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EVERY PERSON
has everyday problems, just as every person has an everyday life, with mounds and hills of pleasure, and ruts and pitfalls
of trouble.
What are these "everyday" problems? They are usually related to any situation common to the
human condition. Nail-biting; hostility toward one's family; awkwardness; an uncontrollable temper; timidity; lethargy; unpopularity—all
are familiar and rather general manifestations of "everyday problems." Such manifestations, of course, can sometimes be cured
with aspirin or mouthwash or some other product from the neighborhood drugstore. On the other hand, everyday problems can
be seeds that grow into "serious" problems—marital or sexual dissatisfactions that daily worsen, drinking much more
than "too much," for instance—problems which may send the sufferer to his minister begging for advice, or to the psychiatrist's
couch, or to a hospital bed.
LSD, that quixotic giant, has been of service here, too. The drug has found
its way into countless "everyday lives" and has solved countless "everyday problems." The publications on LSD—both clinical
and popular—abound with accounts of "small" lives that have been made larger, richer, smoother, as a result of the LSD
experience. Many such endorsements have been given by those who would be terrified to take "drugs" (dope), and who will readily
swear that they take no drugs (alcohol, tea, coffee and tobacco do not count) except upon the doctor's orders when they are
"sick." "Sickness," therefore, has accounted for much of the first-hand information we have about everyday problem solving.
Numerous medical practitioners as well as psychologists and psychoanalysts, have used LSD to help patients over various impasses.
And, of course, there are thousands of private individuals who, through their own experiments, have found many of their problems
dissolved. The reason for this is that LSD usually acts as a "true mirror," and in a large number of cases that true mirror
is an inescapable one, revealing oneself to oneself with awesome and sometimes painful accuracy. Since most people are braver
than they think themselves to be, they often profit significantly from this honesty.
While there exist many
independent and spontaneous accounts of such experiences, those bearing the "official" seal are unquestionably more creditable.
For this reason, the individualistic, first-hand reports, which are often brilliantly stated and filled with sharp, persuasive
detail, must bow out, or at least for the time being take a seat in the rear.
Referring directly to one
of the most authoritative works in the field, any number of applicable examples of everyday problem solving can be found in
The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy.[1] The case of one seriously disturbed child is cited in this work as having
been effectively solved, or aided, through LSD therapy:
Dr. T. T. Peck.[2] The 5-year-old girl was a real behavior problem, completely rebellious
about everything. Knowing her background, I couldn't blame her. We gave her about 40 mcg over a 1 and 1/2 hour period. and
she became completely uninhibited. It was a typically schizophrenic reaction. Afterward, she was very happy. The only untoward
reaction was a very slight tremor and an over-elation, to some extent. But, for 2 weeks, she was just a perfect child. Of
course, she went back into the same environment and continued much the same pattern. But then we showed the parents where
they were really planting the seeds of her difficulties in her. By changing the environment, we solved the problem.
This example
is deliberately cited, in spite of its negative aspects, to show that the drug is only as good as the subject is, and that
a bad environment acts as a magnetic field and can draw back the best LSD recipient, unless the subject has maturity and/or
some control over his circumstances. In this case at least some of the proper environmental corrections were made. Another
account of a "problem child" had clearer, more patently satisfactory results, although the case was more expressly difficult:
Murphy:[3] One 8-year-old made a very good recovery. That was completed 3 years ago,
and I hear from the family quite often. She had a long-standing extremely chronic, and extremely restive, character disorder.
She was an enuretic child with deep sexual conflicts, whom I had had in unsuccessful psychotherapy for a year before she started
LSD. I was getting absolutely nowhere with her. In treatment, she worked up to 300 mcg (of LSD) and took them regularly, once
a week.
Asked if
the parents had had LSD too, Dr. Murphy replied that there was no father, and that although the mother had talked of taking
the drug, she never did. However, the mother was a "very intelligent, cooperative, and resourceful person," and there was
a "very thoroughgoing change in the child."
Dr. Murphy went on to explain the child's satisfactory recovery:
Her enuresis, which had been with her every day for several years, stopped after the second
session, a very violent one, in which she became disoriented and called continually for her mother. But then she went on to
a great deal of characterological change. She had been a thoroughly dull and boring person, a narrowly moralistic, unimaginative
child. She stank of urine most of the time. She was a "straight A" student in school. During treatment she changed so that
everyone, relatives and friends, as well as her mother and herself, noticed it. It wasn't so much "spectacular" as it was
profound and convincing. She was by no means free of problems, but became so free and creative and so much more outgoing and
generous, that it was clear her behavior was springing from something spontaneous within herself.
Passing
for the moment from the reports on the clinical level to those from other qualified and serious investigators lacking medical/psychiatric
credentials but highly respected, there is the case of "S," who was in the grips of an odd but troublesome behavior disorder
concerning "spilled" liquids. This is recounted in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience by R. E. L. Masters and
Jean Houston.[4]
Before "S" [5] took LSD, he was by habit a rather sloppy person who kept his office in
"a mess," was oblivious to clothes strewn about the house, dirty dishes and so forth. But one thing he could not abide was
liquid spilled on any surface. Seeing such unsightliness threw him into unaccountable rage and set him immediately to cleaning
it up.
About an hour into his session, S was led into a dining room where he immediately
noticed that some rather slimy looking soup had been spilled on the table top and left there, seemingly by accident. His initial
reaction was the usual one, and at once he began to search for something with which he might wipe up the spilled soup. Finding
nothing, he pulled out his handkerchief and debated whether he ought to use that. Then, however, he became aware that what
he was experiencing was much less anger... than fear. He looked closely at the droplets and turned noticeably pale. Before
his eyes, as he subsequently related, those few tiny drops began to expand, rise up, bubble and seethe, take on a "horribly
slimy and gelatinous" appearance, and then surge like a miniature but rapidly growing tidal wave toward the edge of the table.
At the same time, he recognized as a cause of his anxiety the fear not only that the room would be flooded with liquid but
also that it would infect whatever it touched.... He leaped back in horror, wiped away the drops with his handkerchief, and
appeared almost ready to faint. But then he approached the table again, picked up the soup bowl, and deliberately poured a
good bit of its contents on the table top. He became increasingly calm and described to the guides the visual distortions
he had perceived.
