PSYCHEDELIC THERAPY AS AFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATION
Transformation and the History of Philosophy January 1, 2023 Adam Bradley
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.