Theoretical perspectives on LSD research:
from cybernetics to complexity theory

note

I stopped working on this paper when I encountered an article (now over a decade old) by Carhart-Harris et al., The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs (text). My own interest in a more-or-less technical analysis of LSD began with my own experiences, particularly with the so-called "white light effect." In information theory, the "white" signal, by analogy with vision, is the highest entropy signal in any frequency domain, and it seemed to me that the white-light experience should have a relatively straightforward interpretation in those terms on any model which claims to correlate thought with events in the brain. Early (cybernetic) neural network models were inadequate for explaining a rather obviously global effect, although the basic structural and chemical processes involved were and are relatively settled.

In a sense the bridge which I was trying to build from personal experience to solid scientific ground unexpectedly connected with another span being constructed by Carhart-Harris and his co-authors which is based on scientific foundations and which "stretches out" towards experience. As a result, I abandoned further construction. The bridge is effectively complete, I think. Instead of updating the text, I will be posting it as a resource of potential historical interest, as it links the history of LSD research to information theory, neural network theory, complexity theory, and related questions in philosophy and the history of ideas. I would like to think of it as a different perspective on the topic; not a scientific paper in the normal sense, but an attempt to bridge the gap between scientific theory and the practice of psychedelic therapy.

In a sense, the evolution of science from cybernetics to complexity theory has only re-confirmed the validity of earlier efforts in the field, and will (I suspect) be of little practical interest to the average user or to psychedelic therapists. However, when Edelman and Tononi's neural network theory imported coding theory from complexity theory (cf. Zurek, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information), it provided a new explanation of the recovery of birth trauma, which decisively moved the topic from the scientific limbo in which it has languished into the limelight. As this publication demonstrates, I believe that public interest runs ahead of institutional realization of the science.

It would be remiss of me to fail to credit the late professor Hilary Putnam for advising me (a quarter-century ago) that Edelman and Tononi's then-new model of neural networks provided a better fit for my ideas about psychedelic action than classic cybernetic ones. It goes without saying to anyone who knew him that he had no particular interest in the psychedelics and merely answered a student's question with his legendary incisiveness.

Introduction 1: History

The story began in 1943 with the coincidence of the accidental discovery of LSD's psychological effects and the foundation of neural network theory. From there it moves through the postwar ferment of the Cybernetics Group and the 1959 Macy Foundation conference on the use of LSD in psychotherapy, followed by Stace's assertion, in 1960's Mysticism and Philosophy, that LSD and other psychedelics trigger mystical experience. The Golden Age of LSD research can be said to have been wrapped up by the systematic work of Stanislav Grof, who had conducted thousands of clinical sessions before his first popular publication in 1976, by which time LSD had already been illegal for more than ten years.

The following decades saw the evolution of new perspectives on information theory—some of which are collectively known as complexity theory—as well as compatible models of neural activity. This development significantly updated the scientific explanation of consciousness, and the burden of this paper is that it is particularly successful in improving our understanding of the effects of LSD.

In 1943, McCulloch and Pitts published their model of neural networks, which is generally credited as the foundation of neural network theory. (NNT; cf. "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," pdf) After the war, McCulloch became the chair of the seminal Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, and the LSD effect naturally came to the attention of the cybernetics group because it provides brute empirical evidence for the central thesis of NNT, that thought supervenes (i.e. depends) on states of the brain.

LSD's structural similarity to the neuromodulator serotonin was recognized immediately. It was originally thought that LSD is a serotonin antagonist, but it is now regarded as a partial agonist at the 5-H2 receptors. More detailed information on its neuropharmacology is widely available, and is not the subject of these comments. (for example, Nichols, D; Psychedelics)

LSD created a sensation among scientists, and in 1954 Time magazine published the first of many articles on the new wonder drug, sparking public interest. The Macy Foundation held a pair of conferences in 1958 and 1959, at the second of which, on "The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy," researchers reported that the drug facilitates the recovery of repressed birth trauma and triggers mystical experience. (Abramson, The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy; Appendix 1, excerpts) The promise of instant mysticism drove public interest, but in retrospect, it is clear that LSD was released to the world before it was fully understood even by scientists.

It was only in 1976, when Grof published Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (followed in 1980 by LSD Psychotherapy) that an interested public could have found a detailed guidebook to the psychological depths it revealed. But it was too late. The image of LSD as a uniquely dangerous drug was set in public discourse and law.

In the absence of reliable public information, recreational users developed rules-of-thumb: primarily, to avoid so-called "bummers" or "bad trips" by movement, change of scene, or change of music, indicating that casual users generally registered the ability to dredge up repressed material as a risk rather than a therapeutic opportunity. This fundamental misunderstanding almost guaranteed a legacy of poor integration among many recreational users and outright bad outcomes for some. By contrast, in the hands of experienced therapists, LSD is remarkably safe, considering the depth and intensity of the effect.

It is not surprising that LSD has been supplanted as the popular psychedelic of choice by shorter-acting and less harrowing substances such as psilocybe mushrooms, the phenylethylamines such as MDMA or "ecstasy" (which are described as "entactogens," not classic psychedelics), and ketamine (a dissociative anesthetic, like nitrous oxide, with psychedelic effects). The potent but extremely transient tryptamines such as N,N-DMT have also been marketed, if not widely. Ayahuasca, plant-based DMT which has been orally activated by brewing with an MAO inhibitor, has also spread far beyond its Amazonian origin; however, a drug which famously causes subjects to purge in various ways is not destined to be a club drug like MMDA or ketamine, or a festival drug like psilocybe.

Grof's classic studies of LSD psychotherapy offer an essentially complete account, and LSD has continued to play a certain role in neuroscientific research, but its legal prohibition (and of course its dubious reputation as a street drug) appears to have prevented a certain amount of scientific discourse which might have been expected, considering advances in cognitive science and related fields. As a result, there is still a certain novelty in applying twenty- or thirty-year-old theoretical insights to field research which is more than half a century old.

Specifically, I argue that the neural group selection model developed by Edelman, Sporns, and Tononi (popularized by Edelman and Tononi in A Universe of Consciousness, 2000) provides a better explanation of psychedelic experience than that provided by McCulloch and Pitts' model. (For a valuable account of scientific developments outside this narrow focus, see James Kent's Psychedelic Information Theory.) Edelman, Sporns, and Tononi [EST] based their model on complexity theory, on which the LSD effect can be naturally characterized as causing elevated levels of entropy in the brain. Prima facie, this argument is so general as to be almost trivial; the equivalent of pointing to an apple falling from a tree and announcing "Eureka. The law of gravity (as recently improved) has applied in the case of this apple!" Also, as with gravity, there is no particular mystery about the effects of LSD, which can be described by any lay user. The conclusion that the drug stimulates a flood of thought is essentially unavoidable and has been articulated in some form by everyone who has ever commented on it.

However, EST proposed something new: that neural groups—comparable to the relatively simple networks of the McCulloch–Pitts model—are connected by previously unrecognized mechanisms, which facilitate the binding-together of sensory inputs and the integration of consciousness generally. I will argue that the same schema accounts for the systematic alteration of meaning during the LSD effect. EST also offer an explanation of the repression and recovery of traumatic memory. In addition, the appeal of construing mystical or peak experience in terms of peak entropy, if not quite obvious, develops naturally on the model.