S now was urged to "go deeper," to go down into the depths of his own psyche and try to
find there some explanation for what he had seen. He fell silent for a minute, then spoke in a voice that sounded as if, in
fact, it were coming up from the depths. The phenomenon he had just witnessed, S said, was one that occurred on a level below
consciousness whenever he was confronted with spilled liquid. He could tap, from "some deep source," many memories of having
repeatedly had such experiences before, although they never had emerged into consciousness.
In working
through this strange insight, S finally realized that the "viscous putrefaction so corrosive as to 'rot [anything] upon contact'...
was 'bound up with... a wet, slimy and corrupt sexuality,' which simultaneously attracted and repelled, setting him in 'painful
conflict with moral values.' "
The LSD experience for S was like sailing in a glass-bottomed boat. As he
continued to peer into the opaque depths, he discovered still other facets of himself that eventually led to his "recovery"
and his saying—and his wife agreeing with him—that his relationships with his family were much better, "mainly
as a result of 'the loosening of a rigid puritanism.' "
This absorbing if small "everyday" problem is notable
not only for the subject's keen perception, but because it is a prime example of an "everyday" problem—nothing disastrous
but an unhappy condition that could, and did, create untold hours of anxiety for its owner. Just as a thorn in the heel torments
the bear unable to communicate his trouble, so the inarticulate human being who has a small, out-of-the-way, but constantly
troublesome problem can be made miserable by the most trifling of "thorns."
The lonely widow is, in a way,
luckier. At least she has a historical precedent, an accumulated warehouse of human sympathy to draw on, when she has lost
her spouse and cannot accept her loss. Masters and Houston present the case of a widow who had turned to the bottle for solace
shortly after her husband's death six years before. In consequence, she had lost her friends and herself, but adamantly remained
maudlin and inconsolable over her loss of her husband.
During her session she reminisced about her happy
life before her husband died. He had been all things to her, and had protected her in every way. Though he had left her well
provided for economically, she felt she had no emotional resources to live on and was too old to find any. Drink, and acting
as custodian of mementoes from the past—her husband's clothing, his toothbrush and other possessions—were her
only interests, aside from speaking of him as often as possible, almost as if he were alive.
S brought with her to her session a pipe that had been her husband's favorite
and which she often looked at and held when she wanted to feel especially close to him.... Finally, she closed her eyes and
reported that the pipe was "getting warm—and then that she had the feeling of holding not the pipe but instead her husband's
hand. She now experienced the first of many vivid memory sequences during which she "relived" with intense emotion a great
many past events.... Her husband seemed "real as life" and she wept with joy at his "return from the grave."
S then began to talk to her husband, telling him how much she had missed him since his death, how difficult life had been
for her, and how their friends had abandoned her since she had started to drink. To the guide's inquiry, she explained that
the sense of her husband's presence was "completely real" and that he listened "very seriously" to her discourse and sympathized
with her plight, but managed nonetheless to convey the idea that he "didn't really approve" of the way she had been behaving.
She fell silent, and finally reported that the pipe was only a pipe again, that it was growing cold, and the sense of her
husband's presence was becoming very faint. Then, however, it returned once again—a presence so powerfully felt that
she thought she could "reach out and touch him." She felt her husband smiled at her lovingly, conveying "whole worlds of encouragement
and strength," then slowly turned his back and walked away. Then the sense of presence was extinguished and somehow she knew
that he would "come no more." The pipe now was "cold and lifeless" in her hands and had "nothing more to do" with her husband....
"At long last," she said, he was "gone. Dead. Really dead. He has made me understand that and I have got to accept it. That
is what he would want me to do. That is the meaning of what I just went through."
S, from that
time on, was gradually able to make adjustments, to "grow up, create a new life" for herself; and she discontinued her drinking
immediately and did not revert to it.
That environment is a stern dictator, co-ruling man's fate with chance,
is clearly true in the case of another "victim" of himself, an amateur gambler who might more realistically be termed an amateur
loser. The subject, a clerk in a small English bank, was deep in debt and in constant friction with his wife and children
because he was a regular and compulsive gambler at the dog races. LSD and ritalin treatments, under direction of Drs. Ling
and Buckman, were suggested when it became apparent that betting at the dog races was the dominant activity of his life. (This
patient also had an immature dependency on his mother, a characteristic which did not help his marital situation. ) Even at
the outset of treatment, however, he realized his own weaknesses to a certain extent and acknowledged that he really gambled
in order to lose. He "obtained a strange satisfaction in the misery that followed losing, and the humiliations that followed
on the financial crisis," as he himself put it after his second LSD-ritalin session.
In time this man came
to understand that he was not behaving like an adult in calling on his mother for emotional reassurance and that some of his
problems were sexual. He was successful early in the series of his twelve sessions in giving up his deliberate losing at the
races and, upon occasion, he won some money. His relationships with his family, including sexual relations with his wife,
were markedly improved, and his trips to the dog races became infrequent. Still, although he was more content, in better financial
condition and no longer in the grip of his compulsion, he found himself unable to settle down. At the end of the ninth session
it was decided that he should take a rest from treatment for a time, to see what would happen.
He did not
have a genuine relapse, but again he got along badly with his wife and children, and he had to make a conscious effort to
resist urges that he return to his former preoccupations. His wife, a pragmatic type of person, lost patience with him. Finally
he went on a gambling spree, and afterward he felt "purged" because he had lost all his money. He also made a full confession
to the bank that he had done this, as he had on a previous occasion when his employers had been paternally understanding about
his difficulties. At that point he returned to treatment.
By the end of the final session, the former gambler
had a subtle but telling insight into his difficulties: he had not made the proper adjustment prior to his gambling spree
because, having been relieved of his compulsions, he had found no interests or outside occupations to replace them. When he
learned that he would have to "learn to live without it" (gambling), he then settled down to doing so, and quite successfully.
Six months after dismissal he was still living a satisfactory life, free from his previous problems.
Had
this man not been capable of learning to live without his destructive and immature preoccupation, his story might not have
had its successful conclusion. All too often "relapses" occur when the individual, freed from his problems, feels not his
loss so much as he does an inner void. Failure to find a constructive substitute, or to "fill in the hole," may engender a
state of anxiety and be as detrimental as returning to the same environment, unchanged in atmosphere or reality; and makes
full non-backsliding recovery virtually impossible.
