How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

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  SIDNEY COHEN AND HIS COLLEAGUES in Los Angeles had, like the Canadian group, started out thinking that LSD was a psychotomimetic, but by the mid-1950s Cohen, too, had come to question that model. Born in 1910 in New York City to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Cohen, who in photographs looks very distinguished, with thick white hair slicked back, trained in pharmacology at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in the South Pacific during World War II. It was in 1953, while working on a review article about chemically induced psychoses—a long-standing research interest—that Cohen first read about a new drug called LSD.

  Yet when Cohen finally tried LSD himself in October 1955, he “was taken by surprise.” Expecting to find himself trapped inside the mind of a madman, Cohen instead experienced a profound, even transcendent sense of tranquillity, as if “the problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life [had] vanished; in their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude . . . I seemed to have finally arrived at the contemplation of eternal truth.” Whatever this was, he felt certain it wasn’t a temporary psychosis. Betty Eisner wrote that Cohen came to think of it instead as something he called “unsanity”: “a state beyond the control of the ego.”

  As often happens in science when a theoretical paradigm comes under the pressure of contrary evidence, the paradigm totters for a period of time as researchers attempt to prop it up with various amendments and adjustments, and then, often quite suddenly and swiftly, it collapses as a new paradigm rises to take its place. Such was the fate of the psychotomimetic paradigm in the mid-1950s. Certainly, a number of volunteers were reporting challenging and sometimes even harrowing trips, but remarkably few were having the full-on psychosis the paradigm promised. Even poor Mr. Katz’s twelve hours as a madman included passages of indescribable pleasure and insight that could not be overlooked.

  As it happened, the psychotomimetic paradigm was replaced not by one but by two distinct new theoretical models: the psycholytic and, later, the psychedelic model. Each was based on a different conception of how the compounds worked on the mind and therefore how they might best be deployed in the treatment of mental illness. The two models weren’t at odds with each other, exactly, and some researchers explored both at various times, but they did represent profoundly different approaches to understanding the psyche, as well as to psychotherapy and, ultimately, science itself.

  The so-called psycholytic paradigm was developed first and proved especially popular in Europe and with the Los Angeles group identified with Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner, and Oscar Janiger. Coined by an English psychiatrist named Ronald Sandison, “psycholytic” means “mind loosening,” which is what LSD and psilocybin seem to do—at least at low doses. Therapists who administered doses of LSD as low as 25 micrograms (and seldom higher than 150 micrograms) reported that their patients’ ego defenses relaxed, allowing them to bring up and discuss difficult or repressed material with relative ease. This suggested that the drugs could be used as an aid to talking therapy, because at these doses the patients’ egos remained sufficiently intact to allow them to converse with a therapist and later recall what was discussed.

  The supreme virtue of the psycholytic approach was that it meshed so neatly with the prevailing modes of psychoanalysis, a practice that the drugs promised to speed up and streamline, rather than revolutionize or render obsolete. The big problem with psychoanalysis is that the access to the unconscious mind on which the whole approach depends is difficult and limited to two less-than-optimal routes: the patient’s free associations and dreams. Freud called dreams “the royal road” to the subconscious, bypassing the gates of both the ego and the superego, yet the road has plenty of ruts and potholes: patients don’t always remember their dreams, and when they do recall them, it is often imperfectly. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin promised a better route into the subconscious.

  Stanislav Grof, who trained as a psychoanalyst, found that under moderate doses of LSD his patients would quickly establish a strong transference with the therapist, recover childhood traumas, give voice to buried emotions, and, in some cases, actually relive the experience of their birth—our first trauma and, Grof believed (following Otto Rank), a key determinant of personality. (Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients’ recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)

  In Los Angeles, Cohen, Eisner, and Janiger began incorporating LSD in their weekly therapeutic sessions, gradually stepping up the dose each week until their patients gained access to subconscious material such as repressed emotions and buried memories of childhood trauma. They mainly treated neurotics and alcoholics and people with minor personality disorders—the usual sorts of patients seen by psychotherapists, functional and articulate people with intact egos and the will to get better. The Los Angeles group also treated hundreds of painters, composers, and writers, on the theory that if the wellspring of creativity was the subconscious, LSD would expand one’s access to it.

  These therapists and their patients expected the drug to be therapeutic, and, lo and behold, it frequently was: Cohen and Eisner reported that sixteen of their first twenty-two patients showed marked improvement. A 1967 review article summarizing papers about psycholytic therapy published between 1953 and 1965 estimated that the technique’s rate of success ranged from 70 percent in cases of anxiety neurosis, 62 percent for depression, and 42 percent for obsessive-compulsive disorder. These results were impressive, yet there were few if any attempts to replicate them in controlled trials.

