Psychedelics, Psychotherapy, and the Power of Kindness With Dr. Phil Wolfson

As psychedelic-assisted therapies become more mainstream, ketamine treatments are increasingly medicalized, often lacking the integration, connection, and context that can unlock their true healing potential. How can clinicians ensure these therapies are transformative rather than transactional?

Psychedelic psychotherapist Dr. Phil Wolfson advises against separating ketamine from psychotherapy. Instead, he advocates for an integrative, human-centered approach that includes preparatory work, therapist presence, and post-session integration. When determining patient dosage, clinicians should focus on assessing the individual rather than adhering to rigid protocols. Dr. Wolfson also urges clinicians to cultivate compassion, deepen their therapeutic relationships, and consider the spiritual and emotional dimensions of healing, especially when working with trauma and grief. 

In this episode of Living Medicine, Dr. Sandy Newes talks with Dr. Phil Wolfson, the Founder and CEO of the Ketamine Research Foundation, about the art and ethics of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Dr. Wolfson shares how his son’s illness led him to pursue psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, consciousness and death in psychedelic experiences, and the contrast between IV clinics and integrative therapy models.

This episode is brought to you by the Living Medicine Institute.

LMI is a training, resource, and membership program educating providers about the legal and safe use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

To learn more or participate, visit https://livingmedicineinstitute.com.

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Living Medicine podcast, where we talk about ethical medical use of psychedelic psychotherapy, teaching skills, examining the issues and interviewing interesting people. Now let’s start today’s show.

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:18

Hi everyone. This is Sandy Newes of the Living Medicine Institute, and we provide content and resources and training for clinical and medical providers who are interested in either launching a career in Academy and assisted psychotherapy or deepening their existing skills. And we also have a broad interest in psychedelic medicine in general, and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And I am thrilled to be with Dr. Phil Wolfson, who is really very clearly one of, if not the kind of identified elder and wisdom keeper in the field. And Dr. Wolfson, actually, I forgot to get your written bio, so I’m just going to wing it so you can fill in if I miss anything. Dr. Wolfson runs a long standing clinic in the North Bay Area where he treats a variety of different clients. He has a group, group practice, and I believe that you offer both ketamine treatment and cap. Is that correct?

Dr. Phil Wolfson 1:15

I don’t differentiate between the two. Okay?

Dr. Sandy Newes 1:18

And also, he wrote, kind of the founding book called The Ketamine Papers, which everybody has on their library, which really, in my opinion, really launched the field into being a field. And he’s also really invested in research, and so runs Ketamine Research Associates. Is that the right way to say it? Normally, I have all this written out

Dr. Phil Wolfson 1:40

organization is the Ketamine Research Foundation, right? We have two groups, Academy, Training Center and the ongoing ketamine psychotherapy associates, of which you have been delightedly a part

Dr. Sandy Newes 1:54

of, right? Yes, and I have had the privilege of being a part of the ketamine psychotherapy associates, which I love and think everybody should be aware of. And it was also able to be with you at Dharma K, which was a kind of retreat style gathering at menla that you all are doing annually. And I’m also aware of the fact that you to also do training so so we are, you know, delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you and to talk about all of those things. So thank you so much. So

Dr. Phil Wolfson 2:27

call me Phil, please. Okay,

Dr. Sandy Newes 2:28

I’ll be happy to All right, well, Phil, so being kind of you know one of the elders, and I mean that as you know the the holders of the wisdom, not just age, but you have certainly ridden this wave, right? Ridden the wave of, you know, psychedelic movement as it came into its inception and where it is now. And so what I thought I’d love to just start with is kind of that like your history in the field. And then let’s move into some of the things about ketamine and cap in general. And you know what makes a good cap therapist? And you know, kind of some of the differences in routes of administration. So how did you get to be here, like, how did, how did you land in this place where you’re so clearly mission driven in this work?

