hallucinations and imagination:
“The world is the vague theatre of real objects on the one
hand and individual and momentary phantasms on the
other. It takes in without discrimination real objects on
the one hand and individual and momentary phantasms on
the other –it is an individual, which embraces everything
and not a collection of objects linked by causal relations. To
have hallucinations and more generally to imagine, is to
exploit this tolerance on the part of the antepredicative
world, and our bewildering proximity to the whole of being
in syncretic experience.”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962,p.308)
Following Merleau-Ponty, Ullmann (2012) points out that
a vast part of our waking life is, basically, a volatile fantasy
which works together with our perception and memory. In
contemporary phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar has suggested
that the new task of phenomenological research is to analyze
the “alternative representational systems”of fantasy (Lohmar,
2010, p. 176). In line with this program, psychedelic experi-
ence could also be a suitable subject of this project subsumed
under the wider category of fantasy activity [Edward S. Casey
contends that fantasy in itself is probably an indefinable
concept because of its polysemy. The volatile experiences
of daydreaming and reverie, for instance, can be seen as
forms of fantasy, but this may occur and overlap with near-
hallucinatory experiences as well (Casey, 2003, p. 79). To our
opinion, it is true that we could speak of the wide spectrum of
fantasy activity, but it is crucial to see that there is a sharp line
between fantasy-activity and the sense of reality].
THE FOURTH WINDOW: THE PSYCHEDELIC
EXPERIENCE
Gestalt psychologists observe their subjects in their normal
waking state, but the situations in which they are put into are
out of the ordinary. The psychonaut’s state of consciousness
is radically different from the normal waking one. After
ingesting an adequate amount of psychedelic substance, the
user goes through powerful cognitive and emotive changes.
Perception and imagination –modulated by psychedelics –
become more vivid and full of life. It is of great importance
whether the subject goes through the experience with open
eyes or blindfolded. When the user experiences a trip with
eyes open, the effect usually consists of the distortion and, at
the same time, enrichment of perception. This experience can
be characterized by heightened esthetic appreciation and
flood of associations, sometimes even synesthetic transfigu-
ration of perception. If the psychonaut goes through the
experience blindfolded then the trip usually consists of
visions. Psychedelic visions are not psychotic hallucinations,
users often find them enjoyable, uplifting, fulfilling, and
inspiring experiences in spite of their frequently and shock-
ingly transformative aspects. Ideally, the subjects are often
happier and find themselves in a better physical shape after
the sessions (Shanon, 2003, p. 165). Characteristic features of
the visions are the intense affectivity and extraordinarily vivid
imagination. Furthermore, the experience is frequently ac-
companied by intellectual ruminations and realizations. The
contents of the visions are monstrously heterogeneous. The
range of the accounts expands from playful and frivolous
fantasies (e.g., users see cartoonish figures or characteristic
images of pop art) to numinous or unsettling themes of other
worldly journeys (Shanon, 2003,p.96).Insidethemindof
the user, new meanings, metaphors, analogies, and symbols
begin to form in an unpredictable and spontaneous way.
Everyday objects may be saturated with deep significance and
with mystical connotations.
The phantasmata (hyle or sensual material) of psyche-
delic visions are not only a volatile, obscure quasi-sensual
experience, rather an intensified multimodal experience.
Mostly clear and organized patterns form, which can easily
be recalled after the initial experience. At the same time, as
Benny Shanon proposes, the narrative structure of visions
are not so complex as those of dream narratives:
“By and large, it seems to me that structurally they are
less complex than the narratives of dreams. Overall,
what makes ayahuasca visions impressive is their mag-
nificence, grandeur, supernaturalness, and the psycho-
logical and spiritual impact they have on their viewers.
