The Psychoanalytic Review
March 1, 2026
Shalini Masih
This paper explores the mystical unconscious as a dimension of psychoanalysis that moves beyond psychoanalysis's emphasis on repression and interpretation. Drawing from psychoanalytic insights, mystical traditions, and personal clinical encounters with states of spirit possession, the author argues for a psychoanalytic stance of witnessing. Through concepts such as the mystical vertex, internal...
The Psychoanalytic Review
March 1, 2026
Mark L Ruffalo, Alex M Ray, Abigail Rasol et al.
Psychotic symptoms are a prevalent yet underrecognized feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD), with studies estimating their occurrence in up to 60% of patients. Despite their clinical and theoretical relevance, these phenomena are marginalized in contemporary diagnostic frameworks, which emphasize affective instability and interpersonal dysfunction while minimizing impairments in...
The Psychoanalytic Review
December 1, 2023
Gary Ahlskog
2 citations
The psychoanalytic journey and the psilocybin journey both reveal unconscious dynamics. In this article a psychoanalyst discusses his own psilocybin journey. Similarities and differences between these journeys are discussed. Possibilities are offered for a dialogue in which psilocybin may contribute to psychoanalytic understanding and psychoanalysis may contribute to the understanding of...
The Psychoanalytic Review
February 2017
Céline Masson, Silke Schauder, Simone Korff Sausse
This article links contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the dream, especially Bion's, with the work of the American video artist Bill Viola, who is deeply influenced by altered states of consciousness and produces images of dreamlike quality. We discuss the oneiric and infantile roots of creativity and artistic inspiration, finally taking Viola's monumental artwork The Passing (1991) as...
The Psychoanalytic Review
August 1, 2016
Ágoston Schmelowszky
In the last decades one can perceive a striking parallelism between the shifting perspective of leading representatives of empirical dream research concerning their conceptualization of dreaming and the paradigm shift within clinically based psychoanalytic metapsychology with respect to its theory on the significance of dreaming. In metapsychology, dreaming becomes more and more a central...
The Psychoanalytic Review
December 1, 2014
Paul D. Cooper
The author reviews the literature on the relation between Buddhist meditation and psychoanalytic listening and argues that the influence of the dynamic unconscious is not addressed in this literature, which engenders a pragmatic overvaluation of attention and an accompanying unexamined devaluation of the analyst's experiences of inattention. The article emphasizes contemporary psychoanalytic...