Dr. Phil Wolfson 3:16

Well, you’ve been very complimentary. It’s delightful to be with you and whoever is on your show, and I’m pleased to be here with them, really, as Sandy I am, I wear the cloak of being a psychotherapist, and that’s always been my delight. And so when I was in college at Brandeis, and I had the good fortune of having access to psychotherapy going through my own identity crisis at 17, we skipped a year in New York City, and we were very young coming into college, and it was 1960 and things were just emerging, right? I had the opportunity for 30 sessions for free of psychopathy, and given the severity of my identity crisis and my suicidality and stuff that went along with leaving a very Imperial home with all of its difficulties, abuse, et cetera. Psychotherapy really provoked a sense of a method that enabled me to find myself bit by bit. It went on for a long time after that, but it opened the door to resolution of some of the ways in which I was split and having the difficulty of finding my own path. I I was very interested in history for many different reasons. I decided I was going to go to med school and the psychotherapist. Psychologist at Brandeis, all were complaining that they couldn’t prescribe though they were at the forefront Maslow was my teachers, yeah. They were at the forefront of of progressive psychotherapy. Yeah. Med School. I decided I want to be Che Guevara for a while, and did all kinds of radical stuff, and organized the first health brigade to Cuba in 1968 and did community service in New York against the two standard of class care and racist care and misogynist care that was represented by being in Bellevue Hospital and then alongside University Hospital, and the contrast was horrendous, and the treatment of people who were not able to afford private care was horrendous. So I became very involved in all of the social justice aspects medical Committee for Human Rights the street 60s and in 64 when I started medical school, I and eight other men, young men, all dropped acid in New York City on the roof top of our dormitory, thinking we could fly. No one tried it.

Dr. Sandy Newes 6:25

Nobody can fly. We just need to be really clear, people, humans cannot fly.

Dr. Phil Wolfson 6:34

That was a pretty radical thing to do, and and I don’t know that LSD fully changed me, but it opened certain doors of conception, and what really helped was marijuana, which came in the same year and freed me a bunch of my self consciousness. So while it was really focused on radical ways of developing family therapy, systems therapy as I graduated from med school, and in fact, did therapy while I was in med school. I was devoted to med school into being a doctor, and psychedelics played a small but significant part of that, but it was really the halcyon days of family therapy. Lange and ethos and I ran a small inpatient hospital, an alternative hospital, when I came to California in 77 which was a process. Hospital was called I Ward was funded by the county, and we had a kind of collective of anti racist, very mixed, wonderful people. And the unit tried to show that we could treat first break people, schizophrenia or whatever, without use of significant medicine in a family centered community environment, who were partly successful as a bed hospital in the county system, who was difficult and out of that by 1983 I was looking for some other solutions, and I met Alexander Schulger. Sasha was really the father, the reintroducer of MDMA, and probably the most brilliant creator of psychoactive substances, phenethylamines and tryptamines. And we became very, very close and very close friends and collaborators, etc. And that brought together a lot of the people that you know. So if I’m an elder by age, which I am, plus in part, some of the other elders in Asia, those who are still around, many have passed on, formed an organization called the Rupa, the Association for the responsible use of psychedelic agents that met at Esalen under the umbrella of Dick Price, who was co owner of ES, unfortunately died in an accident up the mountain. We lost that support at us, but for a significant period of time, we were able to go to ES for weeks, out of time, at a time, wow, out of what got, what’s still out there generated then a lot of what we learned, for instance, about MDMA generally, during the legal period. And that

Dr. Sandy Newes 9:50

is so interesting. So let’s So tell me more about that, because I had the privilege of hanging out with Sasha a bit, Sasha and Anne here and there, and the various. Brilliant people who circled them. And I can only imagine that being at Esalen during the time of legality, with what sounds like, was essentially a think tank like our people coming together to explore ideas that must have been really rich.

Dr. Phil Wolfson 10:19

Well, it was an experiential thing. So like Claudio, there are no goblin was part of it. GEORGE Greer, who went on to after Dave Nichols, the secret chief. A lot of people, a lot more people, were really invested. And can will, Ken Block, who did anything to omega around near death experience. It was a very rich experience, and we did a lot of therapy. Of the myths that people are living with now, for example, about psychedelics and MDMA in particular, are just that they’re not based on anything but the illegalization that occurred in 1986 and that led to the truncated, constricted way in which we finally have moved towards prescriptive legalization. But that has all kinds of myths. So a myth, for example, is that you can’t use MDMA more than two or three months apart. No. MDMA is very successfully used a week apart, for example, with integration in between four couples therapy. A lot of what we did was relational, relational issues. We treat depression, PTSD, OCD, families. I wrote a paper on treating families in 1986 It was published. So I know a lot of the methodology, which was revolutionary in its nature, based further on the LSD work, but MDMA as a, really a perfect psychotherapeutic agent, I would argue, along with ketamine in its various ways, especially the low dose, as a perfect psychotherapeutic agent, the revolution was you had to be more alive with your patients. You had more expressive and exposed. You had to spend much more time. And while methodological frameworks were important, what was most important was kind of the integration of the experience that being still probably the most important aspect of a post psychedelic session experience leading to psychotherapy output. And we do, yeah, so

Dr. Sandy Newes 12:57

if you want to finish that thought, go for it. But I want to, I just want to in I want to send just see, like, I’m just sitting here being like, oh my gosh, what a profound personal and professional experience. And I’m just super curious, like, how that influenced like you as a human and how you went on in your professional career. Like to have the opportunity to deep dive like that. Not a lot of us get that like intense

