How Stanislav Grof Helped Launch the Dawn of a New Psychedelic Research Era
http://www.alternet.org/story/146393/how_stanislav_grof_helped_launch_the_dawn_of_a_new_psychedelic_research_era
The world of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with
psychedelic pioneers, whose work was rejected a half-century ago.
April 10, 2010
By Alexander Zaitchik
Next week, the brightest lights of the psychedelic cognoscenti will
gather in San Jose, California. Leaving swirls of tracer visions in
their wakes, they will converge from around the world at an
incongruously bland Holiday Inn, 50 miles south of the Haight-Ashbury
neighborhood that once served as the pulsing capital of
Psychedelistan. There, several hundred turned-on and tuned-in
doctors, psychologists, artists and laypeople will participate in the
annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). For four days, they will explore --
through workshops and lectures, nothing more -- the widening gamut of
clinical inquiry into the uses of the psychedelic experience, a
global resurgence of which has led to hopeful talk of a "psychedelic revival."
After decades of psychedelic deep freeze, such talk is finally more
than just wishful thinking. A skim of the conference agenda offers a
tantalizing glimpse into the newly bubbling world of clinical
psychedelic research. UCLA Medical professor Charles Grob will speak
about his work using psilocybin to treat anxiety in late-stage cancer
patients. Psychologist Allan Ajaya will share findings from his
research in LSD-assisted myofascial pain therapy. Other speakers will
address possible psychedelic-based cures for alcoholism, addiction,
depression, migraines, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Each will
represent a different corner in a promising field newly awakened.
From North America to the Middle East, recent years have seen a
rising interest into the medicinal possibilities of MDMA, LSD, DMT,
and other drugs now shaking off decades of government-imposed
clinical hibernation.
Since 1986, MAPS has been agitating for this overdue renaissance,
spearheading and publicizing efforts to legalize and de-stigmatize
research involving schedule-1 drugs designed to induce non-ordinary
states of consciousness. As the outfit's slogan has it, "We put the
M.D. back in MDMA." It is a testament to the organization's work that
this year's conference, "Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century,"
not only features a multinational cast of active researchers, but
also caters to an increasingly interested public: tickets for many of
the workshops sold out a month in advance.
For most Americans, the only familiar name on the MAPS 2010 speakers
list is the Oprah-approved, integrative-health brand name, Dr. Andrew
Weil. But Weil hardly enjoys rock-star status at conferences
dedicated to the present state and future of pioneering psychedelic
research. As detailed in Don Lattin's new book, The Harvard
Psychedelic Club, Weil's main historical contribution to the field
was negative and came nearly 50 years ago: As an undergraduate
snitch, it was Weil's articles for the Crimson that got Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) thrown out of Harvard, thus putting
the kibosh on the university's psilocybin project.
One of the most significant figures attending the conference in San
Jose is a man largely unknown to the general public. Years before
Leary made headlines for his Ivy League adventures, and years before
Ken Kesey held the first acid parties in the forests of the Pacific
Northwest, a young doctor named Stanislav Grof was conducting
rigorous clinical experiments involving LSD in the most unlikely of
places: a government lab in the capital of communist Czechoslovakia.
It was there, at Prague's Psychiatric Research Institute in the
1950s, that Grof began more than half-a-century of pioneering
research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. While he is
frequently marginalized in, if not completely left out of, popular
psychedelic histories, it is not for any lack of contribution to the
field. "If I am the father of LSD," Albert Hoffman once said, "Stan
Grof is the godfather."
With psychedelic research poised for a mainstream resurgence, the
time seems right to begin giving the godfather his due.
* *
Stanislav Grof had just completed his medical studies at Prague's
Charles University when he caught a life-changing break. It was 1956,
and one of his professors, a brain specialist named George Roubicek,
had ordered a batch of LSD-25 from the Swiss pharmaceutical company
Sandoz, where Albert Hoffman first synthesized the compound in 1943.
Roubicek had read the Zurich psychiatrist Werner Stoll's 1947 account
of the LSD experience and was curious to test it out himself and on
his students and patients, largely to study the drug's effects on
electric brain waves, Roubicek's specialty. When he asked for
volunteers, Grof raised his hand.
The subsequent experience assured Grof's place in history by making
him among the first handful of people to enjoy what might be called a
modern trip, in which the psychedelic state is matched with
electronic effects of the kind that have defined the experience for
generations of recreational acidheads, from Merry Pranksters to
Fillmore hippies to lollipop-sucking ravers.
