LSD Psychotherapy expanded on the promise and power of transpersonal psychotherapy employing psychedelic drugs.
Years before Leary made headlines for his Ivy League adventures, and years before Ken Kesey held the first acid parties in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a young doctor named Stanislav Grof was conducting rigorous clinical experiments involving LSD in the most unlikely of places: a government lab in the capital of communist Czechoslovakia.
It was there, at Prague's Psychiatric
Research Institute in the 1950s, that Grof began more than half-a-century of
pioneering research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. While he is
frequently marginalized in, if not completely left out of, popular psychedelic
histories, it is not for any lack of contribution to the field. "If I am the
father of LSD," Albert Hoffman once said, "Stan Grof is the
godfather."
With psychedelic research poised for a
mainstream resurgence, the time seems right to begin giving the godfather his
due.
* *
Stanislav Grof had just completed his medical studies at
Prague's Charles University when he caught a life-changing break. It was 1956,
and one of his professors, a brain specialist named George Roubicek, had ordered
a batch of LSD-25 from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where Albert
Hoffman first synthesized the compound in 1943. Roubicek had read the Zurich
psychiatrist Werner Stoll's 1947 account of the LSD experience and was curious
to test it out himself and on his students and patients, largely to study the
drug's effects on electric brain waves, Roubicek's specialty. When he asked for
volunteers, Grof raised his hand.
The subsequent experience assured
Grof's place in history by making him among the first handful of people to enjoy
what might be called a modern trip, in which the psychedelic state is matched
with electronic effects of the kind that have defined the experience for
generations of recreational acidheads, from Merry Pranksters to Fillmore hippies
to lollipop-sucking ravers.
Roubicek's experiment involved placing Grof
in a dark room, administering a large dose of LSD (around 250 millionths of a
gram) and turning on a stroboscopic white light oscillating at various, often
frenetic, frequencies. Needless to say, nothing like the experience was
otherwise available in 1950s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else, for that matter.
That first introduction to LSD -- a "divine thunderbolt" -- set the course for
Grof's lifework. He had found, he thought, a majestic shortcut on Freud's "royal
road to the unconscious."
"This combination [of the light and the drug],"
Grof later said, "evoked in me a powerful mystical experience that radically
changed my personal and professional life. Research of the heuristic,
therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of non-ordinary states
of consciousness became my profession, vocation, and personal
passion."
In medical school during the second half of the '50s, Grof
underwent dozens of LSD sessions and became one of a handful of turned-on young
people in the communist world. Upon his graduation in 1960, Grof began full-time
clinical work when he was fortuitously assigned to Prague's Psychiatric Research
Institute, which included a newly launched Psychedelic Research Center. Among
his new colleagues was a young doctor named Milos Vojtechovsky, with whom Grof
had conducted his earliest experiments as a medical student. In 1958, the duo
employed Benactyzin, high doses of which are hallucinogenic, as a way to induce
the psychotic state associated with acute alcohol withdrawal. In 1959, they
wrote an LSD-related study of the brain's serotonergic system, titled,
"Serotonin and Its Significance for Psychiatry." As professional colleagues in
the early 1960s, Grof and Vojtechovsky would co-publish nearly two dozen
pioneering papers on clinical experiments employing LSD and other psychedelics,
including a three-part study on LSD's clinical history, biochemistry and
pharmacology.
Until 1961, this research involved Sandoz-supplied LSD. But
Grof saw no reason why Czech scientists shouldn't be producing a native supply.
Fatefully situated approximately 200 miles from Prague at this time was the
Czech pharmaceutical company Spofa, whose chemists were talented synthesizers of
various ergot alkaloids. Grof put in a request for the company begin producing
LSD; a request quickly approved by communist authorities. Soon thereafter began
production of the only pharmaceutically pure LSD in the eastern bloc. (Sandoz
was still producing the only pure LSD in the West.)
The early weeks of
Czechoslovak LSD production were not without problems. As Spofa cranked up its
line for the powerful psychedelic, its laboratory employees would sometimes
accidentally absorb the compound through their fingertips, much as Albert
Hoffman did when he inadvertently made his famous discovery. Whenever this
happened, it was standard practice at the time to inject the subject with
Thorazine and throw them into the nearest locked hospital ward. This often made
a bad situation worse, and Spofa frantically turned to Grof for answers. The
young doctor happily lectured them on the importance of "set and setting" in the
psychedelic experience. "I assured them that there was no reason for alarm if
someone was intoxicated by LSD," Grof later wrote. "They were advised to have a
special, quiet room where the intoxicated individual could spend the rest of the
day listening to music in the company of a good friend."
Spofa brass took
Grof's advice. When a 19-year-old Spofa lab assistant experienced a substantial
"professional intoxication," she was placed in a comfortable room with a
colleague and music. When the drug wore off, the woman reported having "the time
of her life."
