Depersonalization, a condition where individuals feel detached from their own mind or body, involves a disruption of affect—the positive or negative felt valence that pervades experience. While depersonalized subjects do not lack affect entirely (they often find the condition unpleasant), they experience a deficit in affective immediacy: the direct motivational force that normally makes thoughts and behaviors intelligible. This account resolves the puzzle of how depersonalization can be an affective disorder without a complete loss of affect, and it illuminates the structure of affective experience, particularly how affect typically exerts rational authority over thought and action.
Psychedelic therapy, which uses moderate-to-large doses of psychedelics in a therapeutic context, shows promise for treating depression, addiction, and anxiety. This chapter proposes that the therapy works by generating a distinctive type of transformative experience, termed an affective shift, where a subject's affective attitudes change in a way that alleviates their psychological problem. This account is compared with other proposed psychological mechanisms, and the author argues that affective transformation is plausibly the key causal variable in psychedelic therapy.