Naranjo harmaline-MDA

Claudio Naranjo. The Healing Journey: New Approaches to Consciousness. 1973. Ballantine Books. SBN: 345-24328-5-150. Chapter 4. Harmaline and the Collective Unconscious, pages 121, 166–168

My lack of further experience with pure harmaline derives from my having been engaged, since the time of the above research, in the study of harmaline combinations: harmaline-MDA, harmaline-TMA ¹, harmaline-mescaline and others.

¹ TMA: trimethoxyamphetamine.

I want to end this chapter by pointing out that, useful as pure harmaline can be in psychotherapy, the therapist employing the drug should always keep in mind the fact that some individuals are rather unsusceptible to its psychological effects. As was mentioned earlier, some of them may have no more than a physical reaction to the drug, an unpleasant state of malaise, somnolence, and vomiting that is most probably the result of a conversion reaction.

Early in our work with harmaline, we formed the impression that these “untoward reactions” (consisting of a lack of psychological effects and the presence of physical distress) were most likely to occur in individuals who feel comparatively ill-at-ease in their animal level of existence, which it is the drug’s virtue to lay bare. If it were true that a poor or unpleasant reaction was the consequence of a desperate though unconscious attempt to inhibit that which harmaline stimulates, it would be conceivable that this might be obviated by another drug. 

First I thought of mescaline, both in view of the condition of self-acceptance which it can bring about and the fact that one of the admixtures in the native Amazonian ayahuasca drink has been proved to contain DMT.⁴ Small doses of mescaline indeed proved to increase productivity and diminish the unpleasantness that the experience has for some subjects. Yet mescaline has effects of its own, which may not be desirable in a given case. MDA, on the other hand, proved to have the properties of an ideal admixture. The feeling-enhancing quality of MDA facilitates the decoding of visual imagery into direct experience; its amphetamine-like quality serves to counteract the somnolence induced by pure harmaline, and its stimulation of the drive toward interpersonal contact and communication opposes the tendency to withdraw that leads some subjects into a dreamlike state, the content of which they cannot recapture. 

The effects of the drug combination seem to be more than a summation of their properties in isolation, however. In the first place, the duration of the harmaline-MDA experience is much longer, averaging twelve hours. Qualitatively, there can be differences that I will not go into, since their clinical importance is slight. Yet there is one particular type of reaction which, uncommon as it is, deserves special mention, both as a warning and a reassurance. This is a state of confusion and great excitement in which a person may talk to dream companions and thrash around—even risking getting bruised against the walls or furniture. It would seem that the aggression that usually emerges in harmaline experiences in the symbolic guise of animals or other fantasies is here released in a physical way, though still in a fantasy world of delirium. I have seen this occur twice (in about thirty sessions), the reaction being followed in both instances by amnesia. Alarming as these sessions were at the time, however, they proved to be extremely beneficial to the patients for reasons which can only be a matter of speculation. 

In one instance, the patient was a shy and inhibited young woman who, early in her session, started screaming at her absent mother all that she had withheld from expressing and from feeling toward her. Soon her speech became confused, and interaction with her was almost impossible. She kept playing the parts of some dialogue, which was increasingly hard to follow because of her mumbling. Still, it was obvious that the direct, energetic person that she became at that moment was the opposite of her shy and depressed ordinary self. When she recovered, she was somewhat bruised from rolling on the floor, but her voice and style of movement had changed, retaining some of the assertiveness that she lacked in life, but had displayed in her intoxicated state. Not only was this change enduring, but it carried over into her feelings and decisions. In this particular case, the patient had experienced moments of exceptional freedom under the effects of LSD in a non-therapeutic setting, and this freedom had not carried over into her life. On this occasion, though, when she did not even remember what she had felt and said, her temporary loss of control proved to be a life-changing catharsis. 

The other case was similar in essence: that of a frigid woman with mildly compulsive character style, who rolled about and talked for hours without remembering her experience, but who came out of her session greatly refreshed and with a capacity for sensuous enjoyment unknown to her before. 

In mentioning these two experiences, I want to share a sense of trust with which I have been left after the initial worry—a trust which, I believe, may be beneficial for other patients to be surrounded with in similar situations. We psychiatrists are prone to put great faith in the value of verbal expression and tend to underrate the value of motoric expression as displayed by these patients, calling it just psychomotor excitement. Though pure instances of this, like the above, are rare, I think they are important to know of, because of the light they shed on the non-verbal dimension of every drug experience, if not every therapeutic session.

⁴F. A. Hochstein and A. M. Paradies, “Alkaloids of Banisteria Caapi and Prestonia amazonicum,” Journal of the American Chemical Society 79: 5735 (1957). DMT: N,N-dimethyl tryptamine.