Frontiers in Psychology
July 29, 2026
Lawrence Fischman
I treat Proust’s Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a fictional case history centered around dynamic tension between dissociation, memory, and creativity. I argue that three pivotal breakthroughs of long dissociated memories and feelings in Proust’s novel result from thawing within a dyadically-determined dissociative process, not simply the chance triggering of involuntary memories as the...
Psychoanalytic Dialogues
November 2, 2025
Lawrence Fischman
ABSTRACT In Expansion and Regression in Oceanic Experience, Peoples and Rundel examine “what happens from a psychoanalytic perspective when a patient engages in psychedelic-assisted therapy.” In an elegant paper that has both a clinical and theoretical focus, they discuss what Romain Rolland described metaphorically as the “oceanic feeling.” They believe such feelings can have transformative...
Frontiers in Psychology
2025
Lawrence Fischman
4 citations
The MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) sponsored MDMA-assisted therapy protocol has had greater success in treating trauma in preliminary clinical trials than any prior psychotherapeutic, pharmacologic, or combined approach. It is predicated on a synergy between drug action and the participant's inner healing intelligence. The latter is described mainly by analogy with...
Front Psychol
June 20, 2024
Lawrence Fischman
4 citations
The human need to find meaning in life and the human need for connection may be two sides of the same coin, a coin forged in the developmental crucible of attachment. Our need for meaningfulness can be traced to our developmental need for connection in the attachment relationship. The free energy principle dictates that in order to resist a natural tendency towards disorder self-organizing...
Frontiers in Psychology
2023
Lawrence Fischman
2 citations
Philosophers maintain that touch confers a sense of reality or grounding to perceptual experience. In touching oneself, one is simultaneously both subject and object of touch, a template for experiencing oneself as subject and object of intentions, feelings, and motivations, or intersubjectivity. Here, I explore a form of self-touch carefully documented by Winnicott in observing how the infant...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
September 20, 2022
Lawrence Fischman
9 citations
Participants in MDMA- and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy often emerge from these treatments with new beliefs about themselves and the world. Studies have linked changed beliefs with mystical experiences reported by some participants during drug sessions. While there has been some debate about the epistemic value of drug-induced mystical experiences, and about the need for consent to...
Neuropsychoanalysis
July 3, 2019
Lawrence Fischman
44 citations
New research in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy merits a reexamination of the neurobiology and phenomenology of psychedelic states. First person accounts of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy are used to re-conceptualize the ego boundary as a defense mechanism which regulates the significance that objects hold for the self. Therapeutic action is attributed to ego dissolution, which enables...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
1983
Lawrence Fischman
109 citations
Many observers have noted similarities between dreams, hallucinogenic drug states, and schizophrenia. In the present article, certain fundamental areas of convergence between the three states are described. Consideration is given to the hallucinogenic drug model of psychosis: the reasons for its initial attractiveness, and the reasons for its current disfavor. The concept of ego boundaries is...