  By the end of the decade, psycholytic LSD therapy was routine practice in the tonier precincts of Los Angeles, such as Beverly Hills. Certainly the business model was hard to beat: some therapists were charging upwards of five hundred dollars a session to administer a drug they were often getting from Sandoz for free. LSD therapy also became the subject of remarkably positive press attention. Articles like “My 12 Hours as a Madman” gave way to the enthusiastic testimonials of the numerous Hollywood celebrities who had had transformative experiences in the offices of Oscar Janiger, Betty Eisner, and Sidney Cohen and a growing number of other therapists. Anaïs Nin, Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick, André Previn, James Coburn, and the beat comedian Lord Buckley all underwent LSD therapy, many of them on the couch of Oscar Janiger. But the most famous of these patients was Cary Grant, who gave an interview in 1959 to the syndicated gossip columnist Joe Hyams extolling the benefits of LSD therapy. Grant had more than sixty sessions and by the end declared himself “born again.”

  “All the sadness and vanities were torn away,” the fifty-five-year-old actor told Hyams, in an interview all the more surprising in the light of Cary Grant’s image as a reserved and proper Englishman. “I’ve had my ego stripped away. A man is a better actor without ego, because he has truth in him. Now I cannot behave untruthfully toward anyone, and certainly not to myself.” From the sound of it, LSD had turned Cary Grant into an American.

  “I’m no longer lonely and I am a happy man,” Grant declared. He said the experience had allowed him to overcome his narcissism, greatly improving not only his acting but his relationships with women: “Young women have never before been so attracted to me.”

  Not surprisingly, Grant’s interview, which received boatloads of national publicity, created a surge in demand for LSD therapy, and for just plain LSD. Hyams received more than eight hundred letters from readers eager to know how they might obtain it: “Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD.”

  If the period we call “the 1960s” actually began sometime in the 1950s, the fad for LSD therapy that Cary Grant unleashed in 1959 is one good place to mark a shift in the cultural breeze. Years before Timothy Leary became not
orious for promoting LSD outside a therapeutic or research context, the drug had already begun “escaping from the lab” in Los Angeles and receiving fervent national press attention. By 1959, LSD was showing up on the street in some places. Several therapists and researchers in Los Angeles and New York began holding LSD “sessions” in their homes for friends and colleagues, though exactly how these sessions could be distinguished from parties is difficult to say. At least in Los Angeles, the premise of “doing research” had become tenuous at best. As one of these putative researchers would later write, “LSD became for us an intellectual fun drug.”

  Sidney Cohen, who by now was the dean of LSD researchers in Los Angeles, scrupulously avoided this scene and began to have second thoughts about the drug, or at least about the way it was now being used and discussed. According to his biographer, the historian Steven Novak, Cohen was made uncomfortable by the cultishness and aura of religiosity and magic that now wreathed LSD. Sounding a theme that would crop up repeatedly in the history of psychedelic research, Cohen struggled with the tension between the spiritual import of the LSD experience (and the mystical inclinations it brought out in its clinical practitioners) and the ethos of science to which he was devoted. He remained deeply ambivalent: LSD, he wrote in a 1959 letter to a colleague, had “opened a door from which we must not retreat merely because we feel uncomfortably unscientific at the threshold.” And yet that is precisely how the LSD work often made him feel: uncomfortably unscientific.

  Cohen also began to wonder about the status of the insights that patients brought back from their journeys. He came to believe that “under LSD the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his patient.” The expectancy effect was such that patients working with Freudian therapists returned with Freudian insights (framed in terms of childhood trauma, sexual drives, and oedipal emotions), while patients working with Jungian therapists returned with vivid archetypes from the attic of the collective unconscious, and Rankians with recovered memories of their birth traumas.

  This radical suggestibility posed a scientific dilemma, surely, but was it necessarily a therapeutic dilemma as well? Perhaps not: Cohen wrote that “any explanation of the patient’s problems, if firmly believed by both the therapist and the patient, constitutes insight or is useful as insight.” Yet he qualified this perspective by acknowledging it was “nihilistic,” which, scientifically speaking, it surely was. For it takes psychotherapy perilously close to the world of shamanism and faith healing, a distinctly uncomfortable place for a scientist to be. And yet as long as it works, as long as it heals people, why should anyone care? (This is the same discomfort scientists feel about using placebos. It suggests an interesting way to think about psychedelics: as a kind of “active placebo,” to borrow a term proposed by Andrew Weil in his 1972 book, The Natural Mind. They do something, surely, but most of what that is may be self-generated. Or as Stanislav Grof put it, psychedelics are “nonspecific amplifiers” of mental processes.)

