Expansion and Regression in Oceanic Experience: A Model of Psychedelic Consciousness for Psychoanalysis, by Karen Peoples and Megan Rundel, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 35 no. 6, 2025.
This paper examines the clinical and theoretical implications of psychedelic-assisted psychoanalysis through an in-depth case study of âDanielâ (not his real name), a middle-aged man with chronic anxiety, shame, sexual inhibition, and severe self-criticism rooted in early relational trauma. There used to be more people doing psychoanalysis and related therapies while on psychedelic drugs, because the peak popularity of psychoanalysis coincided with the period when psychedelics were both popular and legal. The paper shows that, in a particular guided environment, a psychoactive drug â ketamine â had positive effects in remembering and re-experiencing oceanic flow-states and processing dissociated emotions. The articleâs focused on what happens when someone undergoes psychoanalysis while on drugs. Against the view that this causes âregressionâ (i.e. the analyst relates to an earlier, usually childlike, aspect of the patient), psychedelic experience is taken as a âunique expanded state of consciousnessâ and âa powerful force for healingâ.
We are told that Daniel is a straight, middle-class white man in his 50s, raised Catholic in the US midwest, who was paralysed by sexual anxiety in his relationship with a partner, and was also an avid collector who struggled to part with anything. Heâs described as obsessional, relentlessly self-critical, and prone to unproductive rumination. (The power of defence-mechanisms to derail the analytic process is a recurring problem in psychoanalysis of obsessive personalities). He had been a sensitive, creative, and ikmaginative child who was less able to rebel than his older sister. His mother was volatile, eccentric, and obsessed with keeping up appearances and his father was often absent. She sometimes threw things and routinely humiliated Daniel, but she was also needy and distressed when he moved away. Daniel internalized his motherâs âharsh and humiliating voiceâ in self-criticism as weak and pathetic, but idealized his parents and upbringing as perfect. His anger, fear, shame, and sadness had all been walled-off and turned against himself. This was accompanied by an internal prohibition on anger, neediness, and sexual feelings, of which he was unaware. He had a pattern of falling in love with older women who usually rejected him. In analysis, he formed a dependent transference and tormented himself about needy and sexual feelings.
Danielâs treatment included (at his own request) ketamine-assisted psychoanalytic sessions embedded within a long-term analytic relationship. Experiences on ketamine were both unsettling and brought positive moments. Daniel gradually developed tolerance of the loosened boundaries he experienced on the drug, and found respite from his self-criticism. Ketamine sessions initially facilitated access to dissociated affects and regressive material, including grief and abandonment anxiety, highlighting both the therapeutic potential and risks of regression when containment is fragile.
The second session was dominated by abandonment fears triggered by the analystâs vacation, and guilt related to these fears, which had reached persecutory proportions. This session seems to have had destabilising effects, and the authors relate this to a desire for a merger with an unconscious ideal mother. They take this as an undesirable defence-mechanism related to early deprivation of such experiences. Daniel then demanded more ketamine sessions, but the analyst instead worked on building his capacity for self-containment and softening persecutory feelings of self-hatred.
The third session went better, with the analyst encouraging the formation of an âobserving ego⊠outside the emotional stormâ and with âself-compassionâ and acceptance of feelings. In other words, the use of drugs helped the analystâs project of strengthening the patientâs ego, by rapidly bringing down the strong defence mechanisms which otherwise prevented access to what the patient (from the analystâs point of view) needed to integrate. They add that this also requires that analysts be prepared to surrender into a state of fusion with the analysand. In this session, Daniel moved fluidly through multiple states of consciousness: somatic and emotional regression, liminal reverie, autobiographical memory, and ultimately a profound unitive experience characterized by ego dissolution, awe, and a sense of spiritual vastness.
The article focuses on a particular moment which was a kind of breakthrough. Recalling a formative adolescent memory of swimming at night beneath a star-filled sky, Daniel described a moment of âvanishingâ that permanently altered his sense of self and spirituality. This expansive state then functioned as a psychic container, enabling him to process previously inaccessible grief, rage, and terror associated with family death, religion, and early neglect, which had previously been dissociated and inaccessible to the analysandâs ego and to the therapist. The authors interpret this as an expanded state of consciousness (âat-one-ment with O,â in Bionâs terms) rather than a return to infantile symbiosis. After the breakthrough, Daniel was able to grieve the loss of his relatives.
This experience functioned as a psychic container, enabling Daniel to access and metabolize profound grief, rage, and loss that had previously been dissociated. Daniel recalled negative experiences of swimming and church, fear and anger at his grandmotherâs funeral, and enjoyment of burying toys and watching them be uncovered by the waves.
