performed by the so-called autobiographical or experiential self: the
mental operation responsible for the narratives that link our first person
to the world, and so help define us. “This is who I am.” “I don’t deserve to
be loved.” “I’m the kind of person without the willpower to break this
addiction.” Getting overly attached to these narratives, taking them as
fixed truths about ourselves rather than as stories subject to revision,
contributes mightily to addiction, depression, and anxiety. Psychedelic
therapy seems to weaken the grip of these narratives, perhaps by
temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode network where
they operate.
And then there is the ego, perhaps the most formidable creation of the
default mode network, which strives to defend us from threats both
internal and external. When all is working as it should be, the ego keeps
the organism on track, helping it to realize its goals and provide for its
needs, notably for survival and reproduction. It gets the job done. But it is
also fundamentally conservative. “The ego keeps us in our grooves,” as
Matt Johnson puts it. For better and, sometimes, for worse. For
occasionally the ego can become tyrannical and turn its formidable
powers on the rest of us. Perhaps this is the link between the various
forms of mental illness that psychedelic therapy seems to help most: all
involve a disordered ego—overbearing, punishing, or misdirected.
In a college commencement address he delivered three years before
his suicide, David Foster Wallace asked his audience to “think of the old
cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually
expresses a great and terrible truth,” he said.
“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with
firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the
terrible master.”
• • •
OF ALL THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL EFFECTS that people on psychedelics report,
the dissolution of the ego seems to me by far the most important and the
most therapeutic. I found little consensus on terminology among the
researchers I interviewed, but when I unpack their metaphors and