Ayahuasca, Impermanence, and the Jungian Art of Transformation
How the Amazonian “vine of the dead” mirrors the deep initiatory process of Jungian transformation.
A New Lens on Death and Acceptance
A new study from the University of Haifa suggests that long-term ayahuasca users relate to death in a fundamentally different way. Compared to non-users, they show less fear, avoidance, and anxiety about mortality — and more calm acceptance. Strikingly, this was not due to religious belief or personality traits but to one key factor: impermanence acceptance, the emotional openness to life’s constant change.
Every transformation demands a symbolic death, the ego’s surrender to something greater.
For Jungian psychotherapists, this finding resonates deeply. Jung viewed the acceptance of impermanence as a sign of psychic maturity. The confrontation with death — literal or symbolic — is central to individuation, the lifelong process by which the personality moves toward wholeness. Every transformation, Jung wrote, requires a kind of dying: the dissolution of old forms so that new life may emerge.
The “Vine of the Dead” and Ego Dissolution
Ayahuasca, the Amazonian “vine of the dead,” often evokes vivid visions of dying, dismemberment, and rebirth. Such imagery parallels Jung’s notion of ego death, when the conscious self temporarily yields to deeper, archetypal forces. Rather than annihilation, this experience widens perspective. The ego learns it is not the center of existence but a transient expression of a greater Self.
The Haifa study showed that those who experienced stronger ego dissolution during ceremonies also reported higher impermanence acceptance and lower death anxiety. Symbolic death, it seems, trains the psyche to tolerate change and relinquish its grasp on permanence. Jung might have called this an initiation — a rehearsal for dying that paradoxically opens one more fully to life.
Symbolic death teaches us to live — not by escaping endings, but by embracing them.
Western Denial and the Return of Death Anxiety
In Western culture, death is largely denied or hidden, treated as medical failure rather than a natural transition. Jung warned that what is repressed in consciousness returns through anxiety and despair. The ayahuasca findings echo his insight: only by meeting death inwardly can we live more freely.
Psychotherapy as a Ritual of Renewal
In Jungian psychotherapy, this encounter takes quieter forms. Patients face the “little deaths” of endings — lost roles, relationships, identities — and learn to bear them without collapse.
The analyst helps to hold the tension between loss and renewal until new meaning takes shape. Both analysis and ceremonial practice rely on containment, surrender, and re-integration — the archetypal pattern of death and rebirth.
To Die Before You Die
The new research gives empirical language to what Jung intuited: peace with death arises not from belief in an afterlife, but from the lived experience of transformation. To “die before you die,” as mystics have long taught, is to awaken to impermanence as the essence of being.
Perhaps more significantly, the point of observation of this experience appears to be ‘unchanging’ in that it provides a calm awareness of one’s one own processes and their relationship to the whole.
In that realization, fear softens. The ego loosens its grip. What once seemed like death reveals itself as renewal — the psyche’s timeless movement toward wholeness.
About the Author
Dr John O’Brien is a senior Jungian psychoanalyst and executive coach supervisor whose work bridges analytical psychology with leadership practice. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C. G. Jung Institute Zürich, where he also contributes as a lecturer, examiner and training analyst.
John’s professional path began in vocational guidance, education, and counselling, before evolving into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Alongside his clinical work, he has extensive experience in individual and team consulting with major corporations and social service organisations, focusing on how psychological dynamics influence leadership, collaboration, and organisational change.
As both a practitioner and independent researcher, John seeks to integrate academic insight with lived human experience. His writing and teaching emphasise the relevance of Jungian thought for contemporary challenges, whether in individual development or in complex organisational systems. Through this work, his aim is to support processes of growth, reflection, and transformation at both personal and collective levels.