Theoretically, the authors focus on how non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOS), facilitated by ketamine, challenge traditional psychoanalytic assumptions that unitive or âoceanicâ experiences necessarily reflect regression to infantile symbiosis or pathological fusion.Drawing on contemporary psychoanalysis, infant research, and psychedelic neuroscience, the authors argue that classical notions of infantile symbiosis and regression are theoretically flawed and clinically limiting. They propose instead that psychedelic experiences often induce expanded states of consciousness that are not tied to developmental time. These states, characterized by ego loosening, awe, and experiences of unity, can be normative, transformative, and developmentally progressive rather than regressive.
Neuroscientific findings are integrated to show how psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network (DMN) and hierarchical predictive coding, allowing bottom-up sensory and affective material to emerge. In neuroscience, the DMN is involved in rumination, self-assessment, fixed ideas of self and others, and âownershipâ of thoughts. It is most active when at rest or thinking about oneself. A different network, the Salience Network (SN) mediates between internal and external stimuli. Hierarchical predictive coding refers to domination of the emotional parts of the brain by the âhigherâ cortical regions involved in conceptual thought. It tends to make people more prone to stereotype and oblivious to sensuous experience. People âsee what they effect to see,â effectively hallucinating their preconceptions over and over. Toning-down or turning-off the DMN and hierarchical predictive coding makes people more open-minded and less rigid, but also undermines their ego-boundaries. The authors also cite evidence that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity and access to primary process phenomena.
This neurobiological process parallels psychoanalytic aims: loosening rigid self-narratives, accessing dissociated affects, and facilitating the emergence of primary process material (i.e. material such as dreams, personal symbolism, and the basis for symptoms). Psychedelics are thus framed as amplifiers of psychoanalytic work rather than substitutes for it. The case of Daniel illustrates how psychedelic-assisted sessions can involve both regressive and expansive processes. Early ketamine sessions elicited childlike dependency, abandonment anxiety, and regressive longings tied to Danielâs unmet early needs and harsh internalized mother. These experiences required careful containment within the analytic relationship.
To conceptualize such phenomena, the authors propose a continuum model of consciousness with two axes: developmental maturation (regression/progression over time) and degree of differentiation (from ordinary waking consciousness to undifferentiated, ineffable states). They delineate five overlapping modes of consciousness: ordinary/finite, emotional/sensory, liminal, archetypal/social unconscious, and ineffable/infinite. They also argue that psychological health depends on flexibility across these states rather than fixation in any single mode. Psychedelic experiences may involve regression along the developmental axis, expansion along the consciousness axis, or both simultaneously.
The types of experience the authors theorise are:
Ordinary/finite: where people feel themselves as egos with definite boundaries and cunctions, and make distinctions to navigate an external world. This is the usual experience today and is also where conscious insight occurs.
Emotional/sensory: overarching, usually conscious feelings of like (affinity) and dislike (aversion), and of emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and pleasure. This also encompasses bodily flow-experience. People can have a witnessing ego at these times, and if they donât, they might experience the emotions as persecutory âthingsâ separate from them.
Liminal: primary process experiencing similar to dreams, midway between conscious and unconscious. Includes imaginative experience.
Archetypal/social unconscious a state where ego categorizing is near-absent and people are receptive to culturally charged, collective symbols. Common in large group experiences and after trauma.
Ineffable/infinite or unitive: the most undifferentiated kind of experience, in which thinking and language are suspended; found in mystical experiences, psychedelic experiences, and advanced meditation.
From the article; the letters stand for the five experience-types.
The authors argue that interpreting such experiences solely as regression to infantile symbiosis misconstrues their clinical meaning and risks foreclosing therapeutic growth. The position he criticises is derived from Freud, who regarded oceanic feelings as returns to an early infantile experience of imagined symbiosis with the mother. On this basis, analysts (including leading theorists like Klein and Balint) have come to see cases of patients experiencing symbiosis with the analyst as pathological and undesirable. However, the authors side with Goldberg, who thinks that fusion is normal and desirable: a person with a well-lived life will have a sense of communion with the world, even if there are pathological variations on how it arises or is understood.
Neuroscientific findings regarding the default mode network, predictive coding, and psychedelic-induced ego dissolution are integrated to support the idea that psychedelics relax rigid top-down self-narratives, allowing bottom-up sensory, affective, and symbolic material to emerge. Within a context providing sufficient relational and analytic containment, this dedifferentiation can foster psychological flexibility, insight, and emotional integration.
Clinically, the paper emphasizes the analystâs role as container and witness rather than interpreter during psychedelic sessions, advocating for an attitude of openness, ânot-knowing,â and receptivity to expanded states. Automatic interpretation of unitive experiences as regression, the authors warn, risks foreclosing therapeutic growth and misunderstanding patientsâ lived experiences.
In the important third ketamine session, the authors suggest that Daniel moved through a series of states, including regressive and transitional ones, with a dedifferentiation and loosening of his self-identity. This initially leads to a liminal experience marked by chill. This triggered memories of church and swimming, which the authors take as screen memories for the motherâs coldness. These passed via the alternative model of his sisterâs confidence to the experience of the âfort-da gameâ of the sea uncovering toys, followed by the swim in which he took on confidence similar to his sisterâs. This is when the undifferentiated ineffable experience occurred.
