Altered consciousness occupies a generative and contested position within depth-psychological literature, functioning simultaneously as a phenomenological category, a therapeutic instrument, and an epistemological frontier. The corpus reveals at least four distinct orientive frameworks for the term. First, the Jungian and neo-Jungian tradition treats altered states as conditions under which archetypal contents of the collective unconscious become selectively accessible—shamanic trance, psychedelic induction, and active imagination are read as structurally analogous routes to the same deeper psychic stratum (Sun and Kim; McGovern). Second, the psychedelic research tradition—from Grof’s LSD sessions through Strassman’s DMT studies and Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain model—approaches altered consciousness empirically, mapping qualitative shifts onto neurochemical and neuroimaging signatures, theorising that elevated psychic entropy dissolves default-mode self-referential structures and thereby permits transpersonal experience. Third, trauma psychology (Herman, Kalsched, Dayton) attends to involuntary alterations—dissociation, numbing, derealization—as defensive reorganisations of consciousness under inescapable threat, linking trance-like absorption to PTSD phenomenology. Fourth, Murray Stein’s Jungian reading of complex-constellated dissociation positions everyday altered states as both pathology and potential, holding open the question of whether fragmented consciousness retains its own coherent awareness. These traditions remain in productive tension over whether altered consciousness is primarily a resource, a wound, or a window.