Roubicek's experiment involved placing Grof in a dark room,
administering a large dose of LSD (around 250 millionths of a gram)
and turning on a stroboscopic white light oscillating at various,
often frenetic, frequencies. Needless to say, nothing like the
experience was otherwise available in 1950s Czechoslovakia, or
anywhere else, for that matter. That first introduction to LSD -- a
"divine thunderbolt" -- set the course for Grof's lifework. He had
found, he thought, a majestic shortcut on Freud's "royal road to the
unconscious."
"This combination [of the light and the drug]," Grof later said,
"evoked in me a powerful mystical experience that radically changed
my personal and professional life. Research of the heuristic,
therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of
non-ordinary states of consciousness became my profession, vocation,
and personal passion."
In medical school during the second half of the '50s, Grof underwent
dozens of LSD sessions and became one of a handful of turned-on young
people in the communist world. Upon his graduation in 1960, Grof
began full-time clinical work when he was fortuitously assigned to
Prague's Psychiatric Research Institute, which included a newly
launched Psychedelic Research Center. Among his new colleagues was a
young doctor named Milos Vojtechovsky, with whom Grof had conducted
his earliest experiments as a medical student. In 1958, the duo
employed Benactyzin, high doses of which are hallucinogenic, as a way
to induce the psychotic state associated with acute alcohol
withdrawal. In 1959, they wrote an LSD-related study of the brain's
serotonergic system, titled, "Serotonin and Its Significance for
Psychiatry." As professional colleagues in the early 1960s, Grof and
Vojtechovsky would co-publish nearly two dozen pioneering papers on
clinical experiments employing LSD and other psychedelics, including
a three-part study on LSD's clinical history, biochemistry and pharmacology.
Until 1961, this research involved Sandoz-supplied LSD. But Grof saw
no reason why Czech scientists shouldn't be producing a native
supply. Fatefully situated approximately 200 miles from Prague at
this time was the Czech pharmaceutical company Spofa, whose chemists
were talented synthesizers of various ergot alkaloids. Grof put in a
request for the company begin producing LSD; a request quickly
approved by communist authorities. Soon thereafter began production
of the only pharmaceutically pure LSD in the eastern bloc. (Sandoz
was still producing the only pure LSD in the West.)
The early weeks of Czechoslovak LSD production were not without
problems. As Spofa cranked up its line for the powerful psychedelic,
its laboratory employees would sometimes accidentally absorb the
compound through their fingertips, much as Albert Hoffman did when he
inadvertently made his famous discovery. Whenever this happened, it
was standard practice at the time to inject the subject with
Thorazine and throw them into the nearest locked hospital ward. This
often made a bad situation worse, and Spofa frantically turned to
Grof for answers. The young doctor happily lectured them on the
importance of "set and setting" in the psychedelic experience. "I
assured them that there was no reason for alarm if someone was
intoxicated by LSD," Grof later wrote. "They were advised to have a
special, quiet room where the intoxicated individual could spend the
rest of the day listening to music in the company of a good friend."
Spofa brass took Grof's advice. When a 19-year-old Spofa lab
assistant experienced a substantial "professional intoxication," she
was placed in a comfortable room with a colleague and music. When the
drug wore off, the woman reported having "the time of her life."
As Grof rose through the ranks at the Psychiatric Institute, his
research increasingly involved using LSD in tandem with traditional
Freudian psychoanalysis, in which Grof earned his Ph.D from the Czech
Academy of Sciences in 1965. His dissertation was titled, "LSD and
Its Use in Psychiatric Clinical Practice." When Grof completed his
Freudian training, he had nearly a decade of experience with LSD. At
34, he was also full of paradigm-shifting ambition, having decided
that psychedelics "used responsibly and with proper caution, would be
for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the
telescope is for astronomy."
It was a heady time for any young Czech with a head full of big
ideas. In 1965, Czechoslovakia was then in the midst of a political
and cultural thaw known as the Prague Spring. A relaxation of state
control and communist mores was encouraging new forms of artistic and
political expression. Filmmakers associated with Czech New Wave
produced exuberant films; the cafes and theaters became hubs of a
thriving youth subculture, which celebrated Allen Ginsburg "King of
May" when he visited Prague in May 1965. Had the trajectory been
allowed to continue, it is easy to imagine a psychedelic Czech youth
culture taking form, just as it did in the United States, with Grof
as its leader.