Introduction 2: Theory and practice

This historical and scientific trajectory raises a more basic question: how should psychedelic experience be situated in theories of mind and knowledge? On the theoretic level, the story I want to tell is a simple one: the success of the EST model in explaining the results of LSD research provides an unexpected confirmation of its power. However, my main intention is practical—to add a useful way of thinking about the psychedelics to the discourse around their therapeutic use. Since most prospective subjects are non-scientists, and therapists are not brain scientists, this requires translating among (what Wittgenstein called) different "language games."

If scientists and non-scientists were speaking the same language, the philosopher Hilary Putnam would not have framed scientific consensus as a deliberate provocation:

The idea that the brain is a cybernetic device which stores information, computes from that information, and controls the body—all without interference from a mysterious "soul"—is based on a vast amount of progress in a half-dozen sciences. (Putnam, H., "Philosophy of Mathematics: Why Nothing Works," in Words and Life, 1994)

Putnam's target in this paper was not the soul; he was mustering his readers before going to battle against a different metaphysical conceit, the notion of an ideal foundation of mathematics. But the Pew poll consistently indicates that four out of five US citizens would find the deprecation of the soul so challenging that they would reject it outright. It is hardly uncommon to find descriptions of psychedelic experience to the effect that it confirms the existence of the mind, soul, or spirit. But the ordinary meaning of these terms doesn't survive translation into scientific language, because they are subject to a critique which strips them of their metaphysical connotations. If the result is a language unfamiliar to most non-scientists, it is not because that critique is new: Putnam is merely echoing Locke, who introduced in 1689 the modern definition of "consciousness." Self-awareness is not so mysterious as to require supernatural explanation, it is an effect of memory:

For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self… in this alone consists personal identity. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXVII, §9)

Locke rejected the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, the idea that we are immaterial entities observing material objects. While the notion of "consciousness" has gained general currency, popular resistance to the philosophical connotations of the term has focused on metaphysical dualism, appeals to quantum indeterminacy, and dogged defense of the idea of the soul.

Even some scientists have invoked quantum mechanics in an effort to revive dualism, or to claim that mind is primordial. I will return to those claims later, in the context of complexity theory. But prima facie, the notion of a carbon-based life form implicitly arguing that the universe did not exist before his kind came to be, or at least before life came to be, contradicts our understanding of cosmology and evolution. As Putnam comments:

Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part—and a small part at that—of reality. (Putnam, H. "Introduction: Science as approximation to truth," in Mathematics, Matter, and Method, 1975)

These philosophical complications can be set aside, at least for a time, because my discussion of the application of NNT to the effects of LSD is as materialistic as possible, of the form: "substance L affects brains in such and such a way, which correlates with (if not explains) all the reported effects." But philosophical disagreements about human identity rear their head when it comes to interpreting those effects, and may affect the course of therapy.

Any valid neural network model should presumably account for the LSD experience and perhaps its therapeutic utility, just as neurochemistry necessarily provides some explanation of the brain processes involved. As a corollary, any advance in NNT would have provided a scientific reason for a re-evaluation of psychedelic research. In this sense, the reinterpretation of LSD research in terms of complexity theory is not a radical revolution, but an example of what Kuhn called "normal science." (cf. Bird, A., SEP, Thomas Kuhn; Thornton, S., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Karl Popper)

From the discovery of LSD to the Second Macy Conference

West: If there is a single area where we can get away from dualistic thinking and work toward a monistic understanding, it should be in the consideration of psychotropic drugs. (p. 109, Abramson, ibid., Appendix 1, excerpts)

This comment can be read as a plain statement of a scientific fact or as a pointed rejection of the reports that LSD can trigger mystical experience. Neuroscientists, of course, had been monists about mind and body by trade since long before cybernetics. They had already proposed a physical explanation for the LSD effect. However, the fact that a tenth of a milligram of LSD can profoundly alter consciousness is as unequivocal a piece of evidence for monism as can be found in human experience. Although ordinary consciousness provides clear indications that thought depends on physical states, such as the effects of fatigue and fever, they plainly do not compel non-scientists to abandon the dualism of mind and body which is baked into Western religion and language.

Anthropologist (and cyberneticist) Gregory Bateson's deference to West at the 1959 conference suggests that the latter's comments were typical of the cybernetic analysis of the LSD effect:

Bateson: Would you comment on the perception of music and such things; the heightening of certain sorts of external perception?

Cole: There is a good deal of evidence that cats under LSD are more sensitive to external stimuli; or at least, those stimuli which do get through on LSD may cause a more intense reaction than they would in non-drug states. These are small doses, of course.

West: That is an extremely important point. With small doses, this is the case; in larger doses, the other phenomenon occurs… The original definition of LSD as a serotonin antagonist confused the issue about what might be happening at the synapse. If LSD enhances synaptic transmission in the sensory pathways by antagonizing a synaptic inhibitor like serotonin, then small doses would produce heightened awareness, and sensations would appear sharper. With larger doses, the effect would reach the point where the circuits would be jammed. The input would become so great that the resulting phenomenon would be that of input overload. Intead of orderly information reaching the cortex, the net result would be a great deal of static and not very much in the way of ordered perceptions. Some sensations would be hyperacute; others greatly distorted; still others would fail to register altogether. (p. 102, ibid.)

This statement reflects West's interest in the so-called psychotomimetic effects of LSD, emphasizing potential overload effects such as jamming, static, distortion, and disordered perception, but it could be characterized as an intuition of the utility of complexity theory in explaining the LSD effect. West also did address the reports of LSD's utility in psychotherapy:

If a drug were to be made which would reproduce the conditions of a dream in a waking person, we would have to say that such a drug ought to be a sensory poison, enough to distort, disturb, or cut out a good deal of external reality; at the same time, it ought to function to keep the lights lit up inside (i.e., maintain arousal) enough to assure the presence of awareness of releases from within, from the brain's own storehouse of sensations and information. LSD meets these criteria. (p. 101, ibid.)

Looking past the loaded term "poison," West's suggestion that the noiselike effects of LSD block normal sensory activity, creating a dreamlike state, recalls Freud's remark that dreams are the via regia (royal road) to the unconscious. (Grof comments that the description is even more true of LSD.) Although West's mention of "releases from within" might have been a reference to the Freudian or psychotherapeutic approach in general, he was undoubtedly aware of the cybernetic model of mental illness which Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch had advanced with the explicit intention of superceding Freud, and which appears to have been a precursor of the model advanced forty years later by Edelman and Tononi:

West: Input doesn't have to be cut down in order to get "release" of previously experienced sensations. Instead, they are more or less blasted into awareness with a little extra electricity of one's own; or a temporal lobe seizure can be precipitated by setting off the focus in a susceptible person. (p. 101, ibid.)

Although West's comments were particularly significant because of his avowed skepticism about the therapeutic potential of LSD, they had almost no practical value to the therapists whose reports he was addressing. Probably they viewed him as hostile and reductionistic. While the therapists didn't quite know what to make of their own observations of religious experience, West described the extremes of psychedelic experience as chaotic, not revelatory. The record shows that even the therapists were keenly aware of the similarity of the LSD effect to a seizure of the temporal lobe.

