Altered States and the Future of Psychopathology: Psychedelics in Historical and Philosophical Perspective

The contemporary psychedelic renaissance is often presented as a therapeutic innovation or a rediscovered psychopharmacological tool. In this keynote, I propose a more general and historically grounded perspective: psychedelics invite a reconsideration of psychopathology itself—of how psychological suffering is understood, classified, and transformed.

Placing current psychedelic research within the broader history of psychology and psychotherapy, I will explore how earlier shifts in thinking—from moral treatment to psychoanalysis, from behaviorism to neuroscientific and diagnostic models—reshaped prevailing conceptions of mental disorder, selfhood, and mental well-being. From this vantage point, psychedelics appear not as an anomaly, but as catalysts that expose unresolved tensions within contemporary psychopathology, particularly the dominance of categorical diagnostic frameworks.

Psychedelic experiences blur conventional distinctions between symptom and meaning, pathology and development, treatment and existential transformation. They foreground dimensions of experience—such as altered consciousness, embodiment, relationality, and value—that have long been central to phenomenological and psychodynamic traditions, yet marginal in dominant psychological models. This challenges prevailing assumptions about what counts as disorder, improvement, and mental health.

Finally, I will address the philosophical implications of this renewed interest in altered states: what they reveal about the nature of suffering, the role of experience in psychological change, and the future of psychopathology at the intersection of psychology, psychotherapy, and philosophy. Rather than asking how psychedelics can be accommodated within existing frameworks, this lecture asks how they may reshape the conceptual foundations of psychopathology itself.