Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  DJB & JEANNE: (simultaneously) Uh oh!

  OSCAR: I went to see McNeal. He shook his head and said, "I’ve been a principal for twenty years and I’ve never run into this in my life. You will have to go back and see your professor because you’re under suspension right now." I said, "What’s wrong?" "Wine, wine! You brought spirits into the classroom!" I said, "Now let me tell you about fermentation." "Please!" he said, "don’t tell me about it, I don’t wan’t to hear about it!"

  He was apoplectic. So I go back and see my professor, the holy of holies, the teacher of teachers. He was perplexed and then said to me, "There’s something you should know. We’re here to teach children, not to entertain them." Well, that phrase broke loose in me and I got very upset. I got up and said, "You know what professor? You can take your goddamn class in general science and stuff it." For weeks after, he’d call me and write me letters saying, we can work this out, but I refused. That was my stint at teaching in high school. It was the best thing that ever happened, I’d still be teaching high school today if it hadn’t.

  DJB: You’ve used the term "dry schizophrenia" in desribing a creative artist. Could you explain what you mean by this and what similarities and differences you see between certain aspects of madness and the process of creativity?

  OSCAR: Well, of course that’s always been on my mind. I remember that I could make the wallpaper do all kinds of tricks when I had a fever, and I could sit - if you’ll excuse me - on the john, and watch the tiles recompose themselves and make patterns. Therefore I suspected that there was a part of my mind which had a certain influence over the world around me, and that, under certain conditions, it can take on novel and interesting forms. The dreams I had were very vivid, very real, and there were times when I found it hard to distinguish between the dream life and what we might call the waking life. So there was a very rich repository of information that was somewhat at my disposal at times, sometimes breaking through at odd moments. I later on thought that could be a place that one could draw a great deal of inspiration from.

  So I studied the conditions under which people have these releases, breakthroughs, or have access to other ways and forms of perceiving the world around them and changing their reality. When I studied the works of people who profess to go to creative artists and ask them how they did it and what it was about, I realized that what we had by way of understanding creativity was a tremend- ous collection of highly idiosyncratic and subjective responses. There was no real way of dealing with the creative process as a state you could refer to across the board, or how one could encourage it. That’s how I got the idea for a study in which we could deliberately change consciousness in an artist using LSD, given the same reference object to paint before and during the experience. Then I would try to make an inference from the difference between the artwork outside of the drug experience and while they were having it. In doing so I was struck by the fact that the paintings, under the influence of LSD, had some of the attributes of what looked like the work done by schizophrenics. If you would talk to the artists in terms of the everyday world, the answers would be very strange and tangential. Then I began to look into the whole sticky issue of psycho- pathology and creativity.

  I found that there are links between the creative state and certain qualities that people say they have when they’re creating, that were very much like some of the perceptions of people who were schizophrenic or insane. I began to notice what made the difference. It seemed that the artists were able to maintain a certain balance, riding the edge, as it were. I thought of creativity as a kind of dressage, riding a horse delicately with your knees. The artist was able to ride his creative Pegasus, putting little pressure on his ability to control the situation, enabling him to just master it, while allowing the rest to flow freely so that the creative spirit can take it’s own course.

  The artist is faced with the dilemma of allowing this uprush of material to enter into their conscious mind, much like trying to take a drink from a high-pressure fire hose. This allows them to integrate their technique and training, and still be able to keep relatively free of preconceived ideas, formulated notions or obligatory reality. In that state they were able to harness it enough so that the overriding symptoms of psychosis were not present, but every other aspect of their being at that time seemed as though they were in a semi-psychotic state.

  So I evoked the term, "dry schizophrenia" where a person was able to control the surroundings and yet be "crazy" at the same time, crazy in the sense that they could use this mode of consciousness for their work and creative ability. There’s a lot of documentation about psychopathology and creativity but I think it’s all from a central pool, kind of a well-spring of the creative imagination that we can draw from. It equally gives it’s strenth to psychosis in one sense, or breaks through in creativity, theological revelation in the world of the near-dying and people who are seriously ill, and so on. All of that provides us with a look into this cauldron, this very dynamic, efficacious part of the brain, that for some reason or other is kept away from us by a semi-permeable membrane that could be ruptured in different ways, under different circumstances. I recall reading that James Joyce had a daughter named Lucia who schizophrenic.

  She was the sorrow of his life. Upon persuasion from Joyce’s patron, both of them were brought to Carl Jung. This was against Joyce’s wishes because he didn’t like psychiatrists. Jung examined Lucia, then finally came in and sat down with Joyce. Joyce said to him that he thought Lucia was a greater artist and writer than he was. Can you imagine? So Jung said, "That may be true, but the two of you are like deep-sea divers. You go into the ocean, a rich, interesting, dramatic setting, with your baskets, and you fill them up with improbable creatures of the deep. The only difference between the two of you is that you can come up to the surface, and she can’t."

