Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", while writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". President Richard Nixon disagreed, calling Leary "the most dangerous man in America". During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times.
As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project after an experience with magic mushrooms he had in Mexico in 1960. For two years, he tested psilocybin's therapeutic effects, in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. He also experimented with lysergic acid diethylamide, which was also legal in the US at the time. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific legitimacy and ethics because he took psychedelics himself along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in. Harvard fired Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert in May 1963. Many people learned of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal. Leary continued to publicly promote psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of the 1960s; he popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority".
Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He developed an eight-circuit model of consciousness in his 1977 book Exo-Psychology and gave lectures, occasionally calling himself a "performing philosopher". He also developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanism, human space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension.
Early life and education
Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child in an Irish Catholic household. His father, Timothy "Tote" Leary, was a dentist who left his wife Abigail Ferris when Timothy was 14. He graduated from Classical High School in Springfield.Leary attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1938 to 1940. He received a Jesuit education there, and was required to learn Latin, rhetoric, and Greek. Under pressure from his father, he left to become a cadet in the United States Military Academy. In his first months at West Point, he received numerous demerits for rule infractions and then got into serious trouble for failing to report rule breaking by cadets he supervised. He was also accused of going on a drinking binge and failing to admit it, and was asked by the Honor Committee to resign. He refused and was shunned by fellow cadets. He was acquitted by a court-martial, but the silencing continued, as well as the onslaught of demerits for small rule infractions. In his second year, his mother appealed to a family friend, United States Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who investigated personally. The Honor Committee quietly revised its position and announced that it would abide by the court-martial verdict. Leary then resigned and was honorably discharged by the Army. About 50 years later he said that it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".
To his family's chagrin, Leary transferred to the University of Alabama in late 1941 because it admitted him expeditiously. He enrolled in the university's ROTC program, maintained top grades, and began to cultivate academic interests in psychology and biology. Leary was expelled a year later for spending a night in the female dormitory and lost his student deferment in the midst of World War II.
Leary was drafted into the United States Army and received basic training at Fort Eustis in 1943. He remained in the non-commissioned officer track while enrolled in the psychology subsection of the Army Specialized Training Program, including three months of study at Georgetown University and six months at Ohio State University. With limited need for officers late in the war, Leary was briefly assigned as a private first class to the Pacific War-bound 2d Combat Cargo Group at Syracuse Army Air Base in Mattydale, New York. After a fateful reunion with Ramsdell in Buffalo, New York, he was promoted to corporal and reassigned to his mentor's command as a staff psychometrician. He remained in Deshon's deaf rehabilitation clinic for the remainder of the war.
While stationed in Butler, Leary courted Marianne Busch; they married in April 1945. Leary was discharged at the rank of sergeant in January 1946, having earned such standard decorations as the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.
As the war concluded, Leary was reinstated at UA and received credit for his Ohio State psychology coursework. He completed his degree via correspondence courses and graduated in August 1945. After receiving his undergraduate degree, Leary pursued an academic career. In 1946, he received a M.S. in psychology at the Washington State College in Pullman, where he studied under educational psychologist Lee Cronbach. His M.S. thesis was on clinical applications of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
In 1947, Marianne gave birth to their first child, Susan. Their son, Jack, arrived two years later. In 1950, Leary received a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. In the postwar era, Leary was galvanized by the objectivity of modern physics; his doctoral dissertation approached group therapy as a "psychlotron" from which behavioral characteristics could be derived and quantified in a manner analogous to the periodic table, foreshadowing his later development of the interpersonal circumplex.
Professorship
Leary stayed on in the Bay Area as an assistant clinical professor of medical psychology at the University of California, San Francisco; concurrently, he co-founded Kaiser Hospital's psychology department in Oakland, California, and maintained a private consultancy. In 1952, the Leary family spent a year in Spain, living on a research grant. According to Berkeley colleague Marv Freedman, "Something had been stirred in him in terms of breaking out of being another cog in society."Leary's marriage was strained by infidelity and mutual alcohol abuse. Marianne eventually died by suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone. He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots".
From 1954 or 1955 to 1958, Leary directed psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation. In 1957, he published The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which the Annual Review of Psychology called the "most important book on psychotherapy of the year".
In 1958, the National Institute of Mental Health terminated Leary's research grant after he failed to meet with a NIMH investigator. Leary and his children relocated to Europe, where he attempted to write his next book while subsisting on small grants and insurance policies. His stay in Florence was unproductive and indigent, prompting a return to academia.
In late 1959, Leary started as a lecturer in clinical psychology at Harvard University at the behest of Frank Barron and David McClelland. Leary and his children lived in Newton, Massachusetts. In addition to teaching, Leary was affiliated with the Harvard Center for Research in Personality under McClelland. He oversaw the Harvard Psilocybin Project and conducted experiments in conjunction with assistant professor Richard Alpert. In 1963, Leary was terminated for failing to attend scheduled class lectures, though he maintained that he had met his teaching obligations. The decision to dismiss him may have been influenced by his promotion of psychedelic drug use among Harvard students and faculty. The drugs were legal at the time.
Leary's work in academic psychology expanded on the research of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney, which sought to better understand interpersonal processes to help diagnose disorders. Leary's dissertation developed the interpersonal circumplex model, later published in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. The book demonstrated how psychologists could use Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory scores to predict how respondents might react to various interpersonal situations. Leary's research was an important harbinger of transactional analysis, directly prefiguring the popular work of Eric Berne.
Psychedelic experiments and experiences
Mexico and Harvard research (1957–1963)
Introduction to psychedelic mushrooms
On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", an article by R. Gordon Wasson about the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, had experimented with psychedelic Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms on a trip to Mexico and told Leary about it. In August 1960, Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico, with Russo and consumed psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary said that he had "learned more about... brain and its possibilities... more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research".Back at Harvard, Leary and his associates began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze psilocybin's effects on human subjects from a synthesized version of the drug, one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms, including Psilocybe mexicana. Psilocybin was produced in a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, who was famous for synthesizing LSD.
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg heard about the Harvard research project and asked to join. Leary was inspired by Ginsberg's enthusiasm, and the two shared an optimism that psychedelics could help people discover a higher level of consciousness. They began introducing psychedelics to intellectuals and artists including Jack Kerouac, Maynard Ferguson, Charles Mingus and Charles Olson.