Only a relatively small number of the visions in my
corpus of data define multi-unit, complex narrational
structures.”(Shanon, 2003, p. 110)
Shanon proposes that in considering the nature of psy-
chedelic visions, a conspicuous paradox that appears is that
Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017) |57
The hyperassociative mind
visions compel a “perceptual belief”(and strong feelings or
illusions of acquiring knowledge) to the subjects. By means
of this latter curious fact, we arrived to the function of
hyper-reality. Shanon accepts the notion that visions are
hallucinations, however, he emphasizes that they are special
kinds of hallucinations which are not only able to rivalize
with perceptual objects but the experience feels “more real
than real”for the users. Following Merleau-Ponty (1962),
Shanon says that in normal life we do not doubt our
perceptual contents; when stimuli reaches the eyes –and
generally our bodily presence –then we promptly immersed
into the world. “Normal human beings do not doubt that
what they perceive is real. In a fashion, the act (or rather,
the existential state) of perception forces itself upon us and
the moment we open our sensory faculties we are immersed
in the world of our perception without any choice or room
for doubt, like fish in water”(Shanon, 2003, p. 165).
If we examine the first personal accounts, we can see that
users describe the visions as special kinds of perceiving.
Shanon refers this phenomenon by the term of “perceptual
belief.”
Michael Winkelman regards visionary states as deriving
from the low-level system of cognition under the language-
based high-level system. Anthropological studies suggest, it
is very likely that psychedelic visions (“presentational
symbolism”in Winkelman) are a common factor in sha-
manic trance and in psychedelic experiences (Winkelman,
2011a, p. 166). Winkelman proposes that visionary experi-
ence –with a psychointegrative function of consciousness –
is the fourth mode of consciousness after wakefulness, rapid
eye movement sleep, and dreamless sleep. Psychointegra-
tion means a peculiar problem-solving activity in which the
affective states of the subject are attuned with the commu-
nity; thus, visions are often the symbolic–imaginative repre-
sentations of social conflicts and emotions (Winkelman,
2011b, p. 35). As opposed to Winkelman, Shanon does not
consider their symbolic aspects. In case of visions, argues
Shanon, there is no necessity to decipher hidden meaning,
visions have intrinsic meaning and sense for the subject.
Based on the abovementioned, one can say that it is
enormously difficult to find the right place of the visionary
experience among the multifarious system of intentional acts.
Certain aspects of psychedelic visions are not far from
ordinary perception, whereas other aspects are overlapping
with normal everyday fantasy (imagination). Seeing from this
perspective, this kind of “hybrid experience”is a special
conundrum. Thus, the psychological and philosophical
potentials of the phenomenological research into psychedelic
experience are rooted in this very –hybrid –nature. This
special variety of altered states of consciousness possesses
and integrates the variability of the imagination of normal
waking consciousness and some of the vividness and sharp-
ness of the normal perception (see Shanon, 2003). Due to this
duality, psychedelic fantasies –compared with regularly
occurring ones –are relatively stable and less likely to slip
away as well as are easier to recall. This is crucial for a
phenomenological project since, in the psychedelic state, it is
impossible to maintain the intentional structures and func-
tions of reflexive consciousness. At the same time, as men-
tioned, the phenomenological analysis demands the operation
of the reflexive consciousness of the subject.
THE INTERPRETATION OF MESCALINE
EXPERIENCE BY MERLEAU-PONTY
It is very difficult to understand the nature of the psyche-
delic experience within the traditional elementary frame-
work of perception. Merleau-Ponty developed a radically
novel, anti-Cartesian way of looking at perception in
The Phenomenology of Perception. Through this new
approach, we can better understand the exotic character
of the psychedelic experience. Merleau-Ponty questions
the objectivist and analytic view of perception. He refuses
the model according to which the knowing subject has to
synthesize the meaning of the object from the raw “sensory
data”in a bottom to top manner, in a vague and mysterious
way. Some of the formulations of The Phenomenology of
Perception anticipate the ontology of his post-humus
work, The Visible and the Invisible [Merleau-Ponty
(1962, p. 210) quotes Herder: “Man is a permanent
sensorium commune, who is affected now from one quar-
ter, now from another.”Then he adds: “My body is the
fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in
relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of
my ‘comprehension.’”], indicating toward a phenomeno-
logical concept of the unconscious (Merleau-Ponty, 1962)
[“The disturbance does not affect the information which
may be derived from perception, but discloses beneath
‘perception’a deeper life of consciousness,”writes for
instance related to hallucination Merleau-Ponty (1962,
p. 253)]. For these purposes, it is important to stress that
while banishing the elementarist views of perception,
Merleau-Ponty argues, among other things, as the follow-
ing: (a) perception is in its original form a multimodal and
synesthetic process, thus different sensory channels are not
separated: we perceive with the whole of our being; (b)
the instrument and medium used for experiencing is
the phenomenological body (Leib); (c) the boundaries of
the Leib are not equal with those of the biological body
(Körper); the outlines of the Leib are intruding into the
physical environment of the Körper; (d) perception is a
process, it has a time dimension: it happens not in a flash,
but over time and is affected by experience(s) happened in
the past; and (e) the Euclidean concept of space is an
artificial construction which is not provided as a phenom-
enon for consciousness; in fact, the exploring activity of
the phenomenological body creates the sense of space for
the subject. Merleau-Ponty displays the viability of his
theory of perception by bringing up perceptual situations
where the elementarist views have failed before. These
examples are drawn from analyzing the perception of the
everyday environment in a normal waking state of mind,
and also from the works of Gestalt psychologists (Koffka,
Wertheimer, and Gelb) and existential psychiatrists
(Jaspers, Minkowski, and Binswanger). In some instances,
he uses different authors’descriptions on mescaline.