In fact the conference must have resembled a trial of sorts, the adverse verdict coming when West compared the therapists' descriptions of the recovery of birth trauma to the claims of Scientology, then known as Dianetics. (Its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was viewed with hostility by the cybernetics group because he had popularized for financial gain a highly mythologized version of the cybernetic model of mental illness, which had been described by McCulloch in articles such "The Past of a Delusion," and by Wiener in his 1948 book Cybernetics. [cf. Breen, Tripping on Utopia])

As far as the therapists were concerned, it was not a claim but an empirically-established fact that LSD facilitates the recovery of birth trauma, as well as religious experience (or something so similar that it demands explanation). All parties were agreed that it causes a profound and overwhelming stimulus, but the neuroscientists treated reports of birth trauma recovery as bizarre anomalies, and uncertain references to religion and mysticism, unimproved by equivocal invocations of the openly dualist Jung, failed to overcome their behaviorist orientation. Nor could the therapists be impressed by scientists—ivory-tower theorists—who seemed more interested in deprecating their reports from the field than in explaining them.

Fremont-Smith lamented toward the end of the conference that it had been a failure. In retrospect, it was more than a lost opportunity. The outright rejection by well-connected scientists, in the world's most prestigious venue for interdisciplinary academic exchanges, was a harbinger of LSD's legal and medical proscription within the decade.

However, in 1960 the therapists' position received outside support from the staid precincts of the Princeton philosophy department; W. T. Stace argued, in Mysticism and Philosophy, that "the principle of causal indifference" requires philosophers and psychologists of religion, at least, to take psychedelics seriously:

…[I]t is sometimes asserted that mystical experiences can be induced by drugs, such as mescalin [sic], lysergic acid, etc. On the other hand, those who have achieved mystical states as a result of long and arduous spiritual exercises, fasting and prayer, or great moral efforts, possibly spread over many years, are inclined to deny that a drug can induce a "genuine" mystical experience, or at least to look askance at such practices and such a claim. Our principle says that if the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences are indistinguishable, so far as can be ascertained, then it cannot be denied that if one is a genuine mystical experience, the other is also. This will follow notwithstanding the lowly antecedents of one of them, and in spite of the understandable annoyance of an ascetic, a saint, or a spiritual hero, who is told that his careless and worldly neighbour, who never did anything to deserve it, has attained to mystical consciousness by swallowing a pill. (Stace, p. 30)

For William James, almost any relaxation of the strong boundaries of personal identity might qualify as religious experience. He went so far as to call alcohol the religion of the common man: "Drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes." (James, The Varieties of Religious Experience) Stace proposed a narrower definition: that true "mystical experience" is a state of "undifferentiated unity." He distinguishes the traditional attribution of religious content to mystical states from the formal qualities of the experience, declaring that the typical Christian description of the experience, "unity with God," is merely an "interpretation;" likewise the Upanishad's "unification of Atman with Brahman." Despite the variety of interpretations, mystical experience seems objective and real, which Stace attributed to self-transcendence, the shared experience of the "melting away" of personal identity into a greater One or Void.

Stace's definition of mystical experience included a list of formal attributes—such as unity, ineffability, sense of sacredness, and deeply felt positive mood—which proved to be of immediate practical use. In 1962, in the so-called Good Friday experiment, Walter Pahnke used a questionnaire based on Stace's list of attributes or categories of mystical experience to confirm, with a double-blind procedure and standard statistical technique, that a psychedelic (psilocybin) can trigger mystical experience. (Pahnke, W., Drugs and Mysticism [PhD. thesis]) (The term "trigger" is favored over "cause" for obvious reasons; the capability to have such experiences must be there—LSD will not cause mystical experiences if given to a computer or a dog or a stick of butter.) LSD evangelist Timothy Leary had thought such an experiment was entirely unnecessary—pretending to establish a known fact—but the unequivocal formal result made it controversial, even famous, and therefore consequential.

The Good Friday experiment suggested that the problem LSD poses for society is that it triggers not a fake form of religious or mystical experience, but some variant of the real thing. In retrospect, it is clear that LSD was never a secret, let alone a secret which could have been kept, but also that popular demand for the drug outstripped popular understanding and public information. The most telling argument against LSD, from the governance point of view, is that LSD does in fact conduce to mystical experience, but that the emphasis on ecstasy undermines the function of religion on which the state depends, that is, the inculcation of social and ethical norms, without reliably replacing it. As Frazer commented with respect to the magical thinking of the mass of people:

It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. (The Golden Bough, p. 64)

The question arises on the personal level: let us assume that a recreational user of LSD does manage to have ecstatic or mystical experiences: what then? In retrospect, like the release of the drug into the general public, the question was premature during the early 1960s. With the troubled public rollout of the drug and the resulting legal ban, promising research was effectively halted, while LSD became the province of the black market. More than half a century later, except in Switzerland, governments still categorize LSD not as a medical breakthrough, but as a "standing menace" with no medical utility.

Grof's seminal publications reflected the divided social and legal evaluation of LSD to the extent that he described the psychological extremes—the depths as well as heights—which users may encounter. Belying its initial media portrayal as instant enlightenment, but confirming the scientific assessment represented by the 1959 Macy conference, Grof wrote that LSD causes an intense purge of material from the depths of the unconscious, culminating in the recovery of birth trauma. Without overdramatizing the risks, the obvious conclusion is that a drug with such profound potential effects is a poor candidate for uninformed mass use.

Grof's consolidation of the field

Grof can be compared to the first explorer of an unknown continent to ascend its peaks, trace its rivers, and return with a detailed map. He participated in more than three thousand LSD treatments of at least five hours duration before writing his seminal books, which, remarkably, describe the whole human psyche.

As a factual matter, this paper is a commentary on Grof's map. Accordingly, despite the fame of his work among psychedelic researchers, it seems appropriate to review some of its more notable features, at least to the extent of identifying (let us say) its central peak and the surrounding jungle.

Needless to say, it would be remiss of anyone involved in the new wave of engagement with psychedelics—whether in the scientific, psychiatric, regulatory, or commercial realm—to ignore Grof's cartography of the unconscious or his empirically-driven evolutions of psychotherapeutic technique.

A basic rule that is of critical importance in LSD psychotherapy is to keep the session internalized. Since the psychedelic experience represents a process of deep self-exploration, a journey into one's own mind, consistent introspective orientation is by far the most productive approach. LSD subjects are therefore encouraged to stay for most of the experience in a comfortable reclining position and their eyes closed… (Grof, LSD Psychotherapy p. 145)

[T]he reclining position is generally encouraged for the next four or five hours, and the experience is almost fully internalized. The subject receives stereophonic headphones and listens to specially selected music; the objective is to let go and surrender to the experience. (ibid. p. 150)

Grof's modifications were dictated by the needs of his patients, specifically by the recovery of repressed traumatic memories, which, according to his extension of psychoanalytic theory, can determine the content and dynamics of consciousness in general and of LSD sessions in particular. Unlike Freud's talking therapy, LSD allows recovery to proceed more-or-less systematically into the realm of preverbal memories. Grof characterizes LSD as "exteriorizing" (that is, from the unconscious into consciousness) repressed "systems of condensed experience" or COEX systems:

A COEX system can be defined as a specific constellation of memories consisting of condensed experiences (and related fantasies) from different life periods of the individual. The memories belonging to a particular COEX system have a similar basic theme or contain similar elements and are associated with a strong emotional charge of the same quality. The deepest layers of this system are represented by vivid and colorful memories of experiences from infancy and childhood.…

Various layers of a particular system can, for example, contain all memories of the past exposures of an individual to humiliating and degrading situations that have damaged his self-esteem. …

The emotional charge which is attached to COEX systems (as indicated by the often powerful abreaction accompanying the unfolding of these systems in LSD sessions) seems to be a summation of the emotions belonging to all the constituent memories of a particular kind. (ibid., pp. 46-47)

Grof found that when LSD therapy was continued, subjects went deeper, into the memorial realm of the perinatal ("around birth"):

The basic characteristics of perinatal experiences and their central focus are the problems of biological birth, physical pain and agony, aging, disease and decrepitude, and dying and death. Inevitably, the shattering encounter with these critical aspects of human existence and the deep realization of the frailty and impermanence of man as a biological creature is accompanied by an agonizing existential crisis.(ibid. p. 95) …

…In a way that is not quite clear at the present stage of research the above experiences seem to be related to the circumstances of the biological birth. LSD subjects frequently refer to them quite explicitly as reliving of their own birth trauma. … (ibid. p. 96)

…A causal nexus between the actual biological birth and the unconscious matrices for these experiences still remains to be established. (ibid. p. 98)

Here Grof may simply be allowing the detail and consistency of the evidence to speak for itself. Many of his subjects reported convincing recall of their own birth, and the simplest and obvious explanation is that the memories were real.