Even more vivid than the gambler's case is this solution
of a "life problem," presented by Dr. Donald D. Jackson at an LSD symposium held at Napa State Hospital, Imola, California:
The patient was a 35-year-old accountant who had been in intensive psychotherapy for five
years because of chronic depression and crippling obsessive traits. He had had a brief psychotic reaction and had made an
abortive attempt at self-castration. His oldest sister was a semi-invalid; he was placed in a position of great responsibility
for her; yet he had always to be deferential and to accept continuous criticism. He had no pleasant experiences of adolescence,
and no dating. At the beginning of therapy he complained of intense loneliness. Both patient and therapist were frustrated
by his meager progress. His solid intellectual defenses were refractory to interpretation. Occasionally he made efforts to
improve his isolated social position; each time he neatly sabotaged the effort.
The patient
was given 100 mcg. of LSD at this point. Although he was eased somewhat, he was still blocked and the doctor was unable to
instigate any fantasy on the part of the patient that might point toward the cause.
Upon speculating about
the kind of fantasy a boy might entertain about a father he had hated, the doctor finally produced an image that suited the
patient. He suggested that if the patient—
—reverentially mowed the grass over his father's grave, and if each passage
of the blades over his father's grave cut a little deeper, there might be a gradual diminution, or shearing off of the parental
authority, a trimming of the father imago. I shared this fantasy with the patient and suggested that he might well have had
such a one. The effect was electric. He exploded with laughter. The feelings and fantasies about father came pouring out,
as though Moses had smote the rock. For the balance of the afternoon we reveled in an exchange of fantasies about his father.
From that day he was a changed man. Previously he had been a Milquetoast at work, whom everyone pushed around.
Now he became self-assertive and positive. He no longer let advantage be taken of him. He was poised and comfortable. It occurred
to him he might do better working by himself. During the next LSD session (150 micrograms) he was able to continue the work
of the preceding session. With the dread father laid to rest, he could relive his adolescent days with the therapist, not
as they had been, but as they might have been. He expressed for the first time the desire for a girl. In the month following,
astounding changes developed. He developed a sense of humor; he became efficient; he began to date; he made plans to leave
his job and set up his own business, and this he actually accomplished. He enjoyed dating and experienced intense sexual feelings.
In therapy he expressed the desire for marriage and children. He struck up a friendship with another man, with whom he discussed
topics formerly tabu: sex and women.
Following LSD he began to have intense dreams, sometimes pleasurable,
often in color, which he had not had before.
In seventeen (now nineteen) years of practicing psychotherapy,
I have never seen as much change in an individual with a rigid obsessional character. The change has been permanent. While
it has leveled off, there has been no backsliding since our first Encounter using LSD.
One of the
reasons why LSD had met with limited public acceptance—aside from the adverse publicity it has received and the fact
that the drug is acknowledged even by enthusiasts to be fraught with considerable-dangers unless expertly used—is that
today the public, in general, is quite accustomed to claims made for "miracle" cures. Every unusual advance is suspect to
the majority which, with some amusement, sits by and watches hopeful converts practice Spectro-chrome Therapy, Dianetics,
Grapho-Therapeutics or whatever else is in vogue that season.
This is not at all surprising. Well-attested
claims for cures burgeon for almost every remedy ever recommended, and cure claims for primitive and unusual nostrums will
probably always have a following. (Some of them, oddly enough, have even proved to have scientific validity. )
But prior to Hofmann's accidental discovery of LSD, there was never any miracle cure that claimed revolutionary benefits
in the alleviation of mankind's mental and emotional imbalances. Not until LSD has there been a therapy, a drug or any other
problem-solving means that reached so many different levels.
The nineteenth-century medicine show and its
medicine man must have given hope and therefore aid, as well as entertainment, to the audiences which bought patent medicines.
The purveyors were not all charlatans, whether or not they had personal faith in, or experience with, the product they peddled.
The claims they made for their goods always had any number of honest adherents to back them up. The endorsers believed that
the medicine did them good, and quite often it did, if only because they thought it would.
To ignore the
power of suggestion, with or without drugs, is perhaps to become fallacious. Even scrupulous investigators who would like
to think of themselves as unprejudiced are constantly being surprised by unacknowledged errors. This is why most seasoned
researchers accept all findings with caution and attempt rigorous self-examination to rout out their hidden biases.
Some reports made by members of the Josiah Macy Foundation's LSD conference, relating to experiments made with LSD
and placebos, revealed how great the powers of suggestion can be:
Abramson: "I have also seen rather violent reactions when tap water was administered.
One subject became so upset from a tap water 'dose' of zero LSD administered in the morning that I had to be with him until
11 o'clock that night, and he was upset for a week thereafter. One young girl became paralyzed in both legs after tap water.
Possibly the more violent reactions are due more to the underlying personality than to the drug itself."
Dr. Abramson
was asked if the placebo subjects were integrated with the group which had actually received the drug; the answer was in the
affirmative. He went on to say that extreme reactions on the part of the tap-water subjects invariably occurred in a group
setting and were typical. Another member of the conference, Dr. Betty G. Eisner, related that one of her placebo patients
in an experiment had had a violent skin reaction that persisted for some months later. And Dr. Keith S. Ditman spoke of an
unusual situation that came up in his work:
One of our subjects showed a reaction indicating he did not believe the physician had given
him LSD. This is a reverse situation; that is, the drug reaction was affected by the knowledge that placebos were sometimes
given.
This rather
startling incident would seem to indicate that if there is one thing that is superior to LSD in its power to alter the human
psyche, it is the human psyche itself! There are few cases on record, however, of the subject's successfully resisting LSD.
Indeed, most people who take the drug do so because they want to, or are advised to. Most LSD subjects look forward to the
prismatic, climactic, revealing experience which LSD promises and usually fulfills. They are prepared to be persuaded.
In the matter of marital relations or sexual experience while under LSD, the elements of extrasensory perception and
suggestion play a crucial part. If the drug is taken in an impersonal group setting, or with a guide whose interest in the
subject is purely clinical, sexual arousal seldom occurs. LSD is not a "sex drug," although in sexual matters it can act as
a strong stimulus if the setting and the people involved have sexual participation in mind. LSD can influence every area of
human activity, and when sex and LSD do converge, the experience is said to be indescribably ecstatic.
