Beyond the Identity Paradigm: Self-Addiction, Anti-Self Psychology, and Psychedelic Ego-Dissolution

Contemporary psychology treats the construction, maintenance, and enhancement of a coherent self-concept as the implicit telos of therapeutic intervention, an assumption so thoroughly embedded in clinical training, diagnostic frameworks, and outcome measurement that it functions less as a theoretical commitment than as a perceptual habit. This article argues that compulsive identity maintenance operates, across diverse clinical presentations and neurobiological substrates, as an addictive process: self-addiction , characterized by salience, tolerance, withdrawal, and persistence despite harm, with substantial selfhood itself as the object of dependence. Drawing on post-Kantian critical philosophy, predictive processing neuroscience, psychedelic ego-dissolution research, and Deleuzian critiques of therapeutic capture, the article traces how independent intellectual and empirical traditions converge on a common finding: that rigid self-referential processing tracks suffering while its systematic loosening tracks improvement. The self-addiction framework is applied to five standing debates the identity paradigm has rendered intractable: the Dodo Bird verdict, process-based therapy’s unexamined stopping point, Jungian outcome data, the narcissism epidemic paradox, and the ethics of ego-syntonic pathology. In each case, it both explains the debate and reveals the identity paradigm as the constraint that kept the explanation invisible. It proposes metacognitive agency, the bidirectional capacity to modulate both flexibility and rigidity in context, as an alternative therapeutic telos, while addressing the structural preconditions of flexible selfhood for marginalized communities and the recursive risk that dissolution becomes its own object of attachment.