To convey the complexity of these structures, Grof condensed their features into schematic charts. His summary of BPM II, which highlights both the biological pressures of birth and the archetypal imagery—confinement, demonic forces, suffocation—that often arise in LSD sessions: (Appendix 1: Full chart of Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices)

Related Psychopathological Syndromes

schizophrenic psychoses (elements of hellish tortures, experience of meaningless "cardboard" world); severe, inhibited "endogenous" depressions; irrational inferiority and guilt feelings; hypochondriasis (based on painful physical sensations); alcoholism and drug addiction

Corresponding Activities in Freudian Erotogenic Zones

oral frustration (thirst, hunger, painful stimuli): retention of feces and/or urine; sexual frustration; experiences of cold, pain and other unpleasant sensations

Associated Memories from Postnatal Life

situations endangering survival and bodily integrity (war experiences, accidents, injuries, operations, painful diseases, near-drowning, episodes of suffocation, imprisonment, brainwashing and illegal interrogation, physical abuse, etc.); severe psychological traumatizations (emotional deprivation, rejection, threatening situations, oppressing family atmosphere, ridicule and humiliation, etc.)

Phenomenology in LSD Sessions

immense physical and psychological suffering; unbearable and inescapable situation that will never end; various images of hell; feelings of entrapment and encasement (no exit); agonizing guilt and inferiority feelings; apocalyptic view of the world (horrors of wars and concentration camps, terror of the Inquisition; dangerous epidemics; diseases; decrepitude and death, etc.); meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence; "cardboard world" or the atmosphere of artificiality and gadgets; ominous dark colors and unpleasant physical symptoms (feelings of oppression and compression, cardiac distress, flushes and chills, sweating, difficult breathing) (This chart is reproduced in both Realms of the Human Unconscious and LSD Psychotherapy)

Although a subject may experience all the BPMs during the first well-prepared high dose session, typically their full exteriorization and resolution takes many sessions of increasingly profound experience. The subject must go through the recovery of birth trauma and the ego death before attaining to sessions dominated by mystical or religious experience, which Grof includes in a broader category he calls "transpersonal" experience.

The dosages used in this approach are very high, ranging from 300 to 1500 µg (micrograms) of LSD. In contrast to the use of serial LSD sessions in the psycholytic treatment, psychedelic therapy typically involves only one high-dose session or, at most two or three. This procedure has been aptly referred to as a "single overwhelming dose." (Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, p. 36)

Despite Grof's positive comments about single-dose therapy, he reports on a hybrid "psychedelic" mode, using doses typically in the 200-400 microgram range. (LP, 149) This may have the advantage of systematically clearing COEX and birth trauma material which the higher-dose quest for instant mystical experience might leave in place. One might speculate that as the original cartographer of the deepest levels of memory, Grof would have a natural affinity for a thorough purge. In any event, this paper focuses on the slower approach, involving the serial clearing of perinatal material.

The death-rebirth process does not consist of one single experience of dying and being reborn, no matter how profound and complete this experience might feel. As a rule it takes a great number of death-rebirth sequences and an entire series of high-dose LSD sessions to work through the material on the perinatal level, with all its biological, emotional, philosophical and spiritual manifestations. (LP, p. 74)

…The number of psychedelic sessions necessary for the completion of the perinatal process varies considerably from person to person and also depends critically on external factors such as dosage, therapist, set and setting. For this reason, any absolutely valid numerical estimate is impossible. In my experience, some individuals were able to work through and integrate the perinatal material in less than ten fully-internalized high-dose LSD sessions. Others needed several scores of psychedelic experiences in the same framework before they were able to move fully into the transpersonal phase. I have also met a number of people who had taken LSD on their own, in an unsupervised externalized way and in a social context, and had not really even begun this process in spite of hundreds of exposures to the drug. (LP, 215)

Although the serial approach to clearing memorial material is slower, the subject can generally be brought to the same peak which is the target of the single overwhelming dose.

With an increasing number of sessions, the phenomena related to the death-rebirth struggle (BPM III) come to the foreground. Occasionally, brief episodes of rebirth (BPM IV) and of cosmic unity (BPM I) occur in this context. Finally, when ego death and rebirth is experienced in a pure and final form, the pathway is opened to elements of the first perinatal matrix and to various clearly transpersonal dynamic structures. Following this, the phenomena related to the biological birth (BPM II, BPM III, and BPM IV) usually disappear from the sessions and do not recur when the LSD procedure is continued. All subsequent sessions consist almost exclusively of transpersonal experiences and have a definite religious and mystical emphasis. (Realms, pp. 149-150)

The deep emotions associated with perinatal memories, from terror to euphoria, appear to drive a dreamlike generation of narratives which can overwhelm normal thought, attaining cosmic proportions in the perception of the experient. Grof's isolation of his subjects in darkened rooms with eyeshades and music was designed to interrupt the tendency to project those narratives onto the therapeutic situation.

…I found that only three out of seventy-two patients showed a dramatic and lasting improvement of their clinical condition after [a] single LSD exposure. There were many others in whom various degrees of improvement could be observed; however, these beneficial results were only temporary, and after several days or weeks, patients returned to their previous symptoms and behavior. Conversely, several individuals manifested an intensification of psychopathology and a temporary worsening of the clinical condition. (ibid. p. 19)

Grof calls LSD a "nonspecific amplifier," with a value for psychology comparable to that of the microscope for biology or the telescope for astronomy, a description which accords with its release of the catecholamines. Since "nonspecific" implies that everything is amplified, one could compare LSD to a "clean" or "high-fidelity" amplifier. The argument is somewhat circular, since if LSD is a clean amplifier Grof's map is likely to be accurate, and if his map or model is good, that would establish that LSD is a clean amplifier. But the situation is comparable to asserting that the image of a distant galaxy demonstrates the power of a telescope, while the power of the telescope assures us that the observed galaxy appears as it actually looks.

Although Grof's emphasis is on the therapeutic utility of LSD, while West's is on overload risks, they at least implicitly rely on the same cybernetic model or models. (A quibble could be mounted on the basis that the cybernetics conferences were just a moment in science, and a controversial one, but I leave that to historians; it should be unobjectionable to use the term casually to describe the application of information theory to biological systems.) Grof and West agree that disinhibition of signal in the brain adequately explains the effects: the heightening of awareness, stimulation of imagery, and the intensification of thought which may culminate in overload or religious experience (leaving aside for the moment that apparent ambiguity or puzzle).