Merleau-Ponty refers to the mescaline experience in The
Phenomenology of Perception in three different contexts,
namely, those related to the phenomenon of hallucination,
the sense of space, and the phenomenon of synesthesia. To
our mind, the French philosopher, by labeling it as
psychotic hallucination, fundamentally misunderstood the
58 |Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017)
Szummer et al.
mescaline trip. (Later we shall speak about the essential
differences between a psychedelic trip and a psychotic
hallucination.) Therefore, this aspect of the topic will not
be discussed here. However, we suggest that the distortion
of the perception of space and the phenomenon of synes-
thesia are relevant for us. In the following paragraphs, we
will focus on these.
Merleau-Ponty proposes that the entity called “space”in
physics and everyday language, that is the concept of the
Euclidean space, is but an artificial construction, a result of
speculation and abstraction and not something that is pro-
vided as a phenomenon for consciousness. What, on the
other hand, is provided is the environment opened up
through the phenomenological body and experience influ-
enced by the background of perception and the past of the
perceiving subject:
“An initial perception independent of any background is
inconceivable. Every perception presupposes, on the
perceiving subject’s part, a certain past, and the abstract
function of perception, as a coming together of objects,
implies some more occult act by which we elaborate our
environment.”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 253)
Because of the false self-reflection of naturalist science
and the routines of everyday life, the constructive activity of
the phenomenological body (Leib) and the topological
nature of space (by the Leib) is hidden from us. Mescaline
makes the constructing activity of the phenomenological
body visible in a negative way: it suspends the organizing
activity of the Leib, so the spatial relations of the subject are
becoming distorted. As Merleau-Ponty says
“Under mescalin it happens that approaching objects
appear to grow smaller. A limb or other part of the
body, the hand, mouth or tongue seems enormous, and
the rest of the body is felt as a mere appendage to it. The
walls of the room are 150 yards apart, and beyond the
walls is merely an empty vastness. The stretched-out
hand is as high as the wall [:::].”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962,
p. 253)
To Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, these peculiar feelings are
due to the fact that under the effect of mescaline the
phenomenological body (Leib) degrades into a merely
biological organism (Körper). To put it another way, the
Leib ceases to work as an organizing agent of perception; the
Körper cannot hold things and objects together anymore and
the world falls apart for the subject:
“[:::] certain parts of the body are enlarged out of all
proportion, and adjacent objects made too small because
the whole picture no longer forms a system. [:::] if the
world is atomized or dislocated, this is because one’s
own body has ceased to be a knowing body, and has
ceased to draw together all objects in its one grip [:::]”.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 254)
Merleau-Ponty concludes that the sense of space is not a
certain class of the states or acts of the mind, but “its
modalities are always an expression of the total life of the
subject, the energy with which he tends toward a future
through his body and his world”(Merleau-Ponty, 1962,
p. 254).
