Dreams, hallucinogenic drug states, and schizophrenia share fundamental similarities, particularly in the breakdown of ego boundaries—the capacity to synthesize self-representations into a coherent self. This impairment compromises reality-oriented secondary process thinking and allows florid primary process attributes to emerge, explaining many common features of these states. The hallucinogenic drug model of psychosis was initially attractive but has fallen out of favor. Current neurophysiological theories emphasize serotonin neurotransmission in regulating dream and hallucinogenic states, and the analogy suggests serotonin may also play a role in regulating schizophrenic states.
MDMA-assisted therapy for trauma is unusually effective, partly because the therapist's full trust in the participant's inner healing intelligence—analogous to the body's self-healing—helps trauma survivors who struggle with trust to engage the therapist as a witness. The medication enhances trust subjectively. This therapeutic attitude parallels how a relational psychoanalyst acts as witness in resolving dissociative enactment. Trusting one's inner healing intelligence is dynamically equivalent to trusting the relational process, making it a process of feeling witnessed. The therapist's willingness to acknowledge limitations, coupled with conviction that the participant's primary need is to feel witnessed, facilitates integration of dissociated experience.
Self-touch, particularly the form observed in infant engagement with transitional objects, provides a pre-reflective sense of mine-ness that grounds experience during states of self-loss. These transitional states include absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization. Drawing on examples from Rodin, Dante, and the Beatles, along with neurophysiological research, predictive processing models, and phenomenological perspectives on touch, the author argues that self-touch serves as a template for experiencing oneself as both subject and object, thereby maintaining a sense of reality and grounding in experiences where the self is diminished or dissolved.