Alas, Moscow saw where the Prague Spring was heading, and crushed the
flowering under the treads of Red Army tanks. But by the time the
Russians rolled into Prague in August 1968, the country's most
experienced psychedelic researcher was long gone. The year before,
Grof had been offered a professorship at the University of Maryland.
He arrived in America during the Summer of Love in possession of one
of the world's deepest LSD research resumes.
Soon after his arrival in the U.S., Grof was named chief of research
at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Again, it was a
fortuitous placement. Among his new peers, an ordained minister and
fellow psychedelic pioneer named Walter Pahnke, who had conceived of
the famous "Good Friday Experiment" with Tim Leary and Huston Smith
while at Harvard in the early 1960s. At the time of Grof's arrival,
Pahnke was engaged in promising research into LSD therapy as a way to
mitigate mortal anxiety among the terminally ill. Before Pahnke's
untimely death in 1971, he had found "dramatic improvement" among a
third of his subjects, and "moderate improvement" in another third.
While the Center was a stimulating environment to continue his
research, Grof's Maryland work constituted the lesser half of his
activities during the late 1960s. He also traveled regularly to Menlo
Park, California, where he participated in a working group led by the
founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow. Grof joined a
coterie of Maslow's colleagues and students working to build on the
foundation of humanistic psychology, most famous for its positing of
a hierarchy of needs.
Like so many other forward thinkers of the decade, psychedelic
experiences had touched Maslow deeply. He had come to believe that
the system he developed in the '50s and early '60s was formed around
a stunted view of the psyche. With his humanistic psychology, Maslow
had managed to go beyond Freud and Skinner (the father of
behaviorism), but he did not go as far enough. The spiritual
revolution of the decade, of which the LSD experience was central,
had thrown the limits of humanistic psychology into sharp relief. It
was, Maslow and Grof believed, still too trapped in Freudian verbal
therapy, still too accepting of the idea of an individual psyche
contained in one life, one skull, one personal history, one culture.
"The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies,
various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal
wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during
the stormy 1960s," Grof later wrote, "made it absolutely clear that a
comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include
observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic
consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity;
and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration."
As Maslow and Grof mapped out this new and expanded understanding of
the psyche, they turned to the insights of Carl Jung, the brilliant
Freudian renegade who posited the existence of non-material
archetypal-mythological realms that contain the entire histories,
collective wisdom, and totemic icons of every civilization since the
dawn of time. Along with a belief in these realms, Maslow and Grof
were convinced they were accessible to everyone, especially during
non-ordinary states of consciousness such as those induced by a hefty
dose of psychedelics.
"Experiences occurring in psychedelic sessions cannot be described in
terms of the narrow and superficial conceptual model used in academic
psychiatry and psychology, which is limited to biology, postnatal
biography, and the Freudian individual unconscious," Grof wrote of
the insight behind transpersonal psychology. "Deep experiential work
requires a vastly extended cartography of the psyche that includes
important domains uncharted by traditional science."
Once the basic elements of this new psychological school were in
place, it was time to name it. Maslow wanted to call the new
psychedelically inspired school "transhumanistic."
Grof demurred, preferring the term "transpersonal psychology." The name stuck.
Figures associated with Maslow and Grof's coterie soon launched the
Association of Transpersonal Psychology and assembled an editorial
team for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Around the same
time, Robert Frager began laying the groundwork for the Institute of
Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, which remains the
leading center of transpersonal training.
* *
Just as transpersonal psychology was being institutionalized, LSD
research was being systematically shut down by the government. At the
end of the 1960s, Grof's laboratory in Maryland housed the last
surviving FDA-approved psychedelic clinical research program in the
United States. In 1971, Maryland's research, too, was ordered closed
following the classification of LSD as a Schedule-I drug, defined as
being habit-forming and having "no recognized medicinal value."
With little interest in running a lab without access to LSD, Grof
followed the action and moved west. In 1973, he began a 15-year
stretch as scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
There, overlooking the Pacific ocean and against the constant rumble
of rolling surf, Grof spent the next two years synthesizing his
thoughts on nearly two decades of LSD therapy. The result was Realms
Of The Human Unconscious: Observations From LSD Research, published in 1975.