Marital Problems:
As novelists,
psychologists, and sociologists continue to observe, people today generally do not have good relationships with each other—relationships
that are healthy, joyous and open. Nor are many modern marriages sound. Marriage may begin with a great deal that favors success
and yet there is an appalling rate at which the relationship deteriorates.
Rates of divorce, annulment and
separation are almost at a par with marriage figures, and in countless situations a married couple only remains together for
"the children," or for "old time's sake." In our society, loneliness, alienation and incompatibility are increasingly familiar
conditions.
One of the most revealing studies made of marital mores and attitudes—a survey of 624
housewives who had been married for an average of ten years—was reported by Marya Mannes in The New York Times, November
15, 1965. Most of these women thought of themselves first as "a mother," then as "a wife." Asked about the role of the man
in the family, some 63 per cent thought of him primarily as "a breadwinner" (only 14 per cent considered him first of all
"a husband"). Despite this emphasis on the "breadwinner" aspect, however, "most of the wives felt that their husbands' work
was something entirely outside of their lives, and they commented on it only in terms such as 'My husband is a good provider'
or 'He has a good job.' " As an explanation of the remarkable "evasive tactics" engaged in by husbands in our society—television,
the papers, long working-hours, golf, drink, "outside sex," girlie magazines, Marya Mannes says:
Throughout their responses, the conclusion was inescapable that the wives cared far more about
what their husbands did than about what they were, as persons. About one-third of the women not only put their own
role as mothers first, but indicated that the husband was essentially outside the basic family unit of herself and her children.
In such
a situation, LSD has a remarkable ability to help people overcome problems of alienation. Sometimes this comes about simply
from bettering sexual relations:
Before I started taking LSD, I had all but lost interest in sex. As you know, I'm married—have
been for three years—but it hasn't turned out too well. To be frank, it hasn't worked at all, not even in the beginning
when we were still very much in love.[6]
This husband
then goes on to say that after experiencing LSD he went to bed with his wife and found "It was like discovering her all over
again. Her body, and I know it as well as I know my own, suddenly became new and fresh and exciting. Imagine all that... and
I was barely speaking to her a month ago."
In certain popular magazines, LSD has been presented as a powerful
sex drug. To a greater extent than with presumed "sex drugs," which are not really effective, the claims are justified, for
experiments are repeatable and LSD's sexual reputation is deserved. This is not to say that it is in any way an aphrodisiac,
but since LSD heightens all sensory perceptions, it follows quite logically that, used during sexual activity, fresh sexual
values are garnered.
Since sex, even in an age of enlightenment, is still a veiled subject, few serious
investigators have publicly revealed the value of LSD in melding sexual relations, the cornerstone of any good marriage. An
established authority on sexual behavior recently decided against the publication of a paper he had written on the sexual
aspects of psychedelic experience—on the grounds that such publication might jeopardize his career. Such attitudes have
left honest reporting of what occurs when LSD is introduced into the sexual experience to the maverick writer, or the reckless.
When the LSD session is directed toward problem solving in the psycho-sexual area, the drug can help to
uncover one's "essential self," and may transform the image of a loved one from a person fallen from favor due to his nagging
and irritating traits, to someone far more human and attractive. The drug is able to change the pessimist, who sees nothing
but the half empty glass, into an optimist delighted that the glass is half full. This value rearrangement, shifting from
being petty and faultfinding, to being impressed by the fundamental unity of life, is an opening to maturity.
In April, 1963, novelist Alan Harrington was getting along rather badly with his wife. They were "frequently at odds, and
just not connecting," at the time when he had his first LSD experience. As he wrote later, "I know that the vision revealed
by psycho-chemicals can help overcome feelings of alienation and loneliness":
[In] the next few hours... I loved and desperately wanted my wife. This was
a surprise to everyone, including ourselves, because as I said we had been through a bad time together. But under LSD it is
impossible to fake anything: she was my connection with life.
Someone commented later: "Well, what's so
surprising about two people who have been together for twelve years having a bond between them?"
Nothing,
I suppose, except that the bond can be buried in the details of everyday living; it can be forgotten; the bond can be taken
for granted and become boring if you let it, but just the same over the years it may still be the main cable attaching you
to life. During the parts of the LSD torment when an ego is being shredded, you know who your friends are.
LSD seems to
strip away ordinarily superficial motivations and interests. Under the influence of this drug, material accumulations come
to mean very little; of importance are relationships that are honest and meaningful, and the ability of the senses to derive
the most from experience.
The drug is able to effect these alterations in thought process because it short-circuits
old techniques for self-deception. During the LSD experience, the subject loses his accustomed habits of thinking and feeling
(much of the literature refers to this as "depersonalization"), and goes "outside" of himself, away from the old grooves of
normal defenses. From this new perspective, he sees through the ways in which he avoids intimacy and spontaneity, participation
and openness—what may lead to being "an utter fake," and what Eric Berne has discussed in terms of "evasions" in his
book Games People Play. There is a grim reality and embarrassing humor to such "games" as Harried, Kick Me,
Stupid, Wooden Leg, Rapo, Look How Hard I Am Trying, Sweetheart, and Uproar (to name a few on Berne's list).
LSD has very little patience with fraudulent defenses or with artificial environments or with status, and it rips away
the facade that keeps us from understanding how preoccupied we may have become with the trivial. The drug also seems to shorten
the gaps between events that are, or prove to be, meaningful, and thus it forestalls deliberate "forgetfulness," or blockage.
In consequence, a more realistic appraisal of oneself and one's behavior patterns seems possible. A 49-year-old married man
explained it this way after having undergone a series of LSD treatments at Marlborough Day Hospital in London:
I am able to talk to my wife more freely and frankly than I ever used to be. I am not so afraid
of saying what I really think even if I know she will not agree. Apart from the restoration of intercourse we really get on
much better than before. That is because there was a time, which was very difficult while it lasted but which has borne fruit,
when we were both quite open in our talking about the breach that had come between us. When one pretends that all is well
and is afraid of speaking about how one really feels there is no hope that things will get any better. When, as happened in
our case, one has the courage to be honest then there is a very good chance that all will be well.
