*Psychoanalysis and Psychedelic Psychotherapy – A New Modern Synthesis? DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109095*

grip of anxiety and fear. They reveal what portion of our character and conditioned behaviors are the results of protective survival strategies that served well in negotiating family-of-origin situations. As these sclerotic structures soften, like a candle melting, they reorganize toward softer positions that are enabled within the current context where the provision of safety, care and attuned attention are offered in the treatment situation. An individual's gifts and intelligence, formerly directed toward systems of protection, become freshly available to be directed toward play and harnessed toward curiosity, exploration, imagination and joy. During this bountiful creative state, the possibility of rediscovering identity, along with a sense of essential self-energy, represents a path to wholeness—a process of integration and actualization, through individuation and growth. In Playing and Reality [10], Donald Winnicott describes "Playing, which cannot be dissociated from creativity and a sense of 'enjoyment,' is an 'intensely real' experience that has intrinsic therapeutic virtue, that is to say it is capable of promoting 'self-healing'." In the theater of the psychedelic experience, knowledge is accessed, conflicts are addressed, and developmental arrest is negotiated and solved.

Knowledge about the personal past and the creation of the existing self-architecture is discovered as an artifact in the experience itself. Information is received with highly inventive symbolic expression, analogous to the creativity of dream work, but in this instance the dream is *lucid* and the setting provides the dream elements and dream furniture. Different self-states and introjects may be accessed, to be grasped and compassionately listened to for self-reclamation, expansion and integration [11]. Narratives and storylines that have dominated belief and identity systems and which contribute to the limitation of experience are brought into awareness to afford a more deliberate self-authorship, freedom of choice and invention, and the exhilarating possibility of new experience.

**Inner Healing Intelligence**—The central principle in psychedelic psychotherapy is one that recognizes the capacity inherent in living systems perpetually to re-establish equilibrium, restore and recover toward wholeness and wellbeing. To activate this innate capacity, one must both remove the obstacles that inhibit healing, and provide adequate conditions for recovery, healing and growth [12, 13]. Consider human ontogenesis as a model: at birth, every infant contains the blueprint and potential for development and growth but the unfolding process depends heavily on the provision of an adequate environment for full developmental progression and mental, emotional, physical and spiritual thriving. The inference here is that as coupled living systems, we innately possess the ability to heal ourselves and each other. We require both the balance and contribution of individual and interdependent systems to obtain wholeness and contribute to collective health [14].

Psychedelic psychotherapy offers a breakdown of protective systems and positions, along with a developmental approach in which the hold of psychological arrests is released to permit developmental progression accompanied by underlying repair of foundational deficits and inner world enrichment. An analogy would be the comparison of a structural renovation of a house in contrast to interior decoration. The former improvements are partly destructive since old structures are broken down, to simultaneously clear the way for new emergent capacities that reflect an upgrade in compromise formations, creative expressions and identity narratives.
