**1. Introduction**

The profession of psychiatry has been described as a pendulum that swings between "psychological" and "biological" theories and therapies. Over the past several decades, the biological emphasis, narrowly focused on the diagnosis and pharmacological treatment regimes, has largely disappointed and failed to yield anticipated results. The advent of psychedelic psychotherapies provides a notably interesting and useful synthesis of the psychological and biological perspectives. Psychedelic medicines modulate neural systems, induce brain plasticity and potentiate learning. The brain is hence primed and receptive for psychotherapy to be especially impactful and potent. The skills and knowledge that derive from the psychoanalytic tradition not only provide a comprehensive system and treatment process relevant to psychedelic psychotherapy but also offer a unique opportunity for psychoanalytic theory and technique to be modified and applied to a treatment context that, similar to psychoanalysis, recognizes the intrinsic healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness.

The so-called non-ordinary states of consciousness have been utilized in healing practices in virtually every civilization for millennia. Shamanic healing, naturally occurring (spontaneous) mystical experience, yoga practice, meditation, pranayama and trance, at times enhanced with the use of naturally growing psychotropic plants, represent a mere scattering of approaches and paths through which intrinsic healing potentials are activated within healing rituals and practice.

The origins of psychoanalysis itself can be traced back to experiences of non-ordinary consciousness through the practice of hypnosis. Sigmund Freud was introduced to this treatment modality in 1885 while studying with Charcot and Bernheim in Paris [1, 2]. In Vienna, Freud's friend and colleague, Joseph Breuer, used hypnotic techniques to regress hysterical patients to uncover the underlying origin of the symptom. Breuer discovered that a strong emotional reaction and release of forgotten traumas would often eliminate hysterical symptoms; the technique was coined "the cathartic method." It was through these early explorations that Freud postulated the presence of an unconscious mind. Freud speculated that hysterical symptoms contained protective functions as well as symbolic meaning, and he consequently argued that symptoms needed to be respected and not indiscriminately removed. Freud felt the process of hypnosis, even when effective, offered limited insight into the mechanisms of symptom formation themselves and, by extension, of the underlying conflicts that are resolved in symptom expression. However, the radical discovery that Bernheim's hypnotic method could actually recover lost memories allowed Freud to draw inferences regarding dream formation: "In a dreamer too the lost knowledge about his dreams is present, though it is inaccessible to him so that he himself does not believe it, it is not something entirely out of the blue" [3]. Freud quickly moved beyond hypnosis to develop the free association technique in which obstacles to free expression were worked through to reveal unconscious fantasies and wishes. This methodology endowed the analytic subjects with greater autonomy, and the therapeutic relationship became the central vehicle for the unconscious fantasies and wishes to be actively revived, experienced and re-lived through the drama of transference. The treatment elements such as frequent sessions, the use of a couch to promote reverie and the capture of inherent regressive forces activate the treatment situation. "Subconscious" material, dreams and fantasy expressions emerge under the analytic method's deliberate tilt away from conscious, censored thought processes. This technique essentially promotes the non-standard, deeper levels of conscious experience that color, shape and animate everyday life.

The Canadian psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond coined the term psychedelic, derived from the Greek word meaning "mind manifesting," to describe the inherent ability of psychedelic compounds to bring hidden aspects of the unconscious mind into conscious experience. Psychedelics induce changes in the matrix of perception, emotion and self-awareness. It has been speculated that these compounds act to inhibit the default mode network in the brain, a set of brain regions more active during rest than during the execution of goal-directed tasks. It is speculated that more dreamy states of awareness such as those encountered during a psychedelic experience, REM sleep and temporal lobe epilepsy represent an earlier style of cognition
