Introduction

The misrepresentation involved in an altered state of consciousness (ASC) arises in the ‘nonconscious neurocognitive background mechanisms of consciousness’ and is a result of an ‘external or internal change to the organism’s biological makeup’. Mainstream psychologists abjected the transpersonal psychology of William James and C. G. Jung, which embraced ASCs and subliminal experience, as well as psychoanalysis. Where Sigmund Freud was eager to dissociate psychoanalysis from the occult connotations of mesmerism, Jung openly acknowledged that his conception of the unconscious had its roots in the ‘animal magnetism’ of Mesmer. For Jung, his vision in the microcosm corresponded to the coming cataclysm in macrocosm. This vision arose as a result of a technique Jung called ‘active imagination’, which can be considered an ASC, and which he used to channel unconscious archetypes and images. In the second half of the twentieth century, ASCs began to be studied by psychiatrists and some psychologists, as well as parapsychologists.