Figure 1, below, depicts the consensus, articulated separately by West and Grof, that LSD causes a (roughly) dose-dependent arousal which peaks after about two hours. The effects of different levels of arousal are shown, including ordinary states (in blue) as well as the disinhibition caused by the ingestion of LSD (in green) during the course of an otherwise normal day. The ingestion of LSD at 10 AM is represented by point L, the origin of three possible trajectories of arousal, depending on dosage as indicated. The green area is the zone of the LSD effect. (The onset of the effect is illustrated but not its recession.)

The horizontal green line marks the full onset of the LSD experience, which is characterized by the beginning of spontaneous visualization, typically colored patterns which can be perceived with closed eyes. The potential scope of a single conscious state is represented by the purple rectangle ranging from A to B, which will be carried over into other diagrams. (The actual duration of a state of consciousness is brief; the width of the rectangle is just for illustration):

The top dashed blue line represents the possibility of natural peak experience without any of the visual markers of psychedelic onset. Spontaneous non-psychedelic experiences in the green zone are a distinct possibility, particularly with shamanic "techniques of ecstasy"—dance, music, ordeal, fasting, and so on. But psychedelically-triggered religious experience and West's overload effects by definition lie entirely within the peak of the high-arousal green region.

The correspondence between physical and mental effects depicted in the chart represents a practical consensus on a monist explanation of the LSD effect, agreed to by scientists, recreational enthusiasts, prohibitionists, and legal authorities; that LSD causes a (roughly) dose-dependent arousal. The observations from LSD research themselves constitute definitive evidence for the dependence of consciousness on states in the brain, that is, for mind-brain monism, and the rough relationship between dose and effect depicted on the chart is intuitively obvious even to a casual user.

After almost half a century, Grof's report has not been superseded; neither has the accuracy of his description of LSD as a "non-specific amplifier," which as I have said represented a consensus on the physical facts in the language of signal-processing or, more generally, information theory. Among the developments since then which have contributed to the understanding of LSD is the EST model of neural activity, and the interpretation of information theory which became known as complexity theory.

From cybernetics to complexity theory

One reason for the development of complexity theory was dissatisfaction with the answer suggested by cybernetics to the question of how meaning is related to information.

It would seem eminently reasonable that a college text on gravity, being longer than an elementary primer on the subject, contains more information and therefore more meaning or knowledge. The intuition can be represented on a simple chart:

However, this can't quite be correct—there could be two messages or books of identical length, one meaningful, one gibberish. The message needs to be useful and the receiver needs to be able to understand it, otherwise it could be classed with other sources or types of noise. Classical information theory quantifies uncertainty, not meaning. An instruction manual of infinite length could not meaningfully be said to contain an infinite amount of meaning: although comprehensive, it would be useless to a finite user.

In retrospect some of Wiener's comments show him to have been as aware as any mathematician of his day that information theory doesn't apply to the problem of meaning if one doesn't consider the observer. For example, he commented that the discovery of a natural law constitutes a permanent reduction in uncertainty, a statement very much in the spirit of complexity theory, but other scientists saw more clearly the need for a better way to define the amount of meaning in a message than by a probabilistic measure of the entropy of the source, which was all that cybernetics offered. Weiner was certainly one of the forebears of complexity theory, but other scientists rightly get credit for its development. (cf. Heims, S. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 1982; and The Cybernetics Group, 1991, both MIT Press)

The evolution of the understanding of information theory, from cybernetics to complexity theory, can be characterized as part of more than a century of wide-ranging discourse over the interpretation of quantum theory. Well before Quine's refutation of logical positivism in 1951's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," it was clear that quantum mechanics posed a deep challenge to the traditional assumption that the foundations of knowledge are the province of philosophy, not science. Fortuitously for psychological inquiries—such as the one at hand—quantum theory placed observations or measurements (and therefore the observer) at the center of physics.

The status of the observer has been a persistent issue in the discourse over the interpretation of quantum mechanics since Planck and Heisenberg. For example, the notion, that wave-packet-reduction ("collapse" of the Schrödinger equation or WPR) requires the intervention of consciousness led Schrödinger himself to object that the idea that a cat in a box might be in a superposed state, both dead and alive until observed, is absurd. (For discussion, see the many articles on the topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which range from the measurement problem and macro-objectification, to Bayesian treatments and the testing of string theory; beginning with Ismael, J., Quantum Mechanics)

[W]hat we call existence is an information-theoretic entity. …No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. (Wheeler, "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links," in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, Zurek, ed. 1990)

Complexity theory describes the relationship between any observer (or group of observers) and any series of observations. Wheeler's comment about observations being "device-intermediated" implies that human consciousness is not playing a special role, except in the sense that we conscious beings are having a discourse about our observations.

Probably the most well-known of the recent defenses of dualism is the proposal by Penrose and Hameroff that quantum collapses in neuronal microtubules could account for consciousness, which appears to reduce consciousness, thought by most scientists and philosophers since the time of Locke to be a complex process, to a substance, as Putnam commented in a breezy review—just short of a formal rebuttal—in the New York Times. (Putnam, 1994. "The Best of All Possible Brains?").

On the other hand, proposals involving the biological role of quantum effects—for example that thought takes advantage of quantum degeneracy for memory, or that we depend on the stability of DNA at body temperature, an effect of bond strength—do not contradict supervenience and are relatively uncontroversial. While improvements (such as EST) in the explanation of the globality and integration of consciousness do not entirely rule out a role for, say, the exploitation of quantum entanglement in thought, as Penrose and Hameroff proposed, they do undermine the argument that there is no other way to explain consciousness.

Leaving aside such quantum-dualist proposals, Wheeler's point is that quantum mechanics is primarily concerned with observations, with an interaction of observer and observed.

…[E]very physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit. (Wheeler, J. "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links," in Zurek, ibid.)

"Significance" implies a network of communicating observers. If humans were the only observers in the universe (a condition which, as Putnam commented, could never be verified even if true), and became extinct, the universe would presumably continue to exist, as it existed before we evolved. The topic is not abstract knowledge of an abstract universe, but our situated knowledge of this universe—its significance to us. This anti-metaphysical reframing aligns with the move from cybernetics to complexity theory, where the emphasis shifts from control and signal transmission to integration and emergent order.

Complexity theory naturalizes the role of the observer, a scientific goal which had attracted scientists since at least the 1860s, when Maxwell had asked whether a tiny "demon" could extract energy without expending work, an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Early in the 20th century, statistical thermodynamics began to take the physical role of the observer into account. Boltzmann's student Smoluchowski showed that an automated trapdoor acting as a Maxwell's demon would quickly become unreliable due to the effects of impinging heat. In 1929, Szilard wondered whether an intelligent demon could do any better, but had no definition of intelligence which would have helped him answer the question. (Zurek, "Algorithmic Information Content, Church-Turing Thesis, Physical Entropy, and Maxwell's Demon," in Zurek, ed. ibid.)

An idealized observer at minimum registers the results of a series of measurements. If we view that record as constituting the input to a universal computer of the Church-Turing type (which arguably includes human intelligence), then we have a way of approaching Szilard's question. (ibid.)

It turns out that, in a random environment, even an intelligent demon couldn't extract free energy due to the cost of information storage, storage of the record. (p. 80, ibid.) Specifically, it is the cost of erasure or resetting of the recording capacity which wipes out any gain in free energy made by the demon. (p. 83, ibid., also "resetting" cf. Owen, "Information Processing and Thermodynamic Entropy." [SEP] The significant energetic cost of resetting may account for the otherwise surprisingly high levels of energy consumption by the brain during sleep.)

