Psychotherapy
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist in training practicing in Dalston and Stoke Newington, Hackney, East London.
Speaking Engagements
Alongside my clinical practice, I speak and write on psychoanalysis, psychedelic integration and drug policy, presenting at universities, conferences and public events, and contributing to podcasts. Below is a selection of that work.
Presentations and panel appearances
5-MeO-DMT Goes Viral: A Free Discussion in the Wake of Bryan Johnson’s Livestream
for The Psychedelic Society - 8th April 2026
In recent weeks, Bryan Johnson live streamed a high-dose 5-MeO-DMT experience to hundreds of thousands of viewers - bringing one of the most powerful psychedelics into the mainstream spotlight. The broadcast has sparked widespread curiosity, debate, and concern. From bold claims around longevity and “brain resets,” to questions about safety, dosing, and public influence, it raises an urgent question: What happens when something this intense, personal, and poorly understood goes viral? This rapid-response panel, hosted by the Psychedelic Society, brings together leading voices across research, therapy, and harm reduction to unpack the moment and provide grounded, evidence-informed perspectives.
The Great Revelation of the Mysteries: weirdness and epistemic injury in the clinic of psychedelic experience and beyond
at the Psychedelic Mysticism: Ritual, Religion, Weirdness and Integration workshop at University College Cork - 1 May 2026
As the use of psychedelics grows, as the sample size increases, so too will the weirdness and, in its wake, the epistemic injuries. These substances and the weirdest of the experiences they can precipitate, such as self loss, alien abductions and recovered memories of abuse or birth, can leave people questioning who they are and their ability to know what is real. Far from condemning their use on this count, contemporary psychoanalysis, with its commitment to methodological agnosticism, sees both personal and (cosmo)political value in such experimentation and the revelation of the mysteries…
for Psychedelicacies by Maya Bracknell-Watson at the Viktor Wynd Museum at the Last Tuesday Society - 11th December 2025
From earliest life every one of us is immersed in a world of pure novelty, preoccupied with weaving the fluctuations of experience into a stable and coherent tapestry. We theorise and construct understandings and expectations of space, time, the social world and ourselves within it from the threads of culture we happen upon in our maturation. Yet novelty insists upon us, disrupting all attempts to complete the picture. Protected by only this thinnest of veils, every so often we experience something so apparently novel it creates a hole in the very fabric of our reality. These rips, tears and ruptures can undermine faith in our habitual ways of knowing, our own memories and even our sensory perceptions themselves, demanding suture. In this talk we will draw on contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of trauma, revelation, gaslighting and eye witness testimony to think about some of the more far-out experiences that can be engendered by psychedelics, and one of their unfortunate results, epistemic injury.
at Kings College for PsyAware & Maudsley Psychedelic Society - 22nd November 2025
Ego, Death, Ego (re)Birth – What Can Be Said of the Psychedelic Experience?
for Lacan in Scotland - 25 September 2025
The word psychedelic, referring to a class of substances including LSD and magic mushrooms, is a portmanteau of psyche (mind or soul) and delos (revealing). While the perceptual changes, including changes in self-perception, have been the subject of psychological exploration, there is considerably less work looking at the effects of psychedelics from a psychoanalytic perspective. The word psychedelic, referring to a class of substances including LSD and magic mushrooms, is a portmanteau of psyche (mind or soul) and delos (revealing). While the perceptual changes, including changes in self-perception, have been the subject of psychological exploration, there is considerably less work looking at the effects of psychedelics from a psychoanalytic perspective. In this talk, Timmy Davis will draw on insights from Lacan to explore the subjective impact of psychedelics, in both clinical and non-clinical contexts. Building on ideas introduced in his 2020 Lacunae article, ‘New, Strange, Odd and Weird Perceptions – A Lacanian Approach to Psychedelic Experience’, Timmy will argue that psychedelic drugs have the capacity to precipitate experiences beyond the signifier and castration. These experiences can be understood to harbour the potential to both destabilise and open unforeseen possibilities for subjectivity, having clinical utility but also posing certain risks. Using clinical material from his work with The Psychedelic Experience Clinic, the presentation will conclude by elaborating a new way of conceiving the potential difficulties that can emerge in the wake of psychedelic experience, and how these difficulties relate to, and shed light upon their utility as a treatment.
