Trauma and healing in personal accounts of psychedelic integration: An embodied discursive analysis

Abstract

Discursive psychology (DP), developed by Potter and Wetherell (1987), employs discourse analysis to explore how contextualized talk achieves social functions and constructs versions of reality. Adopting a non-cognitivist stance, DP views psychological phenomena as produced through language and social practices rather than internal mental states. This paper outlines DP's two primary aims: analyzing how discourse constructs alternative versions of events and identifying discursive strategies used to accomplish social aims, including rhetorical and accountability features in managing stakes and interests. Critiquing the essentialism and internalism of conventional cognitive psychology, DP emphasizes the public and normative nature of discourse, avoiding inferred mental states to explain behavior. However, DP's focus on rhetoric often overlooks subjective experiences and the skills involved in managing stakes. This paper argues for an expanded DP that integrates embodied expression, drawing on Charles Taylor's expressivist perspective. Language is seen as intrinsically connected to human expression, constituting self and shared reality. By broadening DP to include embodied discourse, this approach can offer deeper insights into affective practices and the lived realities of experiences, such as psychedelic therapy integration. This expanded focus emphasizes the constitutive nature of expression in understanding psychological phenomena, advocating for a comprehensive approach that captures the nuanced interplay between embodiment and discourse. This paper highlights the potential of DP to enrich our understanding of how individuals collaboratively constitute and express their experiences in everyday life, providing a more holistic analysis of specific psychological phenomena like psychedelic therapy integration.

Topics & conditions

Detected automatically by Psychedelic Commons from the title and abstract, not labels from the source. They may be incomplete.

Keywords