Lester Grinspoon, a psychiatrist on the faculty of

Cannabis has been written about, albeit infrequently, as an adjunct to psychotherapy. The limited data available at this time are not altogether convincing. Moreover, my own experience in treating patients who are high on pot, while limited, is not impressive. The patient often has the conviction that there is heightened communication, understanding and insight, a sense which I as a therapist have usually not been able to experience. The drug does, however, appear to promote associational fluidity and, in view of this property, deserves more study as an adjunct to psychotherapy.[1]

    The book first appeared in 1971; since then, Grinspoon has partially revised his position. "I'm convinced that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater in 1966 when the profession washed its hands of psychedelic drugs and said, 'There's nothing here for us.' Insofar as marijuana represents a kind of moderated psychedelic experience, then you have to wonder if it couldn't be used in similar ways." Grinspoon notes that some people have used LSD to open up certain channels in themselves that they can later reenter through the milder drug, marijuana.
    Norman Zinberg is more skeptical. While conceding that some drugs are useful in the treatment of acutely disturbed patients, Zinberg questions the use of marijuana in a therapeutic or analytic relationship with relatively healthy patients. While acknowledging that marijuana may sometimes be useful to the social lives of the people who smoke it, Zinberg has strong doubts about its value in psychotherapy, where shortcuts are not necessarily helpful to the patient. The trick, he notes, is not just to get over certain inhibitions, but to find out what makes them important. Zinberg agrees that marijuana can be useful in helping the patient transcend inhibitions, but argues that this may be counterproductive to a real cure. Inhibitions are important, he maintains, "and the fact that a patient has them has to be respected and worked with. How these inhibitions serve you, and how they get in your way—that's what the therapeutic process is all about. When you get down to it, so you loved your mother or you didn't love your mother." In other words, psychotherapy is less interested in the content of the sessions—the understanding of which may indeed be facilitated by marijuana—than in the process itself, which may be distorted by it.
    Jenny, a psychotherapist and occasional marijuana user, shares Zinberg's skepticism, explaining with a smile:

There is a door that normally separates your conscious from your unconscious mind. When you're stoned, the door swings easily back and forth, giving you access from your conscious to your unconscious and back again. Now that's exciting, but it's not always helpful. The way I see it, if Freud had wanted you to know about these things, if he had wanted you to have such easy access to your unconscious, he wouldn't have given you the id, the ego, and the superego in various "warring" combinations to keep you from getting too close to the truth. In other words, he wouldn't have given you defenses.