  DJB: Basically it’s like the difference between being able to swim in the ocean or being....

  OSCAR: Caught by the waves and dashed to pieces, right. There’s a wonderful book that describes the process of this ever-changing remarkable flux of consciousness that Sherington called "the enchanted loom". It’s called The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes. I recommend it highly as an exercise in the ways of the imagination.

  DJB: Could you tell us about the thought-experiment that you devised to categorize what you refer to as "delusions of explanation?"

  OSCAR: Imagine that someone is taken quietly at night while they’re sleeping, out of their bed, and are then deposited in one of the most unearthly places on the planet - Mammoth Cave. We found by repeated experiments that upon awakening, there are only five explanations that someone in a Western culture would come up with and I refer to these main headings or rubrics as "delusions of explanation." They are: (not in order of frequency) I must be dead, I must be dreaming, someone or something has played a trick on me, I’ve gone crazy or I am in Mammoth cave. Through my experience in mental hospitals, I’ve found that schizophrenics will try to explain the extraordinary nature of their experience by using one of these basic rubrics. In our culture explanations for unexplainable phenomena are rather sparse. My supposition is that other cultures may have different explanations for such phenomena.

  JEANNE: What are your thoughts on the mind-body problem?

  OSCAR: This is related to the problem of consciousness, but isn’t quite the same thing. The mind-body problem is, I guess, as old as the human race. It has to do with how the "soup becomes a spark." How is it that the material world, and the material substrate of ourselves, can give rise to something that seems to be of a different universal order, that of thought? Obviously consciousness stands somewhere between this maneuver of going from material things to thought.

  There are several different propositions that occur. Brain function simultaneously coexists with thought processes, and this interacts in a dynamic fashion. That’s one theory. Another theory is that the brain, being so complex and convoluted, spawns or gives rise to what we experience as t
hinking, which seems to have a semi-independent existence. This is a dualistic approach to the problem.

  The third notion is simply that mind is also spirit, and this is imposed on the brain from the outside in some strange way. This is a theological sort of explanation. The vitalist notion claims that the life-force gives rise to, or at least coexists with, the soul, which after the death of the material host, leaves and finds somewhere else to reside. I’ve never had a problem with the notion that material substance could give rise to immaterial energy. It’s not odd to conceive of the fact that you can build a machine out of material substances and that out of it comes electrical energy, or that you can press a button and out of these batteries comes a beam of light from your flashlight. So the light doesn’t seem to me any more miraculous in relationship to the batteries than does the thought process coming out of the material aspect of the brain.

  DJB: Or the same goes for magnetic fields. They’re defined as non-material regions of influence on the material world.

  OSCAR: Yes. You could make a machine where the electricity could turn itself back and regulate it’s own existence to some extent. When I worked with Barbara Brown in her bio-feedback laboratory in Sepulveda V.A, I was able to see my brainwaves in the form of patterns on a screen. I got the notion that as I’m watching my brainwaves, I’m changing them at the same time. They’re constantly being influenced by my watching them, so I’m never really seeing the objective evidence of my own brain. You could argue that if someone else was watching my brainwaves they might get a different notion, but I’m watching them, I’m taking that information in and in turn sending out something else which is subtly influenced by what I just took in. This has been called the auto-cerebroscope; a device where you see something happening that projects what your brain is registering, but in witnessing it, you change its content. Do you ever see things as they really are? This philosophical dilemma is never more clearly outlined than when under these conditions.

  DJB: What are some of the main problems that you see with the state of psychiatry today and how do you think we can improve it for the future?

  OSCAR: Boy, you’ve really got a tiger by the tail there! I think that the material emphasis of psychiatry and neuropathology of the last century, where everything was reduced to the simplistic notion of the mind as a switchboard, and all illnesses were the result of patho- logical processes in the brain itself, didn’t set well. It did not provide a dynamic framework for understanding human behavior. So when the emphasis changed, and Freud and others came on the scene for modern dynamic psychology, I suspect the pendulum swung equally too far in the opposite direction. The heyday of psychoanalysis and depth psychology then ushered in a kind of behavioral construct that seemed to be dependent only upon the dynamic thought process, and left very little to any kind of physical explanation. So I think we were trapped in constant psychological formulations of all our behavior.

  This was mirrored very well in my own studies. I was interested in finding out the way that the chemistry of the brain and the state of the body influences our thoughts and the way we feel. The trouble was I coudn’t find a suitable research prospect. I couldn’t get a definitive case where I could show that the state of the body influenced thinking and feeling in a specific way. That was supplied serendipitously by a lady who came in and told me that a week prior to her period she experiences profound depression. Suddenly a light went on and I said, "That’s what I’m looking for!" I realized that an optimal experimental subject for human behavior was a woman because of her menstrual period.

