Realms of the Human Unconscious - Preface

This volume is the first of a series of books in which I plan to summarize and condense in a systematic and comprehensive way my observations and experiences during seventeen years of research with LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Exploration of the potential of these substances for the study of schizophrenia, for didactic purposes, for a deeper understanding of art and religion, for personality diagnostics and the therapy of emotional disorders, and for altering the experience of dying has been my major professional interest throughout these years and has consumed most of the time I have spent in psychiatric research. In 1965, I was invited to participate in an international conference on LSD psychotherapy in Amityville, Long Island, and gave a paper on the experiences I had gathered during almost a decade of LSD research in Prague, Czechoslovakia. During a lecture-journey in the United States after this conference, I was offered an invitation to come to the West on a one-year fellowship from the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry in New Haven, Connecticut. After my return to Prague, I received a letter from Dr. Joel Elkes, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, inviting me to come to Baltimore and continue my LSD work as a clinical and research fellow at the Henry Phipps Clinic and in the Research Unit of Spring Grove State Hospital. When this unusual opportunity occurred, I was deeply involved in my research activities in Prague. I had accumulated detailed records from many hundreds of LSD sessions and was in the process of analyzing the data, trying to formulate a theoretical framework for understanding the striking observations that I had encountered during my work. By then I had completed the first outline of a conceptual model that seemed to account for most of the findings in my LSD research; this model allowed for the creation of several partial hypotheses that could be put to a more rigorous test. In addition, I became intrigued by the possibilities that LSD psychotherapy seemed to offer for the alleviation of the emotional suffering of cancer patients facing the prospect of imminent death. On the basis of some preliminary observations, I was preparing a special project to explore this new area in a more systematic way. Dr. Elkes' generous offer was too tempting to refuse; I decided to pursue this possibility and ask the Czech authorities for a one-year leave of absence and permission to go to the United States. After many administrative difficulties, this permission was finally granted. When I arrived at Kennedy Airport in March 1967, more than half of my forty pounds of luggage consisted of the records from LSD research that I had conducted at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague. My intention, at that time, was to complete the analysis of my data and to perform a controlled clinical study of the efficacy of the technique of LSD psychotherapy that I had developed during many years of therapeutic experimentation. My secret hope was that, in addition, I might be able to carry out at least one of the more theoretical studies testing some aspects of my new conceptual framework.