However, where patterns or structures exist in the environment, a universal computer can create a more compact record by modeling those regularities:

Consider a one-dimensional lattice of spins. I shall suppose that each spin can point either up (and designate this by "1") or down ("0"). A sequence of 0's and 1's with the number of digits equal to the number of spins in the system can be then regarded as a "description" of its state. Consider two such descriptions:

01010101010101010101

and

101101001101100010111

The first system is "regular:" It can be simply and concisely described as 10 "01's." There is no equally concise description of the second spin system. To reconstruct it, one would have to have a "verbatim" description [i.e. the second string itself, ed.]; there is no way to "compactify" this into a more concise message. (pp. 75-76, Zurek, ibid.) The algorithmic complexity of a string is defined as the compact version or compression of the string plus the string itself.

Complexity theory says that systems have "depth" or are complex if they are composed of both regular and random behaviors, such as those produced by a clock and a series of coin flips respectively. (Crutchfield and Young, "Computation at the Onset of Chaos," in Zurek, ibid.) Measurements in a totally random universe—a gas of particles—would produce a voluminous record but no thermodynamic advantage despite the system having the greatest possible entropy. A crystal has a visibly lawful structure and low entropy but also lacks complexity, and despite a short record, no work could be extracted

We ordinarily characterize a crystal as having a uniform structure. But a random distribution can also be described as uniform; we find the uniform temperature of a bath to be a useful measurement of the average kinetic energy of an assemblage of molecules. These different types of uniformity can be thought of as symmetries, the idea being "that a data set is complex if it is the composite of many symmetries.… Simply predictable behavior and purely random behavior will not be complex." (ibid., cf also, Bennett, "How to Define Complexity in Physics, and Why" p. 141, in Zurek, ibid.)

The figure below (adapted from Crutchfield and Young) illustrates the theory:

The complexity spectrum: complexity C as a function of the diversity of patterns. The latter is measured with the (normalized) Shannon entropy H. Regular data have low entropy; very random data have maximal entropy. However their complexities are both low. (Crutchfield and Young, ibid., p. 227)

[T]hese regularities are real properties of the physical universe and not just human inventions or delusions.…The issue of whether the laws of nature are discovered or invented is sidestepped if we view the world algorithmically. The existence of regularities may be expressed by saying that the world is algorithmically compressible. (pp. 62-62, Davies, "Why is the Physical World so Comprehensible?" in Zurek, ed. ibid)

Gains in efficiency—such as thermodynamic advantage—require gains in modeling (i.e. understanding) that is, decreases in the length of the record due to compression. The chart above can be read as showing that beyond a certain length of record, efficiency declines. Peak complexity is peak efficiency. The greatest gain in efficiency will come from the most concise code, which is to say the model which delivers the greatest compression of the data. Ideally this would be the shortest code with the broadest scope (as in a concise "theory of everything."):

…[T]he best model is one which permits the encoding of the observed data together with the model of the fewest number of binary digits. (p. 118, Rissanen, "Complexity of Models", in Zurek, ed. ibid.)

Language conveys meaning (as Wittgenstein thought) precisely because it comprises useful descriptions of the regularities of the universe in the form of concise or compressed expressions, i.e. models or maps. (Consider, for example, the compression attendant to the recognition of galaxies in the universe. The astronomer can now concisely inform the educated layman that "the Webb telescope is taking pictures of galaxies which were 13 billion light years away when the light was emitted"—and be understood.) The distinction between compressible and incompressible data led to a formulation of information which provided the measurement missing from cybernetics:

Algorithmic randomness, an alternative measure of the information capacity of a specific physical or mathematical object, was independently introduced in the mid-'60s by Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin. It is based on an intuitively appealing idea that the information content is equal to the size, in bits, of the shortest description. (p. 74, Zurek, in Zurek ed, ibid)

Each state of a universal computer can be thought of as a different virtual machine having a code of a particular length which defines its "algorithmic information content (known also as algorithmic randomness, algorithmic complexity, or algorithmic entropy)." (p. 76 Zurek, ibid.; p. 230, Crutchfield and Young, ibid.) In retrospect, then, Wiener's statement that the discovery of a natural law amounts to a permanent reduction in uncertainty implicitly refers to the algorithmic complexity of the observer or observers:

[A] great reduction in the code length means that we must have spotted a relevant property of the data generating machinery; and vice versa, there is nothing to learn from a "random" string, which has no regular features and cannot be compressed. (Rissanen, ibid.)

If we imagine approaching the temporal end of the universe, it would grow more random and describing it would require a longer record, with greater associated cost and less potential thermodynamic gain, therefore lower efficiency. (Note that the graph above is labelled with the origin and heat death of the universe.) In principle, then, the linear relationship between information and meaning depicted in the naive graph (Figure 2) breaks down and goes into reverse as the record grows increasingly unwieldy, with costs of storage, computation, and erasure growing. Beyond a peak efficiency, with too much entropy or randomness in the data, the linguistic utility or complexity of the record declines and is finally lost.

Complexity theory is most relevant to the study of LSD not because it describes the human situation in the universe, but because EST have applied it to the operations of the brain itself. After all, the system we observe most intimately is ourselves. Even more fundamentally, the brain must map its own physical states in order to sustain meaningful thought.

The Edelman–Sporns–Tononi model(s)

Philosophers and scientists had been dissatisfied with the traditional picture of the observer for a couple of centuries before quantum theory. By mid-20th century there was nearly universal agreement among scientists that humans are not "ghosts in a machine." (cf. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949) This dissatisfaction had already led philosophers to search for logical structures of thought—from Russell's set-theoretic program, to Wittgenstein's early atomism, to the Vienna Circle's positivism—but these efforts remained conceptual. It was McCulloch and Pitts who first showed how propositional logic could be embodied in neural circuitry. (cf. illustration, p. 105 in A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, pdf; Proops, I.,SEP, Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism; Uebel, T., SEP, Vienna Circle etc.)

However, McCulloch and Pitts' ground-breaking but simple sketches could not show how all the inputs related to a proposition or thought are physically integrated in the brain. For example, the various senses are evidently served by different parallel processing streams, as illustrated in the sketch below. Explaining how these (and other) neural elements are brought together is known as the "binding problem."

No member of the Cybernetics Group was under the illusion that the McCulloch–Pitts model was the whole story. Despite the association of his name with traditional linear digital computation, Von Neumann, in The Computer and the Brain, commented that global processes such as the emotions are analog, and that in practice, neural signals are thoroughly mixed. Wiener opined that the 10 Hz. alpha frequency identified in early work on encephalography maps a continuous scanning wave which boosts incipient neural signals above firing thresholds. Together, figures like von Neumann and Wiener gestured toward a more global, analog, and dynamic picture of brain activity—even if they lacked the tools to formalize how parallel processes are integrated.

Attempts by neuroscientists to identify central processes or organelles have consistently fallen short. The notion that thought involves the representation of sensory inputs and previous states to a central locus has been compared by Dennett to a play presented to a homunculus in a "Cartesian theater," a duplication of neural activity which could not be accommodated within observable processing and reaction times.

Over the decades following McCulloch—Pitts, various proposals—such as Parallel Distributed Processing—attempted to solve the binding problem through some intrinsic coordination of the massive parallelism of actual brain activity. (cf. Van Gulick, R., "Consciousness", SEP.) Gerald Edelman first proposed his "neuronal group selection" theory in the late 1980s, and, with Giulio Tononi, in 2000 published A Universe of Consciousness, popularizing the intersection of neural network theory and complexity theory.