In The Phenomenology of Perception, one could argue,
Merleau-Ponty attributes a dual function to the mescaline
experience. On the one hand, as we have seen, he uses it as a
mean of highlighting the phenomenological body’s consti-
tutive role: if –due to the effect of mescaline –the Leib
degrades into Körper, then, space distorts, falls apart for the
subject. On the other hand, when describing synesthesia, the
mescaline experience becomes a window looking into an
inherent, hiding structure of the “primordial experience,”of
the Urempfindung (Merleau-Ponty, 1962)[“Seen in the
perspective of the objective world, with its opaque qualities,
and the objective body with its separate organs, the
phenomenon of synaesthetic experience is paradoxical”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 205). So synesthesia induced by
mescaline “becomes one more occasion for questioning
the concept of sensation and objective thought”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 253)]. As Katherine Morris sug-
gests, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the mescaline
visions as “a particular type of ‘abnormal’experience to
shed light on the normal experience”(Morris, 2012, p. 87).
Merleau-Ponty quotes Gelb, the Gestalt psychologist: we
can “reveal a ‘primary layer’of sense experience which
precedes its division among the separate senses”(Merleau-
Ponty, 1962, p. 252), [When I have taken up the artificial
analytic attitude, “at the same time as the world is atomized
into sensible qualities, the natural unity of the perceiving
subject is broken up, and I reach the stage of being unaware
of myself as the subject of a visual field. Now just as, within
each sense, we must find the natural unity which it offers, we
shall reveal a ‘primary layer’of sense experience which
precedes its division among the separate senses”(Gelb, Die
Farbenkonstanz der Sehdinge, p. 600 –quot. Merleau-
Ponty, 1962, p. 252)] then quotes Mayer-Gross and Stein’s
study pertaining to the effects of mescaline: the experience
induced by mescaline is as if one could sometimes see “the
occasional collapse of the barriers established, in the
course of evolution, between the senses”(Merleau-Ponty,
1962, p. 253) (Mayer-Gross and Stein: Über einige Abän-
deringen der Sinnestägkeit im Meskalinrausch, 385 –id.
Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 253). Merleau-Ponty also refers to
Werner, who suggests that the theory of perception when
subdivided into different senses is progressively less verifi-
able as natural perception is approached (Werner: Untersu-
chungen über Empfindung und Empfinden, I, 155 –quot.
Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 204). This notion of perception
subdivided according to the channels of the sense organs is
not an inherent experience, but a mere illusion induced by
the analytic expectations of the subject. The effects of
mescaline suspend this illusion:
“The influence of mescalin, by weakening the attitude of
impartiality and surrendering the subject to his vitality,
should favour therefore forms of synaesthetic experience.
And indeed, under mescalin, the sound of a flute gives a
bluish-green colour, the tick of a metronome, in dark-
ness, is translated as grey patches, the spatial intervals
between them corresponding to the intervals of time
between the ticks, the size of the patch to the loudness
Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017) |59
The hyperassociative mind
of the tick, and its height to the pitch of the sound.”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 204)
As Monika Langer puts it, in Merleau-Ponty’s interpre-
tation the original synesthetic character of the primordial
experience “becomes dramatically prominent because the
drug prompts its user to suspend that analytic attitude
which atomizes the world [:::]”(Langer, 1989,p.77).
