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Re-Creational Uses 3 |
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The decade of the 1950s saw LSD passing largely into the hands of psychotherapists, who gradually developed considerably revised theories as to its effects, and something of a recreationally- oriented clientele. By August 1950, for example, A.K. Busch and W.C. Johnson were discussing the drug's role as an aid in psychotherapy in an American journal, Diseases of the Nervous System. When Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who came on the scene before this decade was over, later questioned Busch as to how the pair had become involved, Busch said, "I don't know. We got the idea that if we got a good delieriant going, we might then shake things up a bit." Such thinking, rather nonmedical in origin, no doubt influenced many at this time. |
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The overt reason given for professional interest in this drug was that researchers were hoping -- on the basis of an analogy made with the conquest of yellow fever and malaria -- that if they could create a temporary psychosis, then they might be able to study their subject firsthand and maybe overcome it. The result was that LSD was gradually getting into their heads, those of their patients and those of their friends. |
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Oscar Janiger is a good example. He became involved with this substance when someone asked him -- after he had spoken about abnormal psychology, mainly illustrating with anecdotes derived from accidents and brain lesions -- whether or not he himself would like to experience such a state, and offered him LSD. The result, once he had agreed, was such that before long he had initiated nearly a thousand others.
One of his subjects was an artist, who under the influence of the drug had a strong desire to draw. Later he remarked that this LSD episode "was the most important artistic experience that [he had] ever had" and asked whether or not Janiger would mind if he told other artists about it. That opened up Janiger to the potentially significant re-creational uses of LSD. |
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During the 1950s there was what Allen Ginsberg has called "a big cloud of literal consciousness repression" hanging over the appreciation of altered states of mind. Hence most of those with access to LSD in these early days readily accepted the then current notion that it was a psychotomimetic (psychosis-mimicking) agent. But in many ways, this has been a powerful, but nonspecific amplifier of the mental set of the experiencer and the conditions of any particular session. This initial designation of psychotomimetic was probably the result of unfamiliarity with LSD and the original coloration provided by Hofmann's overdose (as he sometimes describes that first deliberate LSD trip). |
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The import of the Busch and Johnson report of 1950 was that on the basis of their preliminary investigation many psychotherapists realized that LSD might offer a means for more readily gaining access to chronically withdrawn patients. "It may also serve as a tool for shortening psychotherapy," they added, and hoped that further investigation would justify their impressions.
Before long, others were widening the sense of LSD's potential. For example, R.A. Sandison, an English practitioner, offered his appraisal early on: "There are good reasons for believing that the LSD experience is a manifestation of the psychic unconscious, and that its material can be used in psychotherapy in the same way that dreams, phantasies and paintings can be used by psychoanalysts."
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