  She is a wonderful biological metronome that you can count on because of this reliable episodic lunar event. So using that concept, I began to plan a series of behavioral events employing this strategy. I found that some women regularly, about a week before their period, have terrible changes in their general demeanor: their behavior, feelings and thinking. I made a study of three or four good clinical subjects, who went into serious states of mental change around that time. In studying them I was struck by the fact that all of them seemed compelled to give me psychological explanations of their behavior.

  For example, a woman would say, "Well, I had a fight with my husband yesterday, that’s what made me depressed." And I said, "Yes, that’s interesting because you had a fight with him last week and it didn’t make you depressed. And every month you have a fight with your husband exactly at the same time and you get depressed." She agreed, it seemed very odd. So then I went to the psychoanalytical texts. They explained this phenomena by saying, well a woman is afraid that in a week or so she’s going to bleed. This suggests to her that she is being castrated and her penis was removed, so why shouldn’t she be depressed? (laughter) Another analytical interpretation is that this fear is a ubiquitous reminder of her feminine identity and that she was therfore inferior.

  That’s a good one. (laughter) I decided to use progesterone as a means of seeing if I could break into the problem of premenstrual depression. I took this woman and I presented her case to my residents when she was depressed. I said, "I’m going to allow you to ask her any question you want, except one, which I’ll keep to myself." At the end of the presentation I asked the group, "Well, what do you make of this woman?" These residents, who knew quite a bit of psychiatry said, "There’s no question that she has classical clinical depression." Since pure progesterone is not absorbed through the gut, you have to give it either by injection or vaginal suppository. So I devised an experiment. I double-blinded my progesterone. I injected the material randomly and didn’t know which was which.

  Then I charted the symptoms and found, when I broke the code, that progesterone had an extremely salutory effect in relieving these women of premenstrual symptoms. I began to see clear evidence of a substance in the body that, in short supply, was markedly influencing the behavior of these women. I gave a talk before the Medical Society and outlined what I had done. I said that premenstrual depression could best be treated by looking at this as a hormonal problem, and that it had certain implications for the way the body influences the mind. The people in the group were skeptical and some said, "How do you know that it isn’t some unconscious factor that’s still operating regardless?" They said, "You haven’t proven that she still isn’t worried about her castration fears. You’ve only proven that if you give her progesterone, that could be modified, but you haven’t attacked the basis of the problem." How could I do that? Psychoanalysis has an answer for everything.

  I went to two of my brightest women medical students, and I asked, "How would you like to spend the summer in Europe? I want you to go to all the primate centers there, and find out, do great apes have a menstrual cycle similar to humans? I want you to talk to the keepers and find out if they have any reason to suspect that their behavior is any different during their menstrual cycle." For the next three months I had letters from all the European zoological gardens. We were excited to discover that in the Berlin zoo, Fritz, who took care of a female gorilla named Olga said, "A week before her period I can’t get near Olga, she’s just a mess. All she does is throw all kinds of shit at me." (laughter)

  At my next opportunity to present I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered that the gorillas have feminine identification problems, and they also have castration fears, (laughter) because they can get very upset before their period." Everyone applauded and started to laugh. That was the beginning of my understanding of how mental and emotional difficulties could be correlated with one’s biochemistry. This is the basis for the treatment of depression by altering one’s neurochemistry.

  DJB: So part of the problem was that people were locked into the idea that the mind could only be affected by the body and not the other way around?

  OSCAR: Yes. I think the over-emphasis on psychodynamics, in deriving everything from psychological theory, retarded us from reaching the same conclusions that the British made. For a long time this perspective stale-mated progress in American psychiatry. In fact, it was difficult to achieve an
y academic status in psychiatry without having taken psychoanalytic training. At present, psychiatric residents are less inclined to enter psychoanalytical training programs, which may reflect their opinion on pscyhoanalysis as an effective treatment.

  JEANNE: So, in Amercian psychiatry, there was an initial reluctance to use drugs to treat emotional problems?

  OSCAR: Right. In that sense European psychiatry was much more progressive. In fact, most of the innovations in psychiatry came from Europe. And you would wonder why, considering the status of American medical research and the abundance of psychiatrists. The British were making strong gains with psychotropic medication that we adopted later on. When you come to think of it, Freud was European, as well as Jung. Menduna in Hungary and Bini and Cerlucci in Italy were the first to use insulin and electro-shock therapy. Neuroleptic drugs were first developed in France. Psycho-drama and Gestalt therapy had European and South African origins. The basis for Behavioral therapies originated in Russia. It’s quite remarkable how little innovation we have brought to the field. We’re good at taking what they give us and grinding it out, but we have a poor record at innovation in the field of psychiatric treatment. Also, psychiatrists have been more locked into their therapeutic systems with little flexibility. In my LSD experiments we ran close to a thousand people, and we found that psychiatrists tended to have negative experiences. The ministers were next. The artists had the most positive experiences. It would seem that the psychiatrist has a strong investment in a particular norm or standard of reality.