According to Merleau-Ponty, under the influence of mes-
caline the primordial experience, the totality and multi-
modality of Urempfindung is freed from the illusion of
perception subdivided into five sense organs (Merleau-
Ponty, 1962, p. 205) [“In reality, each colour, in its inmost
depths, is nothing but the inner structure of the thing
overtly revealed. The brilliance of gold palpably holds
out to us its homogeneous composition, and the dull colour
of wood its heterogeneous make-up. The senses intercom-
municate by opening on to the structure of the thing”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 205)]. To sum up, we can say
that, primarily, perception is not analytical; the perceived
things are not constructed from data conveyed through
separate channels of sense organs. Merleau-Ponty suggests
in Sense and Non-Sense that I perceive with the whole my
being:
“For people under mescaline, sounds are regularly
accompanied by spots of color whose hue, form, and
vividness vary with the tonal quality, intensity, and pitch
of the sounds. [:::] My perception is therefore not a sum
of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total
way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of
the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my
senses at once.”(Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp. 49–50)
THE HYPERASSOCIATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE
PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE AND MERLEAU-
PONTY’S WILD WORLD
The distortion of the sense of space and the disengaging
synesthesia are interesting effects of mescaline. Merleau-
Ponty uses these phenomena convincingly to support his
new look of perception. Still we think, as aforementioned,
that the most important psychedelic effect is the boosting of
the associative capacity of mind. From this point of view, we
can find important parallels between the psychedelic expe-
rience and Merleau-Ponty’s ontology called the “wild word”
or “wild being”by him, albeit Merleau-Ponty did not
explicate these parallels. The central thesis of The Phenom-
enology of Perception was that perception is an active,
vibrating, creative process in which the perceiver and the
perceived things are intertwined in an intimate way. This
radically new theory of perception implies a new concept of
being: in this case, Being is open and reveals itself in the
process of perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1968)[“The in itself
–for itself integration takes place /:::/ in the Being in
promiscuity”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 253). “/:::/ for me
it is no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a
series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion
of Being which is forever. /:::/ the universal structure
‘world’–encroachment of everything upon everything, a
being by promiscuity”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 234)]. The
Visible and the Invisible could only touch on the subject due
to Merleau-Ponty’s early death. The style of the late
Merleau-Ponty is unusual in philosophy. It lacks the exact
definitions and strict usage of concepts sometimes. In spite
of this, we think it helps us to understand psychedelic
experience. In this framework, Being is unfailingly rich
and perception, exploiting the overflowing richness of
Being, is an inherently creative activity. The ontology and
epistemology of the late Merleau-Ponty represents a theo-
retical framework presented in a poetic and somewhat
obscure way. Merleau-Ponty, among others, applies the
concept of the Freudian interpretation, Freud’s novel idea
of the past wedging in and organizing the present, as well as
Husserl’s“ray of world”or “ray of the past.”Consciousness
has to be understood as “rays of the past and rays of the
world at the end of which, through many ‘memory screens’
dotted with lacunae and with the imaginary, pulsate some
almost sensible structures, some individual memories”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 268). While the Cartesian theory
proposes that consciousness is something performed out of a
sequence of individual Erlebnissen, Merleau-Ponty says
that “we are a field of Being”meaning that in every single
instance of perception the whole of Being reveals itself in us
and by us (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 240) [“The interior
monologue –the ‘consciousness’itself –to be understood
not as a series of individual (sensible or non-sensible) ‘I
think that’s’, but as openness upon general configurations
or constellations, rays of the past and rays of the world at
the end of which, through many ‘memory screens’dotted
with lacunae and with the imaginary, pulsate some almost
sensible structures, some individual memories. It is the
Cartesian idealization applied to the mind as to the things
(Husserl) that has persuaded us that we were a flux of
individual Erlebnisse, whereas we are a field of Being. Even
in the present, the landscape is a configuration”(Merleau-
Ponty, 1968, p. 240)]. Instead of the cold, geometrical
Cartesian–Euclidean concept of being, Merleau-Ponty
brings forth the polymorphic and amorphous structure of
Being, its exalted promiscuity. Anything existing can be
elevated to the point of being the emblem of Being [“/:::/ any
entity can be accentuated as an emblem of Being /:::/itisto
be read as such”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 270)] says
Merleau-Ponty relating to the Freudian interpretation in a
general sense (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 270). The individual
events of perception are differentiations of our belonging to
the massive medium of Being itself. This all-embracing
medium is the “flesh,”a common, intertwining structure, a
chiasm of the world and the perceiving body of the subject
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 270) [Perceptions are “differentia-
tions of one sole and massive adhesion to Being which is the
flesh (eventually as ‘lace-works’)”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968,
p. 270)]. In perception, it is not synthesis and passive
reception that occurs, but the detachment and articulation
of the “flesh.”
