New Books in Psychology Black Beryl: Self and Nonself, with Nick Canby
Dec 12, 2025
Nick Canby, a clinical psychologist and visiting assistant professor at Brown University, specializes in meditation and psychedelics. In this engaging discussion, he delves into the complex concept of the self, explaining types of self-change and the fine line between positive insights and detrimental experiences. Canby emphasizes the nuanced ways meditation can lead to both healing and challenge, warning against simplistic interpretations. He also shares insights from his research on self-loss and its implications for mental health, highlighting the importance of context and support.
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Self Is Many Processes
- 'Self' labels many different psychological processes from preferences to embodied subjectivity.
- Nick Canby emphasizes the need to distinguish narrative, embodied, agency, and spatial aspects of self.
Multiple Ways Boundaries Shift
- Changes to self-boundaries come in distinct forms like expansion, loss, insight into illusion, interpersonal shifts, or body-object mixing.
- Those phenomenological subtypes predict different emotional and functional outcomes.
Boundary Direction Predicts Outcomes
- Broadly, reduced boundaries often link to improved mental health while increased boundaries often align with dissociation and pathology.
- Context matters: meditation and psychedelics correlate with expansion, trauma and illness with constriction.
