The Default Mode Network Is Not a Metaphor for the Ego—It Is the Ego’s Neural Signature, and Psychedelics Are Its Chemical Abbaissement

Greg Mahr and Jamie Sweigart’s 2020 paper accomplishes something the Jungian analytic community has largely refused to attempt: it bridges contemporary psychedelic neuroscience with the structural vocabulary of analytical psychology and does so without diluting either. The paper’s pivotal claim is that the default mode network—the brain system responsible for self-referential thought, autobiographical memory, and the maintenance of personal identity—functions as the neurophysiological correlate of what Jung called the ego. When classical psychedelics suppress and desynchronize the DMN, the result is not merely altered perception but something Jung himself described: abbaissement du niveau mental, the depotentiation of the conscious personality that opens the psyche to archetypal depths. This is not a loose analogy. Mahr and Sweigart note that DMN hyperactivity characterizes depression, which maps onto the Jungian understanding of depression as the ego’s rigid, ruminative contraction against the unconscious. The pharmacological disruption of this contraction produces ego dissolution, oceanic connectedness, and access to dissociated material—precisely the conditions under which individuation can advance. What the authors make explicit, and what Jungian clinicians have been reluctant to say, is that a chemical agent can replicate the psychic conditions that Jung achieved only through years of disciplined confrontation with the unconscious.

Jung’s Own Ambivalence Concealed a Class Distinction Between Those Who Can Access the Unconscious Unaided and Those Who Cannot

The paper gives careful and honest treatment to Jung’s well-known skepticism about psychedelics, drawing from his letters to Victor White and A. M. Hubbard. Jung’s three objections—that one should not seek more of the collective unconscious than dreams and intuition provide, that psychedelics invite a sorcerer’s-apprentice disaster, and that the experience remains “unintegrated”—are presented not as settled doctrine but as historically contingent positions. Mahr and Sweigart note that Jung himself admitted he knew “far too little” about psychedelic drugs. More pointedly, they recover Jung’s concession that “there may be some poor impoverished creatures, perhaps, for whom mescaline would be a heaven-sent gift without a counterpoison.” Marie-Louise von Franz, in her essay on drugs from a Jungian perspective, amplified this exact passage and observed that the unconscious itself reacts to drug use—sometimes negatively, as in the terrifying dream of the “Lord of the Sea” mandala-jellyfish that threatened to destroy a heroin smuggler, and sometimes more gently, as when a woman’s post-LSD dream instructed her to pursue the same psychic opening through analysis rather than further drug use. Von Franz concluded that the drug vogue might constitute “a negative preliminary stage, preceding a more enlightened opening-up of the unconscious.” Mahr and Sweigart push this preliminary stage forward into clinical legitimacy by pointing to modern research protocols that embed the psychedelic experience within a therapeutic container—pre-trip preparation, guided sessions, post-trip integration—that did not exist in the recreational chaos Jung feared. The paper thus redeems psychedelics not against Jung’s concerns but through them.

The “Trip Ego” Functions as the Dream Ego Under Conditions of Heightened Numinosity, Making Guided Psychedelic Work a Form of Externalized Active Imagination

The clinical vignettes are the paper’s most original contribution. In one, a man’s psilocybin trip conjures the stairway of his childhood home, where his psychotically depressed mother used to sit—a somatic, spatial enactment of descent into the unconscious that directly parallels Jung’s famous house-descent in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In another, a woman’s terrifying tornado of watching eyes gives way to mandala-shaped jellyfish, images the authors read as Self-symbols offering a new relationship to the unconscious. Mahr and Sweigart introduce the concept of the “trip ego”—analogous to the dream ego but crucially different because the tripper remains conscious and partially volitional. This makes the psychedelic experience structurally closer to active imagination than to dreaming: the ego is diminished but not eliminated, and it can choose to descend further or resist. The man whose partner told him “You don’t need to go to the basement” suffered precisely because ego resistance was reinforced at the moment when surrender was therapeutically necessary. An experienced guide, the authors argue, would have welcomed the descent. This is where Kalsched’s model of trauma becomes indispensable: the archetypal defenses of the personal spirit—the demonic figures that surround the traumatized inner child—are exactly what emerges in “bad trips.” Depth psychologists in the 1960s understood this: they would deliberately increase doses to push past pleasant but superficial material toward the difficult encounters that produce genuine transformation. Joseph Campbell, writing about Stanislav Grof’s psycholytic therapy research, described the same phenomenon as the necessary passage through personal-biographical “knot points” before the transpersonal dimension can open. The psychedelic guide, in Mahr and Sweigart’s framework, becomes the secular shaman who holds the ritual container.

Psychedelic Connectedness Is Not Ego Inflation but Its Structural Opposite—and This Distinction Is the Paper’s Most Clinically Urgent Claim

Mahr and Sweigart draw a sharp line between psychedelics and substances like alcohol and cocaine, which produce ego inflation rather than ego suppression. This distinction has massive clinical implications. The connectedness that psychedelic subjects consistently report—to themselves, to others, to something transpersonal—correlates statistically with therapeutic outcomes. It is the phenomenological inverse of addiction, which isolates through inflation. Cody Peterson’s study of Jaime de Angulo illustrates the tragic version of this dynamic: de Angulo’s shamanic use of psychedelics transformed his religious beliefs but, without corresponding exploration of his personal traumatic history, left his ego more inflated rather than less, and he “ultimately lost control over both” worlds he inhabited. Von Franz’s dream analyses of drug users point in the same direction: the unconscious itself distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate entry. The man-o’-war jellyfish that threatened the heroin smuggler is, structurally, the same Self-symbol as the healing jellyfish that comforted Mahr’s client—but met under conditions of irresponsibility rather than guided surrender, the Self destroys rather than heals. This is the paper’s deepest insight: the content of the archetypal encounter is less important than the container within which it occurs.

This paper matters now because the psychedelic renaissance is proceeding largely without depth-psychological literacy. Psychiatric research frames therapeutic outcomes in terms of symptom reduction; the popular press frames them in terms of personal revelation. Mahr and Sweigart offer the missing framework: a Jungian structural analysis that explains why psychedelics work across such disparate conditions, why difficulty is therapeutically productive, and why the guide-and-integration model is not merely a safety protocol but the modern equivalent of the ritual container that indigenous cultures always understood as inseparable from the substance itself. No other contemporary paper makes this case with equal precision.