A Medical Monoculture or the Blooming of 1000 Flowers? Identifying and mitigating barriers to accessing psychedelic medicines post market authorisation.
at All Things Fungi festival - 13th September 2025
A number of psychedelic medicines are in late stage clinical trials leading many to ask the question of what happens when these drugs reach market. Who will get access and how? Are our current infrastructures adequately prepared to deliver psychedelic medicines? By reflecting on the nature of these interventions, scrutinising current routes of access to mental health treatments, and by taking lessons from cannabis and ketamine, this talk will explore a provisional model of access which reduces risks and maximises benefits. Two interventions required to achieve it will be presented.
The Psychoanalysis of so-called ‘ecodelia’ and the construct of nature connectedness in psychedelic research
at the Nature and its Discontents conference for SIPP/IPSS at University of Essex - 25th June 2025
In 1956 an amateur mycologist, and banker, journeyed to Mexico in search of a mysterious mushroom said to produce mystical visions. Only one indigenous shaman would share knowledge of the mushroom with these western visitors, and in doing so played a vital role in the emergence of a wave of psychedelic research across North America and Europe, being ostracised from her community in the process. This research coincided with a counter cultural movement concerned with civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam war and nuclear weapons, and with a growing interest in eastern philosophies and environmentalism. After 50 years of international suppression following the imposition of global US led prohibitionist drug policies, these substances are being studied once again. Recent clinical trials indicate the promise of using psychedelics in the treatment of a variety of psychiatric conditions, and suggest a role in increasing pro-environmental concern and behaviour. Research has found that questionnaire scores of 'nature connectedness' can increase for up to 2 years following a psychedelic experience, regardless of whether the experience takes place outside or in a clinical hospital setting. Some researchers have gone as far as to say that "feeling part of nature is a primary facet of the psychedelic experience". Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Felix Guattari, Harold Searles, Betty Eisner, Timothy Leary, Michel Henry, mysticism and contemporary psychedelic research this talk will scrutinise these findings and the concept of ‘ecodelia’ (oikos = home, delos = reveal), providing a contemporary psychoanalytic reading of the mechanism and phenomenology of psychedelic drug action.
Must We Burn Jules Evans? A Critical Approach to Ontological Shock and Psychedelic Risk
at the UCL SAP - 18 February 2025
There are risks involved in the use of psychedelic substances. The acute experience can be challenging, power over vulnerable trippers can be abused, distressing symptoms can persist past the acute effects of the drug and there can be social reentry problems. The work of Jules Evans and the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project has highlighted these dangers and acted as a corrective force to the idealisation of these ‘magic’ substances characteristic of early on in the hype cycle. How useful are the underlying assumptions and findings of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project to ongoing drug policy reform efforts and the psychedelic clinic? Could this discourse which has been criticised as ‘fear mongering’ be colluding with decades of stigma contributing to the continued prohibition of psychedelic substances? Could too close a focus on safety sterilise the radical potential of the use of these substances? Or does their work provide a sobering antidote to idealisation, evangelism and wilful ignorance of risk and danger resulting from the wishful desire for quick (profitable) fix for suffering? In this talk I will take a critical perspective based in both the psychoanalytic clinic of psychedelic difficulties and policy work challenging decades of stigma to critically evaluate the work of Jules Evans and the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. Putting forward a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective on metapsychology and consent I will argue that it is precisely in the high risk nature of these substances that their value lies both for society and the individual.