The paper concludes that psychedelic-assisted psychoanalysis offers a powerful opportunity to expand psychoanalytic theory beyond entrenched developmental and ego-centric frameworks. By recognizing unitive states as potentially formative, existentially meaningful, and therapeutically generative, psychoanalysis can more fully engage with the depth and range of human consciousness, advancing its core aim of liberating patients from constricting self-narratives and defenses. When met without reductive assumptions, such states can loosen entrenched self-concepts, support affective working-through, and open patients to enduring experiences of meaning, connection, and psychic freedom. However, the authors also emphasise that the positive process was only possible because of earlier and later work on tolerating ego dissolution, and because this self-containment was aided by the analystâs role as container.
Excuse me while I recalibrate the flux capacitor.
What it means for radicals: The authors share with many psychoanalysts the normative goal of increasing ego-integration, and their judgements of success and failure are relative to this goal. I think this paper discusses regression, defences, and so on in a way which is too normative. This said, as Iâve argued before, ego-integration and ego-strength are not necessarily bad goals â particularly if they donât require strengthening of the hierarchical subordination of sensuous experience to conceptual thought. The ideal of a watcher-self which can observe yet remain unaffected by emotional flows is rather common today, and may be better than a dissociation of self and emotions â but I wonder if itâs also a form of dissociation, in which the reality of affect in relation to the outer world is cut-off by an intervening ego. Ketamine has both dissociative and hallucinogenic effects. Is it the dissociative effects which allow an observer-self to be constructed?
The valuation of flow-states is common in radical work, particularly the thought of Hakim Bey, and to an extent the Situationists, Stirner, Reich, etc. In Bey, flow-states are taken to be the source of meaning in life, the basis of non-alienated experience, and the main source of resistance to the system. Flow-states arenât always transformative, and the authorsâ concern with the possibility that they can be experienced in paranoid ways, as floods of terrifying emotion, is an important qualification here. People may have to let down their character-armour and defence-mechanisms to some degree, before flow-states can have the desired effect.
An aspect not discussed in the paper is the sociological context. Daniel came to therapy in a rather seriously traumatised state. This was the case in spite of positionally optimal conditions (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), because of the specific dynamics in his family. Indeed, the psychoanalytic case-record suggests that this kind of trauma is rather common in such conditions. At the same time, these problems â the widespread psychological suffering caused by the neurotic effects of modernity â are largely invisible, and kept so by psychiatry. Anyone who knew Daniel outside analysis probably took him for a healthy normie. In future, I think, papers like this will be read as evidence of the horrors of todayâs civilisation. And a realisation that positionally âprivilegedâ people are also alienated, traumatised, and immiserated by the system is a necessary corrective on political approaches (identity-political, leftist, etc.) which imagine that redressing social inequalities will also address alienation and trauma.
The theory of modes of experiencing is interesting in its own right, and itâs worth a reader looking through the list and asking which of these they can remember having experienced and when. Fixation in the ordinary-finite mode would seem to be typical of normies in alienated societies. However, critiques of this mode can fall into any of the other modes (or others as yet untheorised). Iâd particularly draw attention here to the archetypal/collective function, which the authors note is common on a large-group level, and is thus likely to crop up a lot in politics. Ideologies like identity politics, the alt-right, the Third Way, populism of all kinds, moral panics, counterinsurgency narratives, etc., seem to me to rely on this function, not on the ordinary ego function. And they often lead to worse effects than if people were using their ordinary egos in the political sphere.
Also, I think there is a desire for immersive oceanic experiences â perhaps Freudâs death-drive, perhaps not â that is met by certain kinds of actual flow-experience, but is also offered as an implied promise of a great many other projects, from advertising to political liberation. After reading this piece, I realised both that attacks on modern reason are missing the target, and that many people imagine they are having ineffable experiences when in fact they are having archetypal/collective experiences (a surrender to a collective flow, often under someone elseâs control, in which they are passive and receptive). The âmarketingâ of such surrender with the promise of ineffable experience â which never comes â is central to its appeal, although the very marketing can develop manic states which imitate oceanic experience. I suspect that everything from the reassurance promoted by police dramas to the appeal of suicide bombing, not to forget the appeal of identity politics, are rooted in such misleading marketing of archetypal states as oceanic states.
I was also struck by the similarities between the kind of obsessional self-criticism Daniel automatically engaged in, which formed such a barrier to healing, and the type of âreflexivityâ, guilt-politics, and group self-criticism which have become fashionable under the influence of identity politics (and which is imported from Maoism). Such practice is the opposite of healing, disalienation, and liberation, packaged as a forerunner or an essential part of these.