Under psychedelics the psychonaut’s boundaries of
self begin to dissolve, self-affection intensifies, the phenom-
enological body merges with the environment and the
phenomenological field becomes the background for the
ever-forming Gestalts (Huxley’s description is a good
example: “A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in
60 |Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017)
Szummer et al.
full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So pas-
sionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very
brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the
blue. [:::] I looked down at the leaves and discovered a
cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and
shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery”(Huxley,
1959, p. 34). All these changes result in a divergent,
hyperassociative working of the mind. As we have said, in
our opinion, the temporarily boosted associative capacity of
the mind is the most important effect of psychedelics. We
suggest that in the psychedelic experience the polymorphic
and amorphous structure of Being, the “wild being”reveals
itself. In the normal state of consciousness this structure is
hidden, because this kind of divergent activity of the mind is
maladaptive in a stable environment. A stable environment
demands swift, routine-like behavioral answers of the
organism for survival. So in normal waking states, percep-
tion and thinking are limited by stereotypes, rigid categories.
Psychedelics suspend the suppressive effect of the routines
of the normal state of mind. Due to this, a flood of meaning
can disengage, revealing the structure of “wild world”: the
orgiastic connections of notions, feelings, bodily sensations,
memories, and stimuli from the outside world become
metaphors embracing each other.
In our opinion, the hyperassociative, creative dynamism
of mind may have an important role in survival. It is a
limitless reservoir of creative solutions, vital if the envi-
ronment changes rapidly and the organism has to adapt to
the demands of new environmental cues. Winkelman’s
theory of the integrative mode of consciousness corrobo-
rates our hypothesis. As mentioned above, he proposes an
integrative mode of consciousness, a superefficient prob-
lem-solving activity in which the affective states of the
shaman are attuned with the community, and the visions of
the shaman are often the symbolic–imaginative represen-
tations of social conflicts and emotions (Winkelman,
2011b, p. 35). Winkelman refers to Vollenweider and
Geyer (2001): psychedelics “reduce the sensory gating
systems of the lower brain structures, leading to a flood of
information into higher levels of the brain.”He suggests
that it results in an enhanced integration of information
from evolutionary ancient structures of the brain into the
frontal brain. This integration explains why psychedelic
experiences “are often characterised as providing under-
standing, enlightenment, a sense of unity, oneness with the
universe, connection with others, and personal integra-
tion”(p. 5).
Grinspoon and Bakalar’s classical description about the
psychedelic experience is a good example for the increased
associative dynamism of the psychedelic mind:
“At deeper levels, drug users may regress to childhood as
they relive their memories, or they may project them-
selves into the series of dreamlike images before their
closed eyelids and become the protagonists of symbolic
dramas enacted for the mind’s eye. Actions, persons, and
images in this dream-world or even in the external world
may become so intensely significant and metaphorically
representative that they take on the character of symbols,
myths, and allegories. Loss of self may be experienced as
an actual death and rebirth, undergone with anguish and
joy of overwhelming intensity.”(Grinspoon & Bakalar,
1983, pp. 13–14)
The most known account of the psychedelic experience is
Aldous Huxley’s essay, The Doors of Perception, which
prepared the psychedelic revolution of the 60s. In this essay,
Huxley stood for a naïve phenomenological approach: “[:::]
we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to
look at the world directly and not through that half opaque
medium of concepts, which distorts every provided fact into
the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or
explanatory abstraction”(Huxley, 1959, p. 22). Huxley
(1946,1999) in his essays implies that by the term “to look
at the world directly”he means to discover some hidden
essence of things. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology allows us
another possibility. It implies an enormously creative
capacity of the mind which makes the subject able to see
things without bias or, with Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, to
return from the “perception fashioned by culture to the
‘brute’or ‘wild’perception”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 212).
Laurie Spurling says that Huxley’s essay “reveals many
parallels between perception under mescaline and Merleau-
Ponty’s descriptions of pre-objective experience at its pri-
mordial level”(Spurling, 2014, p. 19) [Spurling quotes
Huxley’s description of his own sensation of space under
the effect of mescaline: “At ordinary times the eye concerns
itself with such problems as where? –how far? –how
situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience
[:::] the mind does its experiencing in terms of intensity of
experience, profundity of significance, relations within a
pattern [:::]”(Huxley, 1959,5–quot. Spurling, 2014,
p. 19). Then Spurling states: “Here we find an illustration
of the distinction Merleau-Ponty makes between perception
in the natural attitude, which we understand as occurring in
objective space (where? how far? Etc.), and pre-objective
perception, occurring in phenomenal space, and where we
witness the birth of perceptual meaning and organization
(relations in a pattern)”(Spurling, 2014, p. 19)]. We agree.
