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Journal of Psychology and Cognition | Volume 4
May 13-14, 2019 | Prague, Czech Republic
Addiction Research and Therapy
2nd International Conference on
J Psychol Cognition, Volume 4
Integral approaches to Opiate Addiction and its treatment with Ibogaine
Adrian Auler
California Institute of Integral Studies, USA
Opiate addiction is spreading, and its treatment has been
a spectacular failure, due to the predictably narrow,
incomplete grasp of its character one would expect from
the paradigm of scientific materialism. Opiate addiction
research conceived within a positivist-reductionist container
has focused on the clinical addiction to opiates, as if this were
the causal factor rather than a consequence. True, clinical
addiction to opiates is an immediate threat to the health
and welfare of the individual and must be attended first;
but opiate addiction is a mental illness that is exacerbated
by sociocultural stigmatization, political and corporate
denigration of the individual, and a worldview which
maintains that life and the cosmos are meaningless. Opiate
addiction is thus a triage response to existential despair,
characterized by a sense of hopelessness, and resulting in
a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare. The integral philosophy
and yoga of Aurobindo Ghose and the Mother contains an
inherent whole-person psychology, which I use in conjunction
with Jungian depth psychology to evaluate the personal
aspects of opiate addiction. Integral philosophy is a lens I use
to consider.
Speaker Biography
Adrian Auler is a doctoral candidate in East-West Psychology (EWP)
at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His dissertation topic is
opiate addiction and its treatment with the entheogen ibogaine. His real
qualification to address the topic is that he was a heroin addict for 22
years and only escaped it using ibogaine. He finished most of his higher
education in the 21 years since he got clean. He has also written a book
which is a popular treatment of his dissertation topic. He got BA’s in
anthropology and psychology as they complement each other to produce a
comprehensive perspective. He also got an MA, and now ABD, in EWP. His
lenses are depth, transpersonal, and integral psychology, psychological and
medical anthropology, and autoethnography. He focuses on consciousness
studies, including energy medicine and psychedelic research. Integral
psychology is a philosophical and spiritual transpersonal psychology, and
the “hard problem” of Chalmers is a touchstone in his work.
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