How am I not myself? Psychedelic Experience and the Phenomenology of Individuality

Abstract

The psychedelic experience of ego-dissolution presents a striking paradox: the most radical apparent loss of self is nonetheless reported in vivid detail and frequently described as a disclosure of deeper unity. Contemporary neuroscience explains this phenomenon by the relaxation of high-level priors in the Default Mode Network, reducing the ordinary self to a useful fiction or minimal phenomenal self. This article sides with the first-person reports against such reductive accounts. It retrieves the realist phenomenology of the person developed by Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Roman Ingarden within the Munich-Göttingen tradition. These thinkers offer a layered, non-essentialist ontology of individuality as a psychophysical, affectively structured, temporally extended unity. A tripartite distinction is introduced between the psychophysical totality, the narrative-reflective ego, and pre-reflective for-me-ness. Graded analysis of psychedelic reports shows that only the narrative ego is suspended, while the vital-affective and first-personal layers become more salient. This pattern fits precisely the stratified ontologies of Scheler (affective strata), Stein (empathic porosity), and Ingarden (founded strata). Psychedelic ego-dissolution thus functions as a privileged limit case vindicating realist phenomenology over both transcendental idealism and neurocognitive eliminativism. The experience discloses, rather than dissolves, the layered reality of the self.