A Critical Feminist Perspective on Historic and Contemporary Clinical Psychedelic Use in Australia

Current psychedelic training and practice in Australia are shaped by transpersonal and spiritual frameworks that carry long-standing ethical concerns. This talk takes a critical feminist approach to understanding how these frameworks became uncritically embedded in clinical practice, and why this is a problem.

I begin with a review of regulated LSD therapy in Australia during the 1960s and 70s, situating it within the psychoanalytic traditions that shaped its development, particularly Freudian and Argentine neo-Freudian theories. Drawing on Meagn Lomax’s doctoral research and my 2024 co-authored paper on regulatory considerations in psychedelic therapy, I explore how weak oversight mechanisms in the 1970s enabled abusive clinical practices to flourish at the Newhaven Hospital. I highlight the case of Dr Raynor Johnson, a former University of Melbourne academic who co-founded The Family, a cult led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Johnson used his academic status to lend legitimacy to the sect’s spiritual authoritarianism.

I connect this history to the contemporary normalisation of Holotropic Breathwork, a pseudoscientific therapeutic practice developed by Stan and Christina Grof. Holotropic Breathwork made quiet inroads into Australian New Age and therapeutic communities from the late 1970s onward. Its core techniques include focused bodywork, induced hyperventilation, and belief in the recovery of repressed or perinatal trauma. Today, MAPS and Rick Doblin heavily promote as a legal, non-drug alternative to psychedelic therapy and Holotropic Breath is currently used as “experiential” foundation for psychedelic therapy in Australia.

I argue that Holotropic Breathwork is not ethically suitable for clinical practice, and that its ongoing presence in training reflects a broader failure to reckon with the history of psychedelic therapy in Australia.

Note: This presentation will be prerecorded.