ABSTRACT
What does it mean, ‘to drop acid’? It brings to mind a casual fall. The subject waits for the chemical to act, anticipating the jolt of its visitation. At the moment of the fall, the drug takes him out of himself, away on ‘trips’, as he voyages through hallucinated landscapes. The content of a trip is unpredictable. Some are good, some are bad. Like a mood that sweeps over the subject this sudden paroxysm of the psyche casts the tripper into a new frontier. This use of the psyche makes for an interesting relation to the hallucinated contents; it is an exploitative knowledge, the tripper an adventurer who plunders an area of the mind to ‘spot’ hallucinations. But of course sighting does not equal knowing, even though there is a kind of perverse intrapsychic voyeurism in the user who boasts of his trips. To the psychoanalyst who considers himself an appointed visitor to the fields of the unconscious the tripper’s arrogant assertions of actual knowledge can grate on the nerves. In the psychoanalytical treatment of a user it is almost inevitable for the patient to challenge the analyst’s sense of privilege in sighting the use.