A Medical Monoculture or the Blooming of 1000 Flowers? Identifying and mitigating barriers to accessing psychedelic medicines post market authorisation
for IDPAT at Trinity College Dublin - 25 October 2024
Identifying and mitigating barriers to accessing psychedelic medicines
The Power of Love and the Love of Power - The relational dynamics of healing, abuse, cults and totalitarian systems
part of the Antiuniversity festival at Caracol, Norwich - October 16, 2024
What do the relationships between parent and child, therapist and patient, guru and disciple, adept and initiate, teacher and student, sub and dom, beloved and lover, despot and subject all have in common? and how do they differ? When does the presence of power become an abuse of power? and can it be undone? In this talk Timmy Davis will use psychoanalysis and philosophy to explore the place of power in life and transformation.
Technicolour Highway - psychedelics and psychotherapy
at 'A Freudian Trip? Psychoanalysis and Psychedelic Experience' by the Guild of Psychotherapists' Psychoanalysis at the Margins series - 14th January 2023
at Breaking Convention, University of Exeter - 21st April 2023
In this talk I will sketch four major ways in which psychedelics have been used in western psychiatry. Psychedelic therapy, psycholytic therapy, radical psychotherapy, and pseudodelic psychotherapy each posit a distinct methodology and theory of therapeutic efficacy. By situating them in relation to one another, their precursors and contemporaries, and within historical context, I will argue that there is no one size fits all way of using psychedelics in therapy and nor should there be.The history of psychiatry is a history of ideas about the nature of distress and its treatment - and the placebo. The popularity of these various models and their efficacy, is not only determined by, but determines, what is considered to be 'true'. This history is an ongoing negotiation between seekers and providers of treatment, which results in many therapeutic modalities falling by the wayside whilst others gain in popularity and thrive, only to be themselves surpassed by novel or revived therapeutics which capture the popular imagination. The waxing and waning of effect sizes over the lifespan of a treatment is at least in part due to changes in the popular imagination too, with novel treatments often perceived to be the result of scientific progress and touted by 'experts' to be the answer to the suffering of desperate patients - consider for example the drop in cases of possession and exorcism simultaneous to the increasing popularity of mesmerism during the enlightenment, or the rise and fall of effect sizes in trials of SSRI antidepressants since the 1980s.Psychedelic therapeutics are of course not immune to these forces. Arguably the vicissitudes of the personal and popular imagination (for example hope and expectation, hype and stigma - set and setting) may have more power in determining their effects and efficacy than other treatments, leading some researchers to conceive of psychedelics as suggestive technologies, or super-placebos, and to note their power as tools of belief transmission and enculturation.I will argue that the move towards standardisation and manualisation of psychedelic therapeutics is not only ethically problematic but could possibly limit their potential efficacy. Could a focus on the specificity of each seeker of treatment mitigate these issues? Research, regulation, and provision of these treatments should lean into a plurality of containers, each to be determined in dialogue between seeker and provider. What might this look like?
at Breaking Convention 'Worlds Collide' - 2nd July 2022
Panel discussion on key issues around psychedelics featuring Amanda Feilding, Angela Prusa, Ozan Polat, Timmy Davis and Ben Sessa. Chaired by Alexander Beiner.
Psilocybin Access Rights: A Call to Action
at UKC Psychedelic Society - 23rd November 2021
This coming Tuesday we welcome one of our most anticipated guests in Timmy Davis; a previous President of the Psychedelic Society here at UKC who has since gone on to integrate his knowledge of the psychedelic world into a thriving career!
The Future of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy: Ethics, Accessibility and the Community
at Psilocybin London Symposium for The Psychedelic Society and PsyAware - 15th October 2021
Panel with Dr Rosalind Watts, Timmy Davis, Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, Leonie Schneider and Ian Roullier. With their combined extensive knowledge and experience of therapeutic psilocybin use, our mushroom experts will explore how psilocybin is shaking up psychiatry and what open-access psilocybin therapy could entail for the future of human culture.
Psilocybin Access Rights: A Call to Action
at Breaking Convention the Intermission August - 14, 2021
Shamanism, Hypnotism and Psychiatry: Psychedelics in the History of Trance - 23/4/2021
at DNA Royal Holloway Transcending Taboo: Drugs, Society and You conference - 23rd April 2021
He will be discussing how the re-emergence of psychedelics into psychiatry can be considered the most recent chapter in the history of trance, and should be informed by those that preceded it. He will make his case by explaining that, through their incorporation into psychiatry, psychedelics are characteristically amplifying under-considered or repressed aspects not only of patients’ minds, but also of clinical pharmacological research and drug policy more generally.