By this time, officially sanctioned psychedelic research already
seemed like a distant memory. For a new generation that graduated
college after the door had been slammed shut on clinical psychedelic
studies, Grof's book was a window into a world that might have been.
Among those who found inspiration in the book was a young college
student named Rick Doblin, who would later found the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the possibility of a
return to a rational discussion of drug policy and psychedelic
research became more remote than ever. Grof was among those who kept
the flame alive. Around the time of Reagan's first Inauguration, Grof
published LSD Psychotherapy, in which he expanded on the now codified
transpersonal understanding of the psyche. Grof stressed the
importance of two previously neglected realms of experience that
psychedelic experiences can tap into where traditional therapy
cannot: the "perinatal" (birth moment) and "transpersonal"
(archetypical). Coming to terms with these aspects of the psyche,
believed Grof, is the key to psycho-spiritual health.
"When the content of the perinatal level of the unconscious surfaces
into consciousness and is adequately processed and integrated," Grof
wrote, "it results in a radical personality change. The individual
experiences a considerable decrease of aggressive tendencies and
becomes more tolerant and compassionate toward others. [They also
experience an increase in] the ability to enjoy life and draw
satisfaction from simple situations such as everyday activity,
eating, love-making, nature, and music."
Happy, well-adjusted people, Grof believed, also lead to happy,
well-adjusted societies.
"One of the most remarkable consequences of various forms of
transpersonal experiences is spontaneous emergence and development of
genuine humanitarian and ecological interests and need to take part
in activities aimed at peaceful coexistence and well-being of
humanity," Grof wrote. "This is based on an almost cellular
understanding that any boundaries in the Cosmos are relative and
arbitrary and that each of us is, in the last analysis, identical and
commeasurable with the entire fabric of existence. As a result of
these experiences, individuals tend to develop feelings that they are
planetary citizens and members of the human family before belonging
to a particular country or a specific racial, social, ideological,
political, or religious group."
Such sentiments were increasingly removed from mainstream culture in
the age of Reagan. Buffered from the harder edges of the age of
Reagan in Big Sur, Grof kept working, increasingly with his wife and
creative partner, Christina. In 1984, he published LSD Psychotherapy,
in which he expanded on the promise and power of transpersonal
psychotherapy employing psychedelic drugs.
By the time the book's second edition was published in 1994, a
mini-psychedelic revival was underway on the West Coast. Grof had
earned enough stripes to be an acid elder statesman to a generation
of kids dancing to techno on ecstasy and acid. But he did not embrace
the role. While Tim Leary rolled around in mutual embrace with the
San Francisco rave and cyberculture scenes, Grof maintained his
distance, playing the role of austere friend of psychedelics from the
old school. "The hectic atmosphere of…crowded rock concerts or
discos, and noisy social gatherings are certainly not settings
conducive to productive self-exploration and safe confrontation with
the difficult aspects of one's unconscious," Grof stiffly wrote in a
1994 update of his essay "Crisis Intervention in Situations Related
to Unsupervised Use of Psychedelics."
Grof had in any case by then found a way to continue his research
without banned substances. Throughout the 1980s, he had been coming
to the conclusion that perinatal and transpersonal experiences were
not dependent on the use of psychedelics. LSD may have launched
Grof's mind into cosmic orbit. But once there, like so many who
passed through the psychedelic crucible, he had come to believe they
were no longer needed. He even developed a system to prove it:
Holotropic Breathing.
Grof's lifework treats individual and social neuroses through the
exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Whether these
states are achieved through the structured hyperventilation of
Holotropic Breathing, or through psychedelic drugs, for Grof the
stakes remain the same.
"If we continue using the old strategies that have caused the current
global crisis and which are in their consequences destructive and
self-destructive," Grof recently wrote, "it might lead to
annihilation of modern civilization and possibly even the human
species. However, if a sufficient number of people undergo a process
of inner psychospiritual transformation and attain a higher level of
awareness, we might in the future reach a situation when we will
deserve the name, which we have so proudly given to our species: Homo sapiens."
This, in a nutshell, is the same cosmically ambitious hope expressed
by the psychedelic pioneers of a half-century ago. Most of those men
and women have long since given up the dream, moved on to other
things, or died. Stanislav Grof is among the very few still here.
Judging by the hopeful tone of next week's MAPS conference, the world
of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with him.
--
Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and
AlterNet contributing writer. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck
and the Triumph of Ignorance, will be published by Wiley in May.
.
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