To solve the binding problem they proposed that rapid "re-entrant" connections synchronize the frequencies of widely separated groups of neurons, integrating various inputs into a complete picture, thought, or state of consciousness. Their proposal entails a re-evaluation of earlier notions of cerebral organization, for example it shifted the thalamus from a hypothetical seat of central command to a coordinating hub in the thalamo-cortical system

Neuroanatomy is ignored in the sketch below, where the re-entrant connections are shown schematically in dark green. The first two fibers appear perpendicular to the time axis—a shorthand for ultra-fast links operating on millisecond scales. Further down, two groups of five fibers are drawn with slight slopes, suggesting connections across more distant neural groups that act very quickly, though not instantaneously.

Invisible to our subjective sense of perception, these rapid interconnections integrate separate neural groups or elements. A state of consciousness may comprise a myriad of elements and last from about 150 milliseconds to perhaps a couple of seconds, but, in the case of joining sensory inputs, the integration may occur as rapidly as ten milliseconds. The picture below sketches the rapid recognition of a red stop light to the left of the subject.

This simplified sketch shows how neuronal groups representing color, location, and shape converge on the perception of a red traffic signal. Their integration produces a raw image of a circular red light, represented schematically by the bottom line of the diagram.

Not shown, but equally crucial, is the rapid integration of this percept with preexisting maps—for example, the schema identifying traffic lights, the route being driven, and the active expectation of a signal at a particular location. Each of these is instantiated as a cluster of neural elements. Re-entrant neural connections synchronize these clusters into an integrated "dynamic core"—EST's term for a transient, unified pattern of neural activity—which we experience as a state of consciousness. This is their powerful central idea

Their model is highly detailed, recognizing three shells or levels of neuronal activity or mapping: the genetically-determined (more or less "Chomskian," i.e. innate structure); the well-learned automated routines underlying language composition and so on (the "Piagetan," i.e. developmental learning); and the processing of the flow of experience, including feedforward from immediately previous states.

In the language of complexity theory, sensory experience is the registration of observations or measurements. The flow of observations contributes to a record which is continuously compared with the record of previous observations, which includes any adduced models which permitted the record to be compressed. (This broad information-theoretical approach applies to knowledge of the world as well as to the brain mapping itself.) In principle, each core comprises various compressions—integrated "maps" that condense raw data into usable patterns of knowledge—and can thus be treated, in the language of complexity theory, as a "virtual machine": a temporary program built on the fly, a coordinated pattern of neural activity that runs for a moment, carries out a function, and then dissolves (cf. Crutchfield & Young in Zurek 1990).

The following amended picture (schematically) shows re-entrant activity integrating a map of the inputs, associated with the observation of the red light, with a larger set of maps, which includes a map of the driving route and so on. In the single state of consciousness which is represented, information from immediately previous states and relevant knowledge is treated, like sensory inputs, as data:

The EST model is expressed in canonical equations that apply complexity theory to the brain's internal mapping of information. As the above diagrams illustrate, the model characterizes re-entrant brain activity as integrating sensory selections from a differentiated range of possible states. The entropies of separate elements are simply additive, and the integration of these elements constitutes a gain of information or loss of entropy or uncertainty:

The difference between the sum of the entropies of all individual components (x_i) considered independently and the entropy of the system X considered as a whole is called the integration I(X) of system X:

Thus integration measures the loss of entropy that is due to the interactions among its elements. (p. 121, Edelman and Tononi ibid.)

Unlike the incompressible record of random events, synchronized inputs form a map or model. Each subsystem is also defined by its differentiation from, or integration with, the larger system:

As we can measure the statistical dependence within a subset, we can also measure the statistical dependence between the subset (X^k_j) and the rest of the system (X-X^k_j). This dependence can be usefully expressed in terms of mutual information (MI). Mutual information is given by:

and it measures the extent to which the entropy of X^k_j is accounted for by the entropy of its complement X-X^k_j (and vice versa, MI being a symmetrical quantity). Thus, mutual information measures the total amount of statistical dependence between any chosen subset of elements and the rest of a system.…

The ratio of these two measures defines salience, or the 'cluster index.' For example, the cognition of a novel object or concept will be more salient than the recognition of a familiar one:

Having in hand the integration of the subset and its mutual information with the rest of the system, a functional cluster index (CI) can then be calculated for each subset of the system according to:

where I(X^k_j) and MI(X^k_j;X - X^k_j) are appropriately normalized to discount the effect of subset size. This index of functional clustering offers precisely what we are looking for. For an isolated system, it reflects the relative strength of the interactions within a subset of elements compared to the interactions between that subset and the rest of the system. … By evaluating this cluster index for all possible subsets of elements of a given system (or for a representative number of them), one can determine whether that system contains one or more functional clusters. (ibid. 121-123)

Complete states of consciousness are identified with a "dynamic core," a large functional cluster which integrates the maps or smaller clusters which instantiate the contents of consciousness. (ibid. pp. 144, 146) It is also possible to calculate the total potential complexity of a system, based on the the scope of the differentiation which is subject to integration into a particular dynamic core. This is called the neural complexity and is given by the mutual information normalized across all possible subsets:

. . . Mutual information measures to what extent the entropy of (X^k_j) is accounted for by the entropy of X - X^k_j (and vice versa) and thereby measures the statistical dependence between any subset and the rest of the system. Thus mutual information expresses how well the states of subset I(X^k_j) can differentiate among the states of the rest of the system, which is to say how changes in the state of X - X^k_j makes a difference to the state of X^k_j. Accordingly, the value of MI(X^k_j;X - X^k_j) will be high if two conditions are met. First, both X^k_j and X - X^k_j must have many states, that is their entropies must be high. Second, the states of X^k_j and of X - X^k_j must be statistically dependent, that is, the entropy of X^k_j must be accounted for, in large part, by the interactions with X - X^k_j and vice versa.

Having determined the extent to which a given element can differentiate among the states of the rest of a neural system, it is easy to extrapolate to the entire system and define a measure of complexity. This overall measure of the degree to which the entire neural system is differentiated can be obtained by considering not just a single subset of its constitutive elements, but all its possible subsets. This measure can be reached by averaging the mutual information between each subset of a neural system and the rest of the system for all possible bipartitions of the system.

The corresponding measure is called neural complexity (C_N), and it is given by:

where we consider all subsets X^k composed of k-out-of-n elements of the system, and the average mutual information between subsets of size k and their complements as denoted as <MI(X^k_j;X - X^k_j) >. The index j indicates that the average is taken over all combinations of k elements. According to this definition, the higher the mutual information between each subset and the rest of the system, the higher the value of complexity. (ibid. 129-130)

In summary, on the EST model, the complexity of a thought is a function of both the differentiation of the input and the integration associated with re-entrant activity. The proposal of mechanisms by which information is widely shared throughout the brain opened up a world of possibilities:

…[W]]hile a neural system composed of a set of parallel, independent channels or reflex arcs may be extremely efficient for information transmission between separate inputs and outputs, it would be unsuitable for controlling behaviors requiring global access, context-sensitivity and flexibility. A system equipped with forward, backward and lateral connections among specialized elements can perform much better by supporting bottom-up, top-down, and cross-modal interactions and forming associations across different domains. (Tononi, Sporns, "Measuring information integration", 2003 pdf)

Tononi and Sporns went on to propose that each conscious state has a measurable ‘amount of consciousness,’ which they formalized as Φ:

…[A] system can be analyzed to identify its complexes—those subsets of elements that can integrate information among themselves, and each complex will have an associated value of Φ—the amount of information it can integrate.(ibid.)