Mysticism as Modus Loquendi:
The radical potential of speaking about the divine & Panel Q&A
Psychedelics, Madness & Awakening: Harm Reduction and Future Visions - January 2021
The hegemonic, contemporary understanding of ‘mysticism’ reduces it to a particular and ephemeral ‘state of consciousness’ which can be induced at will with the use of psychedelic substances. I will argue that clinical research into psychedelic substances is continuing a domestication process in which ‘the mystical’ has been emptied of its radical potential. I argue that the notion of mysticism can be historicised and particularised, through studying the lives of the saints. Doing so leads us to see that mystical discourse has historically been a mode of resistance to patriarchal and ecclesiastical power, and as such has been subject to a pathologisation attempting to undo its radical personal and political potential. Through examining the dynamic at work in the mutual implication of madness/mysticism, I hope to bring new light to this revolutionary discourse, defining it as an emancipatory modus loquendi. Understanding mysticism as a modus loquendi creates a space in which the voices of those who claim to have experiences of the divine can be heard and understood, allowing divergent and disruptive subjects to speak their experiences and/or be born as subjects in their own right.
Conservative Drug Policy Reform & Road to Legalising Psychedelics Panel Q&A
at the Drug Science Student Psychedelic Conference - 30th January 2021
THOU ART NOT THAT - Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Bad Trip
at Breaking Convention at the University of Greenwich - 16th August 2019
This talk will use Lacanian psychoanalysis to give an account of the ‘bad trip’, as a way of exploring the potential for a psychoanalytic understanding of psychedelic experience more generally. What is the ‘hell’ one fathoms when they experience a ‘bad trip’? And how does one end up there? In order to answer these questions we will explore Lacan’s notion of the subject, the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. I will examine the hellish ‘bad trip’ by explicating the notion of 'ego death' via Lacan’s understanding of psychosis and mysticism, Kristeva’s notions of the khora and the abject, as well as advaita vedanta and the horror genre. Freud argued that mystical ‘oceanic feeling’ was a regression to an undifferentiation with the mother. Stanislav Grof posited that psychedelics can take us even further back, to literally experience our prenatal and perinatal lives. My Lacanian account posits prenatal, perinatal and many ‘transpersonal experiences’ are purely fantasmatic, arguing that the psychedelic experience is a topological rather than chronological regression. We will see that Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on language, its unique formulation of subjective experience and the distinction between the ‘subject of enunciation’ and the ‘enunciated subject’, is well placed to provide a comprehensive model of the subjective phenomena of psychedelic experience. Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a critical discourse with which to talk about these phenomena that neither posits a metaphysics, as many popular quasi-religious models are wont to do, nor falls victim to the same naive psychological realism as cognitive-neuroscientific models. I will argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis has the potential to provide a comprehensive, nuanced understanding of the subjective effects precipitated by psychedelic substances.
THOU ART NOT THAT - Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Bad Trip
at UKC Psychedelic Society - 27th February 2018
This talk aims to sketch a psychoanalytic account of the bad trip. The what, how and why of this experience and its relation to mysticism and healing will be explored with reference to Lacan, Kristeva, Advaita Vedanta and the horror genre.