An improved
grasp of the problem does not guarantee, of course, that a couple will be brought closer together. Often an attraction is
little more than a matter of both partners having needs which may be somewhat satisfied through living together. There are
many persons who are living with partners they do not really like, or who are continuing a relationship just to be continuing
something. Under the influence of LSD, such situations can become very clear; it may emerge that the alliance is essentially
sick, or at best unsatisfactory. Many an LSD user has claimed to realize that, for him, the time has come to "move on" and
that the "marital game has ended." A few, aware of the uprooting effect in their life arrangement, have stopped LSD sessions
because, as one woman put it, "I just can't permit that much honesty in my life."
Although risks like learning
more than one cares to know do exist, the "advice" given by LSD is for the most part benevolent. Instead of encouraging disparagement
of a mate for shortcomings, as may result from greater intellectual clarity, the drug generally activates emotional tolerance,
if not empathy, and highlights hidden or forgotten attractive qualities.
In one of Masters' and Houston's
sessions where this development occurred, a man in his early thirties, while looking in a mirror, saw an image of himself
as the source of great circular loops of neon that entirely surrounded him. Hundreds of thousands of such "loops" appeared.
He felt they were made up of all of his self-attachments and pertained to every point of his life:
"... memory loops, love loops, hate loops, eating loops, mental block loops." Upon re-entering
the living room he saw his wife and immediately became absorbed in studying her since she, too, appeared to him to be surrounded
by her loops. He had always thought of her as being "a rather simple person" and was "altogether amazed to discover that she
is every bit as complicated as I am."
Afterwards
the subject felt that he had been able to recapture a view of his wife that he had held at the time of their marriage and
that he understood her better. Similarly, through the "loops" important things about the characters of other people seemed
to be revealed to him.
Reports of successful marital adjustments with LSD increasingly give evidence of
restored appreciation for the partner and the partnership. It seems not unreasonable, therefore, that one day LSD may be regarded
as a strong asset to marriage counselors. As a forerunner of this possibility, Dr. Richard Alpert, an expert on psychedelics,
has included in his book, LSD, co-authored by Dr. Sidney Cohen, a section entitled "A Manual for Making the Marriage
New."
Along these lines, others have suggested that, in the future, LSD sessions might include the play-back
of previously taped events, specifically a family quarrel. Some of the precipitating factors might dissolve into trivia under
the light of fresh insight.
Frigidity, Impotence, Homosexuality and Perversion.
In 1962, when
screen-writer, novelist-actress "Constance Newland" (a pseudonym) published her book, My Self and I, frigidity in women
was an accepted, but relatively unexplored, problem. At the same time, LSD was an enigmatic drug, also relatively unexplored.
Since My Self and I appeared, joining the two topics in major context, LSD and the cure of frigidity have been linked
in the public mind.
In My Self and I, the author explains that for a number of years she had been
undergoing psychotherapy, without progress, for several problems, chief of which was frigidity. Regarding this, she was perfectly
prepared to live with it, because:
I knew from friends (and from Dr. Kinsey, who reports that approximately one third of American
women suffer similarly) that frigidity among women is almost as prevalent as the common cold—and just about as incurable.
Even so,
she was a healthy, functioning member of society. As Dr. Harold Greenwald says in his foreword to the book, "To me it seems
quite clear that most people meeting her even before her experience in self-discovery would probably have considered her well
balanced, adjusted or emotionally mature."
However gracefully she was able to accept her disorder, Constance
Newland was agreeable when LSD was suggested as an aid for her basic problem, frigidity. She found the results of her twenty-three
sessions with the drug so rewarding that she felt obliged to publicly share her achievements with others.
Constance Newland's husband had died just after her second child was born, and her feeling of emptiness, which she had thought
could only be filled with her career, was to be expected. That her career failed to gratify her emotional needs was also to
be expected. Her long, detailed account, with pronounced Freudian overtones, shows the two predominant effects of LSD when
used to treat sexual repressions. First, the drug is incisive in that it brings to the patient a conscious image of his condition.
Second, it returns him to childhood memories and events, which he relives, thus enabling him to come to new terms with them
and to slough them off selectively.
In her first session, Constance Newland had several clear indications
of her frigidity. Almost at once she felt cold and her teeth chattered as her body trembled. She felt herself sucked down
to the bottom of a dark ocean, alone on the ocean floor, a closed-up clam. Then she saw a "white marble statue of a nude woman
with two gaping holes where her breasts should be." This she recognized as a statue, which had actually been erected after
the second world war, in the center of a German city, christened, "The City Without a Heart."
In later sessions
indications of her frigidity were again revealed, but in other images: she saw herself on one occasion as a fragile glass
vase, about to break. Then it occurred to her that she thought of herself as being "Inviolate," and that it was no accident
that "violet" was her favorite color and that she often dressed in it.
The second major effect of the drug
was to return her to repressed traumatic incidents of childhood from which she had never been emotionally released. Re-living
these experiences, with all their original pain, she was freed from the sexual blockage which had made her frigid:
As a baby, I had seen the act of intercourse which looked to be an act of violence in which
father "choked" mother. That scene had so alarmed and sickened me that, as a protection, I had determined "never to feel anything
so that I would not be hurt."
At long long last, I had uncovered the classic Freudian "trauma" responsible for my sexual
difficulty: one too-strong, too-hot enema, received when I was two and a half years old. It was preposterous. But undeniable....
My ego would have been able to manage a too-strong enema with the "utmost ease" had it occurred later in life. But at the
age of two and a half, my ego was "helpless" and could only fend off the problem—by repression, which later turned out
to be ineffective and involved the "permanent hindrance to further development''—of frigidity....
Thus LSD
took Constance Newland to the base of her problem and released her from her deep-seated fears. Much to her amazement, she
discovered that there is indeed an "unconscious" and that her own had unknowingly served her as an emotional catch-all. Because
so much that was buried there was repellent to her, she had rejected the concept of the unconscious. But as her LSD treatment
gradually opened mental and emotional horizons for her conscious inspection, she recognized the unpleasant elements for what
they were, deflated them and dismissed them from her life. With their disappearance went the desperate emptiness which her
unconscious symptoms had brought about—the unrealistic quest for something to fill the void within her. As a result
of her thorough and courageous exploration of self, she gained understanding, adjustment and cure. As she says, "My life has
new savor, new meaning—and new mystery."