As Grof rose through the ranks at the Psychiatric
Institute, his research increasingly involved using LSD in tandem with
traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, in which Grof earned his Ph.D from the
Czech Academy of Sciences in 1965. His dissertation was titled, "LSD and Its Use
in Psychiatric Clinical Practice." When Grof completed his Freudian training, he
had nearly a decade of experience with LSD. At 34, he was also full of
paradigm-shifting ambition, having decided that psychedelics "used responsibly
and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for
biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy."
It was a heady
time for any young Czech with a head full of big ideas. In 1965, Czechoslovakia
was then in the midst of a political and cultural thaw known as the Prague
Spring. A relaxation of state control and communist mores was encouraging new
forms of artistic and political expression. Filmmakers associated with Czech New
Wave produced exuberant films; the cafes and theaters became hubs of a thriving
youth subculture, which celebrated Allen Ginsburg "King of May" when he visited
Prague in May 1965. Had the trajectory been allowed to continue, it is easy to
imagine a psychedelic Czech youth culture taking form, just as it did in the
United States, with Grof as its leader.
Alas, Moscow saw where the Prague
Spring was heading, and crushed the flowering under the treads of Red Army
tanks. But by the time the Russians rolled into Prague in August 1968, the
country's most experienced psychedelic researcher was long gone. The year
before, Grof had been offered a professorship at the University of Maryland. He
arrived in America during the Summer of Love in possession of one of the world's
deepest LSD research resumes.
Soon after his arrival in the U.S., Grof
was named chief of research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Again,
it was a fortuitous placement. Among his new peers, an ordained minister and
fellow psychedelic pioneer named Walter Pahnke, who had conceived of the famous
"Good Friday
Experiment" with Tim Leary and Huston Smith while at Harvard in
the early 1960s. At the time of Grof's arrival, Pahnke was engaged in promising
research into LSD therapy as a way to mitigate mortal anxiety among the
terminally ill. Before Pahnke's untimely death in 1971, he had found "dramatic
improvement" among a third of his subjects, and "moderate improvement" in
another third.
While the Center was a stimulating environment to continue
his research, Grof's Maryland work constituted the lesser half of his activities
during the late 1960s. He also traveled regularly to Menlo Park, California,
where he participated in a working group led by the founder of humanistic
psychology, Abraham Maslow. Grof joined a coterie of Maslow's colleagues and
students working to build on the foundation of humanistic psychology, most
famous for its positing of a hierarchy of needs.
Like so many other
forward thinkers of the decade, psychedelic experiences had touched Maslow
deeply. He had come to believe that the system he developed in the '50s and
early '60s was formed around a stunted view of the psyche. With his humanistic
psychology, Maslow had managed to go beyond Freud and Skinner (the father of
behaviorism), but he did not go as far enough. The spiritual revolution of the
decade, of which the LSD experience was central, had thrown the limits of
humanistic psychology into sharp relief. It was, Maslow and Grof believed, still
too trapped in Freudian verbal therapy, still too accepting of the idea of an
individual psyche contained in one life, one skull, one personal history, one
culture.
"The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies,
various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well
as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s," Grof
later wrote, "made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally
valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states;
cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and
religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration."
As Maslow and Grof
mapped out this new and expanded understanding of the psyche, they turned to the
insights of Carl Jung, the brilliant Freudian renegade who posited the existence
of non-material archetypal-mythological realms that contain the entire
histories, collective wisdom, and totemic icons of every civilization since the
dawn of time. Along with a belief in these realms, Maslow and Grof were
convinced they were accessible to everyone, especially during non-ordinary
states of consciousness such as those induced by a hefty dose of
psychedelics.
"Experiences occurring in psychedelic sessions cannot be
described in terms of the narrow and superficial conceptual model used in
academic psychiatry and psychology, which is limited to biology, postnatal
biography, and the Freudian individual unconscious," Grof wrote of the insight
behind transpersonal psychology. "Deep experiential work requires a vastly
extended cartography of the psyche that includes important domains uncharted by
traditional science."
Once the basic elements of this new psychological
school were in place, it was time to name it. Maslow wanted to call the new
psychedelically inspired school "transhumanistic."
Grof demurred,
preferring the term "transpersonal psychology." The name stuck.
Figures
associated with Maslow and Grof's coterie soon launched the Association of
Transpersonal Psychology and assembled an editorial team for the Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology. Around the same time, Robert Frager began laying
the groundwork for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto,
California, which remains the leading center of transpersonal training.
*
*
Just as transpersonal psychology was being institutionalized, LSD
research was being systematically shut down by the government. At the end of the
1960s, Grof's laboratory in Maryland housed the last surviving FDA-approved
psychedelic clinical research program in the United States. In 1971, Maryland's
research, too, was ordered closed following the classification of LSD as a
Schedule-I drug, defined as being habit-forming and having "no recognized
medicinal value."
