Ego Dissolution or Self-Expansion? A Relational Reframing of Psychedelic Self-Experience
Abstract
<p>Psychedelic experiences are often described through the language of “ego dissolution,” a phrase that appears to rest on a vertical model of mind in which ordinary egoic identity overlays deeper unconscious, authentic, or transpersonal layers of experience. This paper argues that while psychedelics can profoundly alter self-experience, the language of ego dissolution imports a questionable metapsychology. Drawing on interpersonal psychoanalysis, relational psychoanalysis, and self-state models, I propose that psychedelic self-alteration is better understood as a temporary reorganization and expansion of self-experience. Rather than dissolving a central ego, psychedelics may loosen the boundaries among self-states, bodily affect, autobiographical memory, interpersonal expectation, and world. This framework shifts clinical attention away from the search for a concealed truth beneath the ego and toward the relational conditions under which newly available self-states can be recognized, metabolized, and integrated.</p>
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