Life is repetitive in its processes and similar results were
achieved in sixteen other cases of frigidity treated by Drs. Thomas A. Ling and John Buckman of Marlborough Day Hospital in
London. They report the case of a twenty-six-year-old Indian girl, for example, who feared she could never marry or have sexual
relations, although she consciously wanted to. After treatment with LSD and Ritalin, she uncovered early memories which she
came to understand were the sources of her adult sexual fears. Re-experiencing birth, she felt she had been "created for creation."
This to me was orgasm and this joy was what I ought to look for ... This was also unity with
the "absolute."... I had my first practical lesson in how to have and enjoy intercourse. I learnt to lie back relaxed and
offer myself....
As a result
of therapy, her tensions disappeared and she gained emotional freedom. At the time the account was written up, she was maintaining
a successful relationship and was "able to get full satisfaction out of sexual intercourse and always achieved full orgasm."
Another interesting LSD treatment by these doctors, as reported in the Psychedelic Review, was that
of a married woman who had never obtained satisfaction from sex and reacted to it with distaste. It was soon discovered that
because she had had a "baby love affair" with her father, who nonetheless had no affection for her, she had rejected all sexuality.
In her third session she wanted to remember her first awareness of sexual feeling, and returned to infancy:
I was a tiny baby about six months old, lying on my back with my legs in the air, with no
clothes on and my father was looking at me. He was looking at my private parts and I expected him to react in an approving
way, but he did not. It was a shattering blow to my self-esteem. I felt that here was the very essence of my femaleness and
the one male I most wanted to show approval did not do so.
Following
this insightful LSD experience, the patient felt "enormously released." She found that she began to enjoy male relationships
which previously had resulted in feelings of shame and which afterwards she preferred not to think about. After treatment
she "felt a wonderful outpouring of love" and wanted to have a second child, though previously she had thought another pregnancy
would be "disastrous." In later sessions she summoned other childhood sexual detail that made even further progress possible,
and at the close of treatment she had her first full internal orgasm during intercourse. Six months later she reported to
her doctors:
I am completely free of all the feelings of distaste and guilt that I had, and am able to
enjoy [sex] in a "down to earth" and healthy way. I know my husband finds me much better company and I have a much more positive
approach to him and life in general, and I have much more patience with my children.
It is true
that in many cases of frigidity women have sublimated their sexual drives by turning to careers, and the indications are that
such women seek treatment only when the career (or other substitute) becomes disrupted or unsuccessful. One of the reasons
frigidity has been virtually untreatable in the past is that the sufferer could retain her sex substitute and persuade herself
that it was "fulfilling." LSD, however, reaches to the bottom of the disorder and the subject cannot take refuge from the
truth she finds, whether her career is "fulfilling" or not.
Recognition of the problem is an important first
step, but this in itself solves nothing. In frigidity cases, LSD seems to first define the problem, then dissolve it, thus
freeing the patient to make a suitable adjustment.[7]
The history of LSD is marked by important accidental
discoveries. The first, of course, was the unexpected and stunning discovery of the powers of the drug itself. It was
then only by chance that two investigators happened upon LSD's usefulness in the treatment of chronic alcoholism. Another
discovery several years later was made when a few researchers noticed that the drug enhanced the evocation of "religious"
or "mystical" experience. Still others, looking for a new pain-killer, found that LSD could help the terminal patient to a
greater serenity in acceptance of death. And much to the surprise of many homosexuals who had been given the drug for other
disorders, LSD coincidentally was found to help their homosexual adjustment as well. This is evidenced again and again (almost
as an aside) in case histories dealing primarily with other matters, but to date such information has remained obscure and
has seldom drawn comment.
Individual clinicians, however, have reported improvement in homosexual adjustments—almost
as a by-product of other treatment. Homosexual alcoholics, for example, have not only been able to solve their alcohol problems
as a result of using LSD, but have resolved sexual guilt to the point where they could accept their homosexuality without
shame or overemphasis of its importance to their lives, or they have become more involved in heterosexual behavior. Dr. Ruth
Fox and Dr. Jack Ward are two experts on alcoholism who have had several such cases in which homosexual symptoms have disappeared
or been alleviated, although specific treatment was not intended for this condition. Non-clinical investigators have also
noted this result. Masters and Houston, in giving LSD to college-educated subjects simply to study their reactions—with
no intention of "curing" anything—reported a number of subjects in whom there was a change in homosexual behavior patterns:
Like most (twelve out of fourteen) of the limited number of overt male homosexuals
who have been psychedelic volunteers, there is to be found here a distorted body image.... Certainly, the normalizing of the
distorted body image produced a marked trend towards heterosexualization.... In the streets, he consistently saw what he had
"never seen before": He noticed the "beasts and bottoms" of women and found them attractive. This was a source of much astonishment
to him, since before he always had passed women by without seeing them at all, or noticing them only as if they were objects,
"like lampposts or fire hydrants."
... all of the homosexual subjects have had a rather passive demeanor....
A frequent post-session effect is then a heightened aggressiveness, an impression of greater self-confidence and probably
better self-esteem, with a noticeable deepening of the voice in some cases. Also, gestures may become more vigorous, posture
more erect, and movements generally more decisive and, in some cases, more "masculine."
Coincidental
homosexuality adjustments have occurred with sufficient frequency that at lectures and conferences on LSD, the question has
been raised as to why LSD has not been put to direct use more often for treating the condition. The answer lies in the fact
that so far there has been no systematic attempt to measure the significance of LSD in this specific treatment.
It would appear, however, that LSD is successful in homosexual problems because it can reveal early traumas which underlie
the condition. Further, it can bring about, through insight, a lessening of morbid dependency on parents. As mentioned in
the foregoing quotation, it can alter an individual's inappropriate and/or pejorative total self image and lead to self acceptance.
There are many therapists who believe that it is not possible to work through problems of a sexual nature,
whether they be narcissism, over-dependency, blockage or a variety of perversions, without abreaction—that is, the patient
must first return to the early periods of his life when his attitudes and values were originally damaged and the construction
of "mental dams" was begun. In conventional psychotherapy, which consists mainly of "talking it out," some part of the dam
usually remains. This is why "dynamiting" it with Psychodrama, Marathons, and Vegetotherapy and other methods based on "shock
reactions" have a growing appeal. But compared to these methods, the potentials in LSD therapy seem vastly superior.
