The depth-psychology corpus approaches ecstatic experience not as a peripheral anomaly but as a structurally significant phenomenon that recurs across shamanic, mystical, psychedelic, and contemplative traditions. William James furnishes the foundational empirical typology, cataloguing first-person accounts in which the dissolution of ordinary selfhood issues in overwhelming affect — joy, terror, and certainty combined — and treating these states as evidentially serious regardless of their theological framing. Stanislav Grof systematises the phenomenology within a perinatal and transpersonal map, distinguishing ‘oceanic ecstasy’ (tension-free, undifferentiated bliss linked to cosmic unity and the good womb) from ‘volcanic ecstasy’ (the catastrophic, energetically explosive rapture of the death-rebirth threshold), and grounding both in observable LSD-session dynamics. Mircea Eliade reads ecstasy as the defining technical achievement of shamanism — the controlled break-through between cosmic planes accomplished by drum, trance, and ritual flight — while insisting that not every technique of altered consciousness qualifies as shamanic ecstasy. The Eastern Christian contemplative tradition, represented in the Philokalia, distinguishes a calm exultation from a great soaring of the heart toward the divine, warning against premature or self-induced luminous states. Contemporary researchers such as Yaden situate ecstatic experience within a spectrum of self-transcendent states, submitting its phenomenological core — reduced self-salience, enhanced unity, transcendence of time and space — to empirical measurement. The central tension running through the corpus is whether ecstasy is therapeutically integrable, spiritually normative, or dangerously disintegrative when poorly contained.