Hosting, panel chairing and interviews
for The Psychedelic Experience Clinic - 2024-present
Soul Activism — Anouchka Grose - 30th September 2026
Ketamine in the context of a long term psychoanalytic therapy — Kevin Barrett - 29th July 2026
'New Beginning': A Balintian Account of Psychedelic Healing — CJ Healy - 27th May 2026
The dynamics of transference in psychedelic work — Mijal Schmidt - 29th October 2025
Charismatogens — Prof Nicolas Langlitz MD PhD - 24th September 2025
Psychedelics and the Science of Mysticism — Nathan Gorelick - 27th August 2025
Working with Erotic Feelings in PAT — Pat Song PhD - 30th July 2025)
A journey from psychedelics to embodiment and wildness — Nick Totton - 25th June 2025
The Psychedelic Renascence of Democracy — Prof Oliver Davis - 30th April 2025
Illusion, Disillusionment: a Winnicottian framework for PAT — Lawrence Fischman - 26 March 2025
Anxiety as Vibration: a psychosocial cartography — Ana Minozzo - 26th February 2025
Portals, Dreams, & Memory — Noel Bohl-Fabian, LCSW - 29th January 2025
The Psychedelic Experience Clinic Launch Event
With Jules Evans, Ian Roullier, Jeffrey Guss, Rick Boothby - 25th September 2024
This fundraiser event will introduce the need for our service and why psychoanalysis is well placed to provide it.
for OPEN Foundation - Sharday Mosurinjohn, Jussi Jyllka, Martha Santuccio, Peter Sjostedt-Hughes - 11th December 2023
Exploring the Metaphysical Nature of Psychedelic Experiences. This panel features a number of psychedelic researchers with extensive knowledge in the field of metaphysics. Together, they will engage in a discussion about the metaphysical nature of psychedelic experiences themselves and their place in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and personal growth. First, terms will be defined, specifically what distinguishes metaphysics from mysticism and abstract concepts more generally. Then, the panelists will look critically at the role of metaphysics in psychedelic therapy as it is employed today. What role should it play for patients exactly? And are there alternatives to the current methods?
at PSYCH Symposium - 6th July 2023
Panel with Liam Modlin, Ashleigh Beiner-Murphy and Iain Roullier
With both an increase in psychedelic clinical trials and adoption of new regulations allowing access to psychedelic therapies, the need for trained facilitators and therapists who can provide these services becomes vital. Drawing on the recent developments in policy, this PSYCH Symposium panel discussed the urgency of companies needing to train therapists before this becomes a roadblock for patients and companies, the unique nuances of this specific role, and how crucial they will be in ensuring the development of a roadmap to psychedelic therapies in new markets.
Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics II: Historic Encounters - Panel Discussion
for the Maudsley Psychedelic Society - 7th May 2021
An online panel discussion between Dr Sarah Marks, Professor Wendy Kline and Professor Erika Dyck. This event, the second in a series titled “Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics”, looked to initiate a conversation between contemporary psychoanalysis and psychedelic research. Pre-recorded lectures from each speaker can be found on the MPS channel under 'Psychedelic and Psychoanalysis' playlist. Proceeds from ticket sales went to Mind's Psychosis Project. Hosted by Timmy Davis.
Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics: The Inaugural Event
for the Maudsley Psychedelic Society - 12th February 2021
An online panel discussion between Andrew Feldmar, Paul Zeal and Nathan Gorelick. This event, the inaugural event in a series titled “Psychoanalysis and Psychedelics”, looked to initiate a conversation between contemporary psychoanalysis and psychedelic research. Pre-recorded lectures from each speaker can be found on the channel under 'Psychedelic and Psychoanalysis' playlist. Proceeds from ticket sales went to Mind's Psychosis Project. Hosted by Timmy Davis.
How Data Collection and Tech Will Change Everything about Psychedelic Research
for PsyTechGlobal - October 27th 2020
Timmy Davis interviews Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of Centre for Psychedelic Research: Imperial College London. He discusses how data collection and technology are changing the way we can track the effect of therapies on patients. Previously, the results were gathered after the therapeutic event, but now clinicians and researchers can see results in real-time, thereby increasing the efficiency with which we understand how psychedelic therapies work.
UKC Psychedelic Society research lecture series
at the University of Kent in Canterbury - 2014-2017
Podcasts
#112 Psilocybin Access RightsLiving Mirrors podcast with Dr James Cooke - 19th May 2023
Timmy Davis at the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group discusses evidence based drug policy
Thankyou Plant Medicine podcast with Joe Vaughan - 28th May 2021
Lacanian Psychoanalysis & Psychedelics
Rendering Unconscious podcast with Dr Vanessa Sinclair - 3rd February 2021