Karen Peoples, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist, and a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She was a Study Therapist on the recent FDA-approved clinical trial of MDMA-Assisted Therapy for severe, treatment-resistant PTSD at the University of California San Francisco, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. She also served as a Supervisor on MAPS’ MDMA-Assisted Therapy study in Europe, and is currently a Consultant with MAPS. She is an Experienced Facilitator in the upcoming Pragmatic Trial of Psilocybin Therapy in Palliative Care for demoralized adults near the end of life, sponsored by the Lundquist Organization. She maintains a private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Karen has published and presented numerous analytic papers on non-ordinary states of consciousness in psychedelic therapy, uncanny forms of unconscious communication, incest trauma, transcendent and traumatic states of emptiness, and unconscious bodily communication. Her recent chapter entitled “The Mystery of the Unconscious: Non-Ordinary States in Psychedelic Therapy,” was published this year in Integral Psychedelic Therapy: The Non-Ordinary Art of Psychospiritual Healing. Karen has a long-standing interest in contemplative traditions and practices. She has a current paper entitled “When our Hair Stands on End” to be published by Routledge (2025) in: A Century of Psychoanalytic Mystery: Telepathy in the Clinical Process. This paper addresses the way telepathic experiences in the clinical setting can be so striking that they initiate an altered state of consciousness, as described in the article. The paper draws links with the kinds of altered states produced by psychedelics.