Dr. Phil Wolfson 13:24

I had an intervening, awful difficulty that came at the same time and that my eldest son, Noah, at 12 and three quarters, got a L L cubed for blastic leukemia. Life was threatened and eventually died four years later. So same period where I’m doing all this and my both my kids went to excellent for periods of time. Noah was terribly stricken, and his wife hung on edge much of the time, and eventually it ended so that MDMA was also an important personal part. I wrote a book about it, and we did MDMA sessions. My wife and I, it’s awareness. I wrote a paper for maps in those days on blocking the name, but about being open as parents and not hypocrites, in terms of how we deal with our use, not exposing children to use like an LSD experience, but to use like an MDMA experience. We had family time. They didn’t involve themselves, but there was a centeredness and a cohesion with it that was, you know, part and parcel of what I was doing with other people. So it set me, it set me really into the whole thing about both grief and love and many experience. Answers after that around grief and helping people who losing people or potentially losing people, which I still do, as well as the methodologies of using psychedelics. But of course, it went underground and we lost it for no good reason, for terrible reasons, actually, and we’re only in a very convoluted way, getting back to it. So we talk in this talk, it’s always worthwhile to talk about the defamations of illegalization, which, which is what dominates our lives and and makes our attitudes and views kind of off in some ways, from what they should be. Illegalization makes us think that, for instance, MDMA is only good for PTSD or ketamine is which providers only good for TRD. But psychedelic medicines are about consciousness, and consciousness is enhancing when they work well, and their mind expansion. And they’re about freedom from from uh, obsession and rumination when they’re about freedom to expose oneself to new feelings, ideas and internal recognition of imbalance and to accentuate what we have in us as a guide. So the role of the therapist can be very constricted. Oh, I’m doing CBT, and I’m really locked into that, but in the world of psychedelics, the opportunity is for those things I’ve mentioned, and that’s the excitement of being a psychedelic therapist. Miracles do occur very frequently. They’re not always easy. Some are hard one, but they do occur, and they occur much more rapidly, on average, than conventional therapy. And the life of a therapist doing psychedelic medicine, I think, is much more enhanced, much more exciting and and I think, you know, people like myself are still doing it. I mean, I love still doing it right? 

Dr. Sandy Newes 17:26

I think that is such an interesting thing that you just and we could spend hours on this. So let just, but I just spoke to Dr. Keith heiserling from the trip center. He’s at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute. He’s a psychic researcher. And I spoke to Dr. Ron Siegel, who I know is a friend and collaborator of yours, and we were talking about the same thing that is about this, you know, the relationship between like healing as defined by the scientific methodology, which is largely symptom reduction. And I was trained as a psychotherapy outcome researcher. So, you know, we you have to use symptom reduction kind of as the guide. But you know, within that, you can build in all of these other constructs, but there has to be some objective measurement, which I think is a piece of what you’re talking about, that we then lose. Things can get too mechanistic, but psychedelics have opened up.

Dr. Phil Wolfson 18:17

Why does there have to be objective scientific measurement. Well, in

Dr. Sandy Newes 18:22

order to get something facilitated and re legalized, right? You know,

Dr. Phil Wolfson 18:28

most of it, see, this is the construct I’m talking about. In fact, there are maybe 50 million people, 3 million new users of MDMA. We know from emergency room visits that, you know, it’s very infrequent that people come in panic attacks. They don’t come with safety issues. Why do we always have to show safety issues for 100 people or 300 people, when we have 50 million people who have been safe on multiple users? So the evaluation is unfair. If you did the same evaluation in a legal period without all that scientific mumble jumble, and you extracted what was science, that would be interesting. But most of the issues are covered without the academic you know, stamp of approval. They’re covered, because people are successfully and safely using these medicines. So just, I’m just, you know, hammering at you a little bit around that kind of concept, because while it serves academic medicine and publications, it doesn’t really serve legalization or consciousness raising or the ability of people to obtain these substances.

Dr. Sandy Newes 19:52

Well, I’m with you on that. I’m just, you know, I’m kind of just pretty intrigued at this line, and you know how we do good science. Some good research. Yeah, I did wilderness therapy research for a chunk of time, and there’s very a lot of parallels, but, but the piece I want to kind of zero into here is that the role of, you know, consciousness expansion, the role of shifting consciousness, and then how that relates, you know, like, like, what are your thoughts about that? Like, we all kind of talk about it, but, you know, how can we as clinicians and medical providers, really, you know, do a better job of facilitating that while also kind of holding on to some of the mechanistic pieces that are mandated to us and do good work, right? I mean, how do we do the best healing work that we possibly can or if we go beyond healing, how do we shift consciousness? How do we do

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