Ego Death and Ego Dissolution: Origins and Usage in Current Research (Part 2)
In entry 2 in our series on ego dissolution (pulled from my graduate research on the phenomenon) we will explore how concepts of ego death and ego dissolution have been used in modern research.
Though “ego death” and “ego dissolution” seem to have different implications, their use overlaps almost entirely in the reviewed literature. The choice of language seems to be a matter of culture, rather than conceptual distinction, as the term “ego death” appears more frequently in public-facing, spiritual literature, and the term “ego-dissolution” appears more frequently in academic literature and research. Until a meaningful distinction is clarified, I will use these terms interchangeably throughout this review.
The first mention of ego death in a peer-reviewed psychological journal article (in the combined PsychInfo and PsychArticles databases) was in 1966, in which the dreams of a popular scientist were analyzed and argued to demonstrate fear of being overwhelmed by impulses, or in other words, fear of ego dissolution (Giovacchini, 1966). Here, we see the psychoanalytic model of the ego as the gatekeeper for impulses (id desires), and thus fear of being overwhelmed by these impulses would entail fear of ego death. Two years later, another article came along in the American Journal of Psychology which discussed the relationship between the “hippy” subculture and the Freudian death instinct theory. This article is the first of its kind to connect the experience of psychedelic drugs with ego dissolution, and it argues that this experience poses a kind of resolution to one’s need to externalize destructiveness (Brickman, 1968). Unbeknownst to Brickman, this type of claim would become popular in about forty years.
The following years show evidence of a very mild, but consistent interest in the phenomenon of ego death. Of the roughly 5 million bibliographic records included in these databases, only 136 of them include any mention of “ego death” or “ego dissolution” in the abstract, and only 59 of these are peer reviewed (for the purposes of this literature review, only the peer reviewed materials were considered). From 1966-2010, ego death is mentioned with respect to topic such as near-death experiences, dread, electromagnetic brain stimulation, suicidality, transpersonal psychology, and reviews of Jung’s and William Wordsworth’s writings. After 2010, 30 of the 33 published articles concern psychedelic experiences. It seems, then, that ego death is of almost exclusive interest to those studying psychedelics, at least currently in the field of psychology.
A 2017 analysis of the findings from various psychedelic and neuroimaging studies argues that ego dissolution is best understood as a phenomenon of “unbinding,” which refers to the process of interrupting the brain’s normal organization of information based around a constructed image of self (Letheby & Gerrans, 2017). In other words, for one’s ego to dissolve is to experience an unnatural (though perhaps pleasurable or seemingly revelatory), evolutionary unadaptive state in which the endless flow of sensory stimuli and information is no longer organized according to what is important, or salient, to the organism (Letheby & Gerrans, 2017). In this state, the function of predicting bottom-up stimulus through top-down processing is interrupted (Letheby & Gerrans, 2017). In this definition, the authors equate ego dissolution to the loss of the sense of self, which relates to one of the proposed features of ego from psychoanalytic theory. Rather than conceptualizing the ego as the seat of perceptual mechanisms or executive action, they seem to have adopted the word to mean the felt sense of self, or the sense of being the subject or recipient of experience – the sense of being a distinct individual. In their words: “it seems as if the experiences, although intense and fascinating, are no longer automatically attributed to an entity” (Letheby & Gerrans, 2017, p. 7).
This approximate definition of ego dissolution pervades most academic literature on psychedelic experiences, though some researchers add on theory-specific ways to conceptualize and explain the phenomenon. For example, Fischman (2019) posits that psychedelic-induced ego dissolution, in the psychoanalytic sense, involves the falling away of the egoic defense mechanisms, which allows one to experience something like the infantile, pre-ego oceanic state hypothesized by Freud. Outside of quantitative research on psychedelic states, the philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical foundations of ego dissolution tend to differ slightly, such as in the field of transpersonal psychology.
In the next entry, we will explore how the field of Transpersonal Psychology has described and researched ego dissolution.