Several techniques have been developed for combining certain shock processes with LSD. One far-sighted team of English
doctors reported on their system (used in sixty cases over the last three years) at the Second International Conference on
the Use of LSD in Psychotherapy at Amityville, Long Island. They had an impressive number of successful cases to their credit,
with only two treatment failures and one relapse.
An example of their treatment, as applied to homosexuality,
was presented by Dr. Joyce Martin, Senior Hospital Medical Officer at Marlborough Day Hospital, and indicates the delicacy,
patience, and discernment required on the part of the therapist:
... active participation of the therapist is needed, since the drug regresses
the patients to the earliest experiences so dynamically that they literally feel as a baby and are unable to cope or fend
for themselves; but this is no longer frightening if their present mother, that is the therapist, is warm and understanding
and can supply their needs at that level in some practical way, such as giving warm milk, holding their hand or putting an
arm round them, and also talking to them at a conscious level, since consciousness is always maintained in the treatment,
and reassuring them that it is good and normal to want these things, which all babies need and want, but do not always get.
... we can enable him to face up to all the painful factors in his life and upbringing, which originally
the ego was not strong enough to accept; but now with the transference to the therapist, these things can be accepted. And
it is, in fact, the therapist's job to point them out, so that they are accepted, however unpleasant, which is possible when
the therapist, unlike mother, does not criticize or reject.
Freud maintained that, in certain types of neuroses,
called the narcissistic neuroses, the transference relationship did not develop. This made psychoanalytic treatment very difficult
and lengthy, and was the cause of much criticism. We have, however, had many narcissistic neuroses to deal with under LSD,
and find that, if we know the right role to play, then they gradually respond and develop a transference, develop and integrate.
For example, a man of forty-nine, obsessional schizoid, suffering from extreme sexual frustration causing tenseness, irritability,
inability to communicate with others and depression, was eventually able, through the right attitude of the therapist, to
communicate freely with her and eventually to have sexual feelings and show his penis to her, which was the first time in
his life that he had done such a thing, but he felt pleased and not ashamed of it...
The... case I wish
to describe... is that-of a man of twenty-five, a dentist.... His father died when the patient was one or two years old....
He remembered having a bicycle accident at 12 years of age and being treated in a hospital and then having
to stay in bed at home. He felt something horrible and frightening had happened to him during this time.... The therapist
had an intuitive feeling that there had been some sexual incident, and so she lay beside him. He remembered feeling cold and
miserable after the accident and asking mother if he could get into her bed, which he did. She offered him her breast and
later put her hand on his genitals. The therapist-intentionally put her hand on his thigh and the patient said he felt a weight
on top of him, which she interpreted as someone lying on him, so she got on top of him. This then brought back the memory
that his mother had sucked his penis and made it erect and then pushed it into her vagina. He said he felt like a horse being
ridden by a cowboy and that his mother was very masculine.
Later... he went through an extremely suicidal
depression. He sat in front of the fire holding out his handkerchief and saying that he saw patterns of a tombstone on it
and this was his tombstone. He then remembered feeling mad after the incident with his mother; and when she left him to go
off to work, he crawled back to his own bed and masturbated for the first time. The whole horror of the experience came over
him and he tried to forget it. He then began to see his mother as wicked and evil and ugly and he determined never to let
her touch him again. He locked his door at night and hardly spoke to her for weeks. Eventually the whole incident became repressed
and he never looked at her or touched her again.
The suicidal depression continued for some time, and the
patient would drive his car at 60 miles an hour up one-way streets, etc. He projected his hate against his mother on to the
therapist at times, seeing her as ugly and evil, but with her interpretation about it he was able to accept that it was only
his feelings about his mother, and he continued to come for treatment.
His next memory was of having been
picked up by an older boy in the park, when he was fourteen years old, and allowing the boy to touch his penis and later seduce
him, which he admitted enjoying and said it made him feel like a woman. Later on, he also had successful sexual relations
with virgins, and realized that he was getting his own back on his mother in doing this, but that he did not have such a good
orgasm as when playing the female role. He now remembered doing this with his brother.
The transference
to the therapist was now fully developed and therefore, in order to get him out of the homosexual stage of development, she
praised a mutual acquaintance as being a fine virile man, and this made the patient very jealous, so that the next week he
told her that he had made two conquests with virgins during the week. He then asked the therapist to lie on the bed with him,
which she did, and he put his arms across her shoulders and said he felt merged with her as one person and they were going
into a tunnel together, which was identification with his mother. Later on, he said he didn't want to be a woman any more,
as he felt she wanted him to be a man, and she agreed she did want this, since he had been born a boy. He said his aim now
was to become a man and possess her.
The insights
which some homosexuals have had from LSD therapy have enabled them to marry happily, adjust to an existing marriage, or decide
that they are essentially homosexual and want to stay that way. Other patients who feared homosexuality and had decided to
have no sexual relations at all have found the courage to experiment, and some are leading fulfilling heterosexual lives.
Since the causes of homosexuality are diffuse and not well understood, a continuance of homosexuality after
LSD is not necessarily a treatment failure and should not be thought of as relapse. It may represent the establishment of
a positive nature of the self.
As a group of Canadian psychotherapists put it,... "many [homosexuals] have
derived marked benefit in terms of insight, acceptance of role, reduction of guilt and associated psychosexual liabilities."
This is an estimable development, for as Eric Berne points out in his book about symbolic game-playing, an understanding of
the sundry homosexual dodges and reassuring apologies indulged in by insecure homosexuals can lead to a more highly integrated
life:
[In] "Cops and Robbers," "Why Does This Always Happen to Us," "It's the Society We Live In,"
"All Great Men Were" and so forth, the "professional homosexual" wastes a large amount of time and energy which could be applied
to other ends. Analysis of his games may help him establish a quiet menage which will leave him free to enjoy the benefits
that bourgeois society offers, instead of devoting himself to playing his own variation of "Ain't It Awful"
Because
homosexuality has been considered an endemic and deep-rooted condition since times of antiquity, hopes for its alleviation,
until very recent times, have been faint. But lately, since other resistant mental aberrations have been overcome by new methods,
somewhat drastic treatments are being used and advocated for the homosexual in some quarters. In one current technique the
homosexual patient is shown a picture of an attractive male and is simultaneously given an electric shock. Such a method,
perhaps of some use, nevertheless may have deleterious effects—which is why most thoughtful therapists are opposed to
such "reconditioning."
