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

emotional regulatory system. The quality and success of the child's emotional regulatory system are heavily dependent and influenced by the quality of the maternalinfant dyad and maternal regulatory capacity [15]. In cultures where there is a strong family support system and extended families nearby, deficits in maternal regulatory capacity may be compensated for by proximate family members. In situations where there is limited maternal support and scarce extended family help, maternal function deficits fall primarily on and become the burden of the immature infant. Anxieties will be compensated for, and managed by, immature infantile defensive maneuvers, such as denial, splitting and disconnection as a means to cope with overwhelming painful states, with the resulting formation of brittle psychological coping systems with limited flexibility. These latter increase the subject's susceptibility to future mental problems and poor psychological resilience. In a parallel, overlapping fashion, early maternal bonding and early attachment styles along with associated difficulties lay foundational imprints to inform later patterns of attachment that dovetail into relationship patterns and dynamic formations.

Difficulties in emotional regulation typically contribute to compensations in systems of thinking and/or dissociative states as mechanisms for stabilization, recovery and equilibrium maintenance. Primitive and underdeveloped emotional systems for regulation lead to correspondingly unbalanced compensatory systems in the systems of character and thought, where dissociation strategies are frequently deployed to compensate for the underlying shortfall. Similarly, attachment style and compensations for impoverished early bonding both pattern and heavily influence the subsequent relational quality, depth and texture [16]. Such foundational deficits are unable to be easily corrected because the laying down of these systems tends to follow a progressive developmental unfolding informed by critical windows that impose relatively immutable structures on the basis of character styles and reflexive coping patterns.

Psychedelic medicines offer a radical possibility of accessing these underlying systems for repair, transformation and enrichment. In the psychedelic state, the therapeutic relational field establishes conditions similar to the early maternal-infant dyadic field. The defensive arrangements held in the mind, body and emotional structures of the patient act as protective shells rendering the underlying fields relatively inaccessible and thereby resistant to later repair. It is simply these protective systems that are released within the emotional security of the psychedelic field, and allow for states of reconnection both internally and externally. These releases render the underlying fields permeable to influence. In the open, undefended state, the natural tendency for human physiology to co-regulate and synchronize is utilized for the patient-therapist pair to revive the early infant-maternal dyadic field conditions. Such an environment provides the ideal situation to correct attachment failures, repair regulation deficits and build new emotional regulatory potentials by opening the innate capacities to discover optimal equilibriums and co-regulations. The downstream impact of such foundational repair and enrichment represents a fundamental shift in the understanding of the mechanisms of healing; it moves well beyond symptom reduction, treatment of disease and dysfunction, toward enrichment, resilience and emergence attributes, now considered to be primary indicators of well-being and health.