With little interest in running a lab without access to
LSD, Grof followed the action and moved west. In 1973, he began a 15-year
stretch as scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. There,
overlooking the Pacific ocean and against the constant rumble of rolling surf,
Grof spent the next two years synthesizing his thoughts on nearly two decades of
LSD therapy. The result was Realms Of The Human Unconscious: Observations
From LSD Research, published in 1975.
By this time, officially
sanctioned psychedelic research already seemed like a distant memory. For a new
generation that graduated college after the door had been slammed shut on
clinical psychedelic studies, Grof's book was a window into a world that might
have been. Among those who found inspiration in the book was a young college
student named Rick Doblin, who would later found the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies.
With the election of Ronald Reagan
in 1980, the possibility of a return to a rational discussion of drug policy and
psychedelic research became more remote than ever. Grof was among those who kept
the flame alive. Around the time of Reagan's first Inauguration, Grof published
LSD Psychotherapy, in which he expanded on the now codified transpersonal
understanding of the psyche. Grof stressed the importance of two previously
neglected realms of experience that psychedelic experiences can tap into where
traditional therapy cannot: the "perinatal" (birth moment) and "transpersonal"
(archetypical). Coming to terms with these aspects of the psyche, believed Grof,
is the key to psycho-spiritual health.
"When the content of the perinatal
level of the unconscious surfaces into consciousness and is adequately processed
and integrated," Grof wrote, "it results in a radical personality change. The
individual experiences a considerable decrease of aggressive tendencies and
becomes more tolerant and compassionate toward others. [They also experience an
increase in] the ability to enjoy life and draw satisfaction from simple
situations such as everyday activity, eating, love-making, nature, and
music."
Happy, well-adjusted people, Grof believed, also lead to happy,
well-adjusted societies.
"One of the most remarkable consequences of
various forms of transpersonal experiences is spontaneous emergence and
development of genuine humanitarian and ecological interests and need to take
part in activities aimed at peaceful coexistence and well-being of humanity,"
Grof wrote. "This is based on an almost cellular understanding that any
boundaries in the Cosmos are relative and arbitrary and that each of us is, in
the last analysis, identical and commeasurable with the entire fabric of
existence. As a result of these experiences, individuals tend to develop
feelings that they are planetary citizens and members of the human family before
belonging to a particular country or a specific racial, social, ideological,
political, or religious group."
Such sentiments were increasingly removed
from mainstream culture in the age of Reagan. Buffered from the harder edges of
the age of Reagan in Big Sur, Grof kept working, increasingly with his wife and
creative partner, Christina. In 1984, he published LSD Psychotherapy, in
which he expanded on the promise and power of transpersonal psychotherapy
employing psychedelic drugs.
By the time the book's second edition was
published in 1994, a mini-psychedelic revival was underway on the West Coast.
Grof had earned enough stripes to be an acid elder statesman to a generation of
kids dancing to techno on ecstasy and acid. But he did not embrace the role.
While Tim Leary rolled around in mutual embrace with the San Francisco rave and
cyberculture scenes, Grof maintained his distance, playing the role of austere
friend of psychedelics from the old school. "The hectic atmosphere of…crowded
rock concerts or discos, and noisy social gatherings are certainly not settings
conducive to productive self-exploration and safe confrontation with the
difficult aspects of one's unconscious," Grof stiffly wrote in a 1994 update of
his essay "Crisis Intervention in Situations Related to Unsupervised Use of
Psychedelics."
Grof had in any case by then found a way to continue his
research without banned substances. Throughout the 1980s, he had been coming to
the conclusion that perinatal and transpersonal experiences were not dependent
on the use of psychedelics. LSD may have launched Grof's mind into cosmic orbit.
But once there, like so many who passed through the psychedelic crucible, he had
come to believe they were no longer needed. He even developed a system to prove
it: Holotropic Breathing.
Grof's lifework treats individual and social
neuroses through the exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Whether these states are achieved through the structured hyperventilation of
Holotropic Breathing, or through psychedelic drugs, for Grof the stakes remain
the same.
"If we continue using the old strategies that have caused the
current global crisis and which are in their consequences destructive and
self-destructive," Grof recently wrote, "it might lead to annihilation of modern
civilization and possibly even the human species. However, if a sufficient
number of people undergo a process of inner psychospiritual transformation and
attain a higher level of awareness, we might in the future reach a situation
when we will deserve the name, which we have so proudly given to our species:
Homo sapiens."
This, in a nutshell, is the same cosmically ambitious hope
expressed by the psychedelic pioneers of a half-century ago. Most of those men
and women have long since given up the dream, moved on to other things, or died.
Stanislav Grof is among the very few still here. Judging by the hopeful tone of
next week's MAPS conference, the world of medicine may finally be ready to catch
back up with him.
