Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities through Psychedelic Training

(This article discusses exploratory work that was interrupted early in 1966 when the Food and Drug Administration, as a strategy in combating the illicit-use problem, declared a moratorium on research with normal human subjects. In view of the preliminary nature of the work, it would not under ordinary circumstances have been submitted for publication. However, because of the significance of the hypotheses, and because they are consistent with experience gained in a previous study of four hundred subjects who received psychedelics in a therapy context, and because of the hope that when it is again possible to resume psychedelic research the non-medical applications will get long-overdue attention, the decision was made to release these results in their present, unfinished form.) Amid much controversy over the place of psychedelic chemicals in contemporary culture, we have quietly entered a third phase of the research on human uses of these agents. The first phase, typically identified in the literature by the use of the adjective "psychotomimetic," was characterized by dominance of a priori structured models. Seriously underestimating the effects that such preconceptions might have on the content and aftereffects of the subjective experience, researchers variously reported that psychedelics mimicked mental illness (when given in a setting that provoked it), illuminated Freudian theory (when administered by a competent Freudian), evoked Jungian archetypes (when administered by a sensitive Jungian), substantiated the tenets of behavior therapy (by increasing suggestibility and modifiability), and demonstrated the soundness of the existential approach. The second phase, adopting Osmond's neologism "psychedelic," was characterized by an emphasis on allowing the drug session to run its natural course, in an attempt to minimize the influence of the conceptions and interpretations of the therapist or monitor. Care was taken to provide such expectations, rapport, and environment that the experience would be as nonthreatening as possible. Opinions varied as to what constitutes optimum set and setting, and subjects and experimenters varied. As a consequence, reported effects range from ecstasy to psychosis, from community to isolation, from greatly enhanced mental and perceptual abilities to greatly impaired abilities. From this work emerged a variety of psychotherapeutic applications, well summarized by Hoffer (1965), as well as widespread, mainly illicit, use with sensual, philosophical, and transcendental goals. Growing out of this informal experimentation and clinical research, largely as a consequence of suggestive spontaneous occurrences, the possibility gradually emerged that specific kinds of performance might be selectively enhanced by deliberate structuring of psychedelic-agent administrations. Thus a third phase of psychedelic research began. Whereas, in the first phase, experiences tended to be controlled and delimited—never mind if inadvertently—by preconceptions of experimenter and subject, and in the second phase they tended to be more