Altered states of consciousness (ASC) occupy a contested but generative intersection within the depth-psychology corpus, spanning phenomenological description, neurobiological explanation, and transpersonal theory. Grof’s LSD research provides the field’s most systematic cartography, distinguishing qualitative transformations of consciousness from mere quantitative impairment, and mapping ASC-induced experiences across psychodynamic, perinatal, and transpersonal registers. Sun and Kim extend this into Jungian territory, demonstrating empirically that archetypal symbols in shamanic ritual can precipitate measurable shifts in conscious state, including ego dissolution and oceanic boundlessness — states that resonate with Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Carhart-Harris supplies the contemporary neurodynamic framework, proposing that psychedelic-induced ASC represent high-entropy ‘primary’ states in which default-mode-network suppression releases ordinarily repressed cognitive content. McGovern further synthesizes these strands, arguing that ASC disrupt cortical prediction hierarchies in ways that render archetypal content especially salient. Strassman’s DMT research sits at the biological-mystical interface, while Stein notes that even everyday complex-activation constitutes a mild ASC within clinical analytic experience. The central tension throughout is epistemological: whether ASC reveal transpersonal realities, model psychopathology, or constitute neurologically lawful but subjectively significant reorganizations of ordinary cognition.