**4. Connection**

Psychedelic medications create the conditions for an expansion of experience that extends into realms that are usually inaccessible. The intangible aspects that at once color, shape and organize subjective experience come into the field of awareness where they can be recognized and appreciated. Primordial aspects of self and experience that in the course of living have been disconnected and disregarded are now reclaimed, and in doing so often revive painful states or memories that reveal the very motivation for the earlier disconnection. This access permits an opportunity to process and negotiate earlier injuries in a real-time repair supported by the attending psychotherapist.

The revived experiences may be considered as a "screen memory" or a symbolic motif that captures the organization of the earlier wound or deficit. Stanislav Grof recognized that psychedelic experiences are organized around powerful and emotionally charged "root experiences" [12]. The revived expression is often presented at the developmental level most conducive to being comfortably addressed. The repair leads to reconnection, reconstruction and enrichment, and frequently sets into motion numerous developmental channels of repair expression following the resolution and release from the organizing complex. Furthermore, the overdetermined aspect of repair has significant implications for technique, the centrality of therapeutic neutrality and the importance of meticulous boundary maintenance. As deeper and intimate new internal connections are forged through the self, these capacities are expressed and mirrored externally through enriched, intimate connections in the subject's relationships and with the outside world [14].