The mescaline catapulted Huxley into an everlasting big
bang of primordial experience [According to Merleau-
Ponty, the wild world “to be described as a space of
transcendence, a space of incompossibilities, of explosion,
of dehiscence, and not as objective-immanent space”(1968,
p. 216)] –which Merleau-Ponty, using Husserl’s term,
called Urempfindung (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 216) –the
prolific, overflowingly rich world of the “wild being”or
“vertical being”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 220). As it is well
known, the title of Huxley’s essay came from one of
William Blake’s prose poems, called The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell. Huxley’s choice was superb. The great
English visionary goes on to say:
“But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his
soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the
infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salu-
tary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and
displaying the infinite which was hid. [:::] If the doors of
perception were cleansed, everything would appear to
man as it is, infinite. [:::] For man has closed himself up
till he sees all things thro’narrow chinks of his cavern.”
(Blake, 1994, Plate 14)
Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017) |61
The hyperassociative mind
In the lines above, it is as if Blake describes the psyche-
delic experience with the help of poetic metaphors. The use
of “corrosives”is to free perception up so that one can see
things in their full richness, not just “thro’narrow chinks of
his cavern.”The “corrosive”of mescaline frees perception
from the categorization of everyday consciousness, it’s
blind and mechanical ways of functioning. It is a state of
mind in which routines are removed from the primordial
perception (Urempfindung), thus “the doors of perception
will be cleansed”and the overflowing richness of experience
and being comes into the light [To put it in Merleau-Ponty’s
words: “Say that the things are structures, frameworks, the
stars of our life: not before us, laid out as perspective
spectacles, but gravitating about us. Such things do not
presuppose man, who is made of their flesh. But yet their
eminent being can be understood only by him who enters
into perception, and with it keeps in distant-contact with
them”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 220)]. [As it was recently
demonstrated by the MRI records of Robin Carhart-Harris
(2015), the activity of the brain is increased enormously for
a couple of hours. Millions of neurons are synchronized in
novel ways, building up new and unusual patterns, dischar-
ging in different rhythms)]. To put it another way, by means
of psychedelics we may actually see the living pulsation of
perception at its best, the Urempfindung itself, which usu-
ally lies hidden in the background due to the monotonous
routines of everyday life. Psychedelics, in the words of
Blake, by “melting apparent surfaces away,”are able to
display “the infinite which was hid.”They may shed light on
the trans-objective and trans-subjective sphere of the “wild
world”–which, according to Merleau-Ponty, can be char-
acterized by the infinity of the openness of the Umwelt of the
perceiving subject, the everlasting emanation of Being, its
inexhaustible richness, bottomless abyss, the “operative,
militant finitude”of perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1968,
p. 259) [“Forme the infinity of Being that one can speak of
is operative, militant finitude”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968,p.259)].
It is important to see that the psychedelic experience is
not a sphere of existence dominated by chaos. As mentioned
earlier, psychedelic visions are accompanied by heightened
awareness and mental lucidity that are generally the main
characteristic features of perception. Psychedelic visions, as
we have seen above, are able to combine the variability of
the normal waking imagination and daydreaming, some of
the vividness of perceiving and the freedom of naturally
occurring altered states of consciousness (e.g., dreaming).
