“She Told Me So”: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Plant Third and the Messages from Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca users often report receiving “messages” or a silent “voice” experienced as coming from an external instance that is neither the self nor other humans present. Building on Diament, Gomes, and Tófoli’s notion of a “plant third party,” we rename this phenomenon the plant third to foreground the field in which alterity is encountered. We first read the plant third through Lacanian transference, showing how ayahuasca may become a Subject Supposed to Know whose presumed unerring pedagogy contrasts with the analyst’s ethical refusal of completeness. We then propose a transmatricial articulation with object-relations traditions, linking the plant voice to Winnicottian potential space, Bionian reverie and alpha-functioning, and the “field of dreaming” in which an interpreting self emerges. To avoid collapsing Indigenous ontologies into psychological projection, we mobilize Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism and controlled equivocation, treating the plant third and the analytic third as false equivalents that illuminate one another while remaining ontologically incommensurate. We close by outlining implications for psychotherapy and post-ritual integration, including the risks of literalization and the need for mediating thirds.