  Cohen’s thoughtful ambivalence about LSD, which he would continue to feel until the end of his career, marks him as that rare figure in a world densely populated by psychedelic evangelists: the open-minded skeptic, a man capable of holding contrary ideas in his head. Cohen continued to believe in the therapeutic power of LSD, especially in the treatment of anxiety in cancer patients, which he wrote about, enthusiastically, for Harper’s in 1965. There, he called it “therapy by self-transcendence,” suggesting he saw a role in Western medicine for what would come to be called applied mysticism. Yet Cohen never hesitated to call attention to the abuses and dangers of LSD, or to call out his more fervent colleagues when they strayed too far off the path of science—the path from which the siren song of psychedelics would lure so many.

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  BACK IN SASKATCHEWAN, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer had taken a very different path after the collapse of the psychotomimetic paradigm, though this path, too, ended up complicating their own relationship to science. Struggling to formulate a new therapeutic model for LSD, they turned to a pair of brilliant amateurs—one a famous author, Aldous Huxley, and the other an obscure former bootlegger and gunrunner, spy, inventor, boat captain, ex-con, and Catholic mystic named Al Hubbard. These two most unlikely nonscientists would help the Canadian psychiatrists reconceptualize the LSD experience and develop the therapeutic protocol that is still in use today.

  The name for this new approach, and the name for this class of drugs that would finally stick—psychedelics—emerged from a 1956 exchange of letters between Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley. The two had first met in 1953, after Huxley wrote to Osmond expressing interest in trying mescaline; he had read a journal article by Osmond describing the drug’s effects on the mind. Huxley had long harbored a lively interest in drugs and consciousness—the plot of his most famous novel, Brave New World (1932), turns on a mind-control drug he called soma—as well as mysticism, paranormal perception, reincarnation, UFOs, and so on.

  So in the spring of 1953, Humphry Osmond traveled to Los Angeles to administer mescaline to Aldous Huxley, though not without some trepidation. In advance of the session, he confided to a colleague that he did not “relish the possibility, however remote, of finding a small but discreditable niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad.”

  He need not have worried. Huxley had a splendid trip, one that would change forever the culture’s understanding of these drugs when, the following year, he published his account of his experience in The Doors of Perception.

  “It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision,” Huxley wrote in a letter to his editor shortly after it happened. For Huxley, there was no question but that the drugs gave him access not to the mind of the madman but to a spiritual realm of ineffable beauty. The most mundane objects glowed with the light of a divinity he called “the Mind at Large.” Even “the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us, before dilating on the beauty of the draperies in Botticelli’s paintings and the “Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” When he gazed upon a small vase of flowers, he saw “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence . . . flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.”

  “Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind.” For Huxley, the drug gave him unmediated access to realms of existence usually known only to mystics and a handful of history’s great visionary artists. This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is kept from our awareness by the “reducing valve” of everyday waking consciousness, a kind of mental filter that admits only “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” we need in order to survive. The rest was a gorgeous superfluity, which, like poetry, men die every day for the lack thereof. Mescaline flung open what William Blake had called “the doors of perception,” admitting to our conscious awareness a glimpse of the infinite, which is always present all around us—even in the creases in our trousers!—if only we could just see.

  Like every psychedelic experience before or since, Huxley’s did not unfold on a blank slate, de novo, the pure product of the chemical, but rather was shaped in important ways by his reading and the philosophical and spiritual inclinations he brought to the experience. (It was only when I typed his line about flowers “shining with their own inner light” and “all but quivering under the pressure” of their significance that I realized just how strongly Huxley had inflected my own perception of plants under the influence of psilocybin.) The idea of a mental reducing valve that constrains our perceptions, for instance, comes from the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson believed that consciousness was not generated by human brains but rather exists in a field outside us, something like electromagnetic waves; our brains, which he likened to radio receivers, can tu
ne in to different frequencies of consciousness. Huxley also believed that at the base of all the world’s religions there lies a common core of mystical experience he called “the Perennial Philosophy.” Naturally, Huxley’s morning on mescaline confirmed him in all these ideas; as one reviewer of The Doors of Perception put it, rather snidely, the book contained “99 percent Aldous Huxley and only one half gram mescaline.” But it didn’t matter: great writers stamp the world with their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear Huxley’s indelible imprint.

  Whatever else it impressed on the culture, Huxley’s experience left no doubt in his mind or Osmond’s that the “model psychosis” didn’t begin to describe the mind on mescaline or LSD, which Huxley would try for the first time two years later. One person’s “depersonalization” could be another’s “sense of oneness”; it was all a matter of perspective and vocabulary.

  “It will give that elixir a bad name if it continues to be associated, in the public mind, with schizophrenia symptoms,” Huxley wrote to Osmond in 1955. “People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.”

  Clearly a new name for this class of drugs was called for, and in a 1956 exchange of letters the psychiatrist and the writer came up with a couple of candidates. Surprisingly, however, it was the psychiatrist, not the writer, who had the winning idea. Huxley’s proposal came in a couplet:

  To make this mundane world sublime