The pattern of a psychedelic vision is totally different from
that of a psychotic hallucination. This difference is related
to the basic dilemma that haunts psychedelic research since
the beginning: whether psychedelic experience is a distor-
tion, debilitation, and dissociation of the normal waking
consciousness, a chemically induced preliminary halluci-
nation, or right the opposite: a richer and deeper way of
perceiving reality? Of course, the answer depends on what
we mean by reality and perception. In this paper, we
applied Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical framework. We sug-
gest that the Janus-faced nature of the psychedelic experi-
ence comes from the fact that psychedelics enormously
enhance the creativity and fantasy activity of the mind. A
relatively stable environment requires swift- and routine-
like behavioral answers from the side of the organism for
survival. It implies that the enhanced creativity of the
psychedelic mind can be in conflict with this demand. In
1947, 2 years after Merleau-Ponty’s book The Phenome-
nology of Perception was published, the Swiss pharma-
ceutical company Sandoz started to distribute the strongest
psychedelic substances of all time –lysergic acid diethy-
lamide (LSD) –to psychopharmacologists and psychia-
trists for research. The dilemma mentioned above appeared
here, as well. At first, psychopharmacologists thought that
LSD induced reversible, quasi-psychotic hallucinations or,
in other words, a “model psychosis.”But psychiatrists
quickly came to realize that a psychedelic vision is not
a psychosis-like hallucination, because (a) if appropriate
mind-set and setting (environment) is achieved during the
experience it usually turns out to be quite pleasurable and
is not filled with anxiety; (b) modality is usually visual and
not exclusively auditory; (c) a psychedelic vision, as we
emphasized, brings an extra layer of meaning, context, and
associations flowing to the user: here an almost shocking
multimodal flood of meaning occurs; (d) the experience
does not induce memory loss; (e) it can be controlled by the
subject to a certain extent; (f) the time frame of the
experience can be defined (e.g., in cases of mescaline,
psilocybin, or ayahuasca, a trip generally takes 3–5hr,
double as much for LSD, 20–30 min for DMT, etc.); (g)
psychedelic visions have an integrative potential as op-
posed to psychotic hallucinations (In South-American
indigenous tribes that use ayahuasca, psychoactive plants
act as a moral compass for the members of the tribe.) which
dissociate the personality of the psychotic individual
(Carhart-Harris, 2015;Carhart-Harris et al., 2014;Mishara
& Schwartz, 2011;Tagliazucchi, Carhart-Harris, Leech,
Nutt, & Chialvo, 2014;Winkelman, 2011b) [Neurological
data also suggest a significant difference between psychot-
ic hallucination and psychedelic vision. We know
from psychopharmacological research that psychedelic
experiences stem from the increased levels of neurotrans-
mitters, specifically serotonin and dopamine, which last a
couple of hours. According to recent neurological research
(Carhart-Harris et al., 2014;Mishara & Schwartz, 2011;
Tagliasucchi et al., 2014), psychedelic substances kick
start certain neurosynchronizational and pharmacological
mechanisms that actually do not deteriorate information
processing, on the contrary, they make the individual able
to process information that is normally subliminal and,
thus, lost.]; (h) a vision sometimes has the same intensity as
perception would, it could only be something like a flower
or a pebble, the realness of which we would never question
(see Shanon, 2003); finally (i) it brings about a rich esthetic
experience.
CONCLUSION
Regarding the discussion above, it is worth considering the
relevance of psychedelic experience in phenomenological
investigation. In this paper, we approached the psychedelic
experience through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s epistemolog-
ical and ontological concepts. We proposed that the
accounts of the psychedelic experience and the descriptions
of pre-objective and pre-subjective sphere of “wild world”
62 |Journal of Psychedelic Studies 1(2), pp. 55–64 (2017)
Szummer et al.
or “wild being”by the late Merleau-Ponty reveal the same
hyperassociative structure. We classified psychedelic
experiences under the wider category of fantasy activity.
Adapting Merleau-Ponty’s mescaline descriptions and
applying the conceptual framework of the ontology of “wild
being,”we portrayed the potential that lies in researching
perception and imagination through a psychedelic experi-
ence. We suggested that the most eminent feature of the
psychedelic altered state of consciousness is its hyperasso-
ciative capacity, a crucial condition for imagination and
creativity. We supposed that it has an evolutionary function.
We also argued that psychedelics might have the capacity to
transcend the habituated patterns and the sedimented forms
of our normal waking consciousness. We proposed that the
hyperassociative tendencies, eventuated by psychedelic
visions, could be seen as the latent schemata or ambiguous
and potent Gestalt’s germs of imagination as well as
perception; they are hiding in the background of mental
activity in normal waking consciousness.
Acknowledgements: The article was created by the contri-
bution of the grant of OTKA (research grant of Hungarian
Science, Ref. No. 112542).
Conflict of interest: All authors had final responsibility for
the decision to submit for publication.
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