Unbelievable as it may seem to the conservative therapist, however, LSD not only
works better in the treatment of the homosexual problem, but it does not seem to require the substitution of a surrogate symptom.
Here is how one analyst,[8] familiar with the LSD studies, states it:
I went to the International Congress on Psychotherapy in London last year. There were quite
a large number of papers on LSD therapy. The different approaches were really quite astonishing; people seemed to claim, at
any rate, that they get almost equally good results from different viewpoints. Some people, indeed, seemed to think that one
would get a result, in some cases, entirely from the effect of the drug, with very little in the way of psychotherapy. When
one goes to the A.P.A. meeting, one hears the enthusiasm of the behavior therapists and their claims, with much conviction,
that by deconditioning and getting rid of patients' symptoms, you can get patients better, and they do not relapse, and they
do not produce other symptoms! Contrary to the expectations of the analysts, who have all said that if you get rid of these
symptoms, you will only produce other ones.
In the
layman's mind, homosexuality is often confused with other inversions—transvestism, fetishism, sadomasochism, etc. While
this confusion may cause concern among homosexuals and sexologists, there is a grain of truth in this misidentification in
that a wide range of sexual disorders spring from the same general source, and to a certain extent they are interchangeable.
Because this is the case, a number of uncommon and bizarre aberrations, also engendered early in life, can be treated with
therapy similar to that for homosexuality.
Although seldom classed as perversion, sexual promiscuity is
closely related. As therapists know, patterns of promiscuity can be altered by an emotional recall of certain past events
on the part of the patient. This may be the explanation for the reports, which have puzzled some authorities, that LSD not
only can help the asexual person to "normality," but also can moderate wanton behavior and create the capacity for more lasting
relationships.
It is known that homosexuality and the other perversions are dependent upon fantasy for their
maintenance. Most of this fantasy stems from childhood daydreams and is unsatisfactory for transition to adult life. The grown-up
daydreamer does not recognize this because he has updated and embellished his fantasies with images and impressions he has
found suitable along the way. But he builds of necessity on shaky ground: infantile vision, inexperience and immature understanding.
In consequence, the fantasy, though it may be firmly established as ritual and heavily depended upon, can never reward and
comfort as it did when first conceived. When the fabric of the fantasy wears thin, as it must occasionally because of environmental
change, the daydreamer is in trouble.
In contrast, the LSD fantasy that the patient experiences in treatment
usually is a means of redressing old grievances, but it contains elements appropriate to maturity. Characteristically it reinterprets
happenings of the past (for which the subject was unprepared) from the perspectives of deeper maturity and this entails a
re-examination of the meaning of one's personal existence and a symbolic passage into a new order. The LSD fantasies seem
particularly directed toward the rebalancing of maladaptive functioning, in much the same way as Jung saw the purpose for
dreams. This can lead to growth and transformation. In a society that lacks formal initiation rites, a factor which consequently
leaves uncertain the termination of childhood and adolescence, LSD fantasies seem to facilitate entry of the chronologically
grown-up but emotionally infantile adult into a mature world. This applies to the whole gamut of perversion: sadomasochism,
bestiality, chronic masturbation, flagellation, nymphomania and so forth.
This growth—like all significant
change—can be frightening to the patient and may seriously disrupt the life condition. It can also bring about undesirable
changes in family life unless precautions have been taken and an expectancy has been established. As those familiar with domestic
relations know, improvement in one partner can bring about deterioration in the other. With LSD therapy there is the additional
problem that any marked gain may be dismissed on the grounds that "a drug can't do such things." This attitude is sometimes
disastrous.
In one case, a woman who had become withdrawn, gloomy and listless because she felt that her
successful husband had "outgrown" her and should divorce her, was restored after LSD therapy to the amiable, outgoing person
she had once been. The husband had been completely loyal to her during her travails, but he lost all interest in her when
it became clear that her recovery and renewed interest in life were genuine. He found as time passed that he could not accept
her as an equal, his childhood asthma attacks gradually returned, his business no longer prospered and eventually divorce
did occur.
As a final comment on LSD's role in sexual and domestic matters, it is fitting to reiterate a
plea made by R.E.L. Masters when he published for the first time a series of case histories about the use of psychedelics
as they affect sexual behavior:
... problems connected with sex relations have plagued humanity for a long while,
as they certainly do today. And I do not see how there could be any legitimate objection to the development and marketing
of drugs aimed at helping people generally to enrich their sexual relations when they do have them, and which would assist
in relieving the anguish and misery of persons whose sexual problems are so severe that they are either driven into very bizarre
perversions or forced to get along without any sex lives at all.
Since most of humanity's present day sexual
problems, including impotence and frigidity, are psychological in origin, drugs which merely work upon the genitals, producing
engorgement, are often of little value; and it is likely that the drugs capable of solving or helping with these problems
will have to be drugs powerfully affecting the mind. That is why [psychedelic drugs are] so interesting and promising and
why [they] should be thoroughly explored in this connection.
Footnotes
1. This volume,
edited by Dr. Abramson, is a record of the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation's LSD conference held in April, 1959. 1,099 case histories
of patients formed the basis of the report. (back)
2. Of the Psychiatric and Public Health Departments,
San Jacinto Memorial Hospital, Baytown, Texas. (back)
3. Dr. Robert C. Murphy, Jr., Waverly, Penn. (back)
4. "Psychedelic," a word coined by Dr. Humphry Osmond,
comes from Greek roots and means "mind-manifesting." It was expressly invented to describe the growing list of "mind" drugs
which have effects similar to LSD. There are at present about eighty such drugs aside from LSD; the most commonly known are
psilocybin, mescaline and DMT (dimethyltryptamine). (back)
5. Masters and Houston refer to all of their subjects
as "S." (back)
6. From an interview in Dude magazine, September,
1966. (back)
7. While the published case histories of frigidity cures
with LSD have been emphasized, LSD has similar effects and results in the treatment of male impotence. Men are by and large
more successful than women in diverting sexual energies into their careers when confronted with their problem, and the incidence
is less in any case. Consequently, less attention has been paid to the causes and treatment of this condition. Since here
again the disabling agents that lead to impotence are anxiety, unconscious blocks, fear and inhibition, LSD can bring about
an effective cure. (back)
8. Dr. Donald Blair of St Bernard's Hospital, London.
(back)
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