Notably, Φ is not a separate kind of entity from CN but a proposed complexity measure which is subject to the same systems-theoretical constraints.(Strictly, Φ is defined over a system’s cause–effect structure and is hard to measure in vivo; here it functions as a theoretical index of integrative capacity.)

In previous work, we introduced a measure called neural complexity (CN), which corresponds to the average mutual information for all bipartitions of a system [19]. We showed that CN is low if the elements of the system are connected too sparsely (no integration), or if they are connected too homogeneously (no specialization), but it is high if the elements are connected densely and in a specific manner (both integration and specialization). CN captures an important aspect of the average integration of information within a distributed system. However, it is insensitive to whether the system constitutes a single, integrated entity, or is actually made up of independent subsets. For example, based on CN alone it is not possible to know whether a set of elements is integrated or is arranged into parallel, independent channels. (ibid.)

In other words, CN, neural complexity, is a statistical measure of the overall integration of information, whereas Φ is a complementary complexity measure—intended to capture the amount of consciousness in a particular state—and is constrained by the same system-theoretical limits (cf. Figure 3).

As a systemic constraint on the efficient use of information, I mention complexity theory in (at least) three contexts. Most generally, it applies to individuals (or groups of communicating observers) who are mapping (i.e. accumulating knowledge) about the universe or a restricted dataset. The notion of neural complexity is used to contextualize the discussion of the LSD effect in terms of varying levels of differentiation (or entropy) of neural data. Finally, some of the conclusions reached are tentatively framed in terms of Φ.

The potential neural complexity of any system is a function of its capacity to select data and to integrate or map it. Both changes in input and changes in integration contribute to shifts in this state-dependent potential. In a mechanical computer, doubling the hardware capacity (with the same chip type) doubles the power requirements. The brain cannot add neurons, but its effective capacity—its potential neural complexity—can vary with arousal and with the scope and composition of the data being mapped:

Large-scale computer simulations of the thalamo-cortical system also indicate that changes in complexity can be obtained through functional modulation of neural activity without modifying the anatomical connectivity.

…[T]he same normal brain can be more complex or less complex, depending on its level of arousal. (ET, p. 134)

The same considerations apply to Φ:

In neural systems, for instance, factors affecting maximum firing rates, firing duration, synaptic efficacy, and neural excitability, such as behavioral state, can radically alter information integration even if the anatomical connectivity is unchanged. (Tononi, Sporns, ibid.)

Each state of a brain can be treated as a distinct virtual machine with its own integration profile and codebook for mapping. The algorithmic complexity of the stored record—the accumulated maps or Ω—is a different quantity from either the complexity of the present state or the complexity of a specific task performance. Practical compressibility or mapping yield depend on Ω, the observer's background knowledge, i.e. models, skills, codebooks: the conditional Kolmogorov complexity K(x|Ω) can be low (mappable) or high (incompressible) for the same data x.

In other words, what Edelman and Tononi call the "same normal brain" can be treated as a sequence of distinct virtual machines. A change in arousal reshapes the brain’s attainable range of differentiation and integration; the same brain at different arousal levels behaves as though it had different potential complexity windows. The level of arousal is not the only factor affecting potential complexity: The maintenance of a voluminous uncompressed record is energetically and computationally costly, reducing available processing capacity and therefore the potential neural complexity of new dynamic cores—the immediate recording we experience as consciousness.

Since complexity theory is an application or interpretation of information theory it doesn't contradict the cybernetics-based models of the Golden Age of psychedelics, but EST represents a generational breakthrough after which, as I have said, normal scientific procedures indicate that a re-evaluation of the entire body of evidence from LSD research is in order.

LSD and complexity theory

Warren Weaver, introducing Shannon's foundational text, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), highlighted the extraordinary reach of information theory:

The obvious first remark, and indeed the remark that carries the major burden of the argument, is that the mathematical theory is exceedingly general in its scope, fundamental in the problems it treats, and of classic simplicity and power in the results it reaches. (The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1949)

This generality grounds the interpretation of LSD’s effects as shifts in arousal, compression, and integration.

In Mechanisms of Hallucination, Heinrich Klüver (an occasional attendee at the cybernetics conferences) observed that the logical place to begin the study of any psychotropic drug is its effect on vision, our primary sensory modality. Grof's description of LSD as a non-specific amplifier is borne out in its first visual effects. Aldous Huxley wrote that he had seen:

…a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged. (Doors of Perception)

The following figure represents normal arousal and the amplification described by Huxley in terms of the EST model (higher cluster index with amplification):

(Huxley was actually describing an experiment with mescaline. Grinspoon called LSD the "prototypical" psychedelic, a testament to its relative power, considering that mescaline has historical precedence, having been discovered in 1897 and first synthesized in 1919. But for the simple purpose of selecting an articulate report on the onset of psychedelic arousal, the difference is irrelevant.)

The second cluster in the chart above represents the onset of psychedelic perception in terms of more intense inputs and higher integration than normal, both represented by thickened green lines. Huxley's comment about the flowers "all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged" is captured by the notion that the cluster index is a measure of salience, as well as confirming the general stimulation of vision.

In other words, the evidence indicates that the psychedelic increase—or amplification—of neural activity associated with a message or observation, causes an increase in its salience, meaningfulness, or significance to the subject. (Hume spoke of the force and vivacity of impressions.) While this was immediately apparent to Hoffmann during his first experiment and to every subsequent experimenter, EST reframes the observation as an increase in cluster dynamics—i.e., more varied combinations of neuronal groups becoming temporarily integrated.

Figure 9, below, illustrates the beginning of the full psychedelic effect, characterized by spontaneous visual activity—with eyes closed or shaded as in Grofian therapy, as signified by the black rectangle which has replaced the universe—that is, in the absence of inputs. On the first chart of psychedelic action, Figure 1, this onset was marked by the horizontal green line. In the illustration below, the three inputs represented by the large downward-pointing green arrows are themselves maps whose outputs (below) represent, respectively, the spontaneous registration of a variety of colors, various possible compositions of visual scene, and a variety of possible forms (represented here by three shapes). The horizontal green lines are even thicker than in Figure 8, indicating an increase or amplification of re-entrant activity as well. Instead of the output constituting a specific selection from the possible sensory states on the basis of the veridical mapping of inputs, it will be a map which reflects the increasingly random assembly of imagery:

     

(The form-constants referred to in the chart were identified by Klüver as organizing visual space in psychedelic and spontaneous visions, in dreams and seizures, as well as appearing in art. They are: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral. [Klüver, Mechanisms of Hallucination])

Presumably, in addition to the spontaneous activation of neural groups, elevated re-entrant activity plays a role in recruiting groups which otherwise would not be contributing to the succession of dynamic cores. Almost anyone who tries LSD will likely intuit that in the place of veridical visual input, she is instead seeing maps (and maps of maps) which have been inappropriately ramified or evoked outright, whatever language she uses to describe the effect. At most doses, subjects can readily distinguish between reality and the visions, although this is not always the case. Actual hallucinations are rarer than elaborations or distortions of inputs, although not unknown.

From the earliest reports on LSD, recruitment of otherwise inactive neural groups has been recognized under such evocative descriptions as "quivering boundaries," "loosening of associations," "crosstalk," and so on. EST's re-entrant activity provides a mechanism which could instantiate those impressions, an improvement on the appeal to amplification in general. Psychedelic experience tends to be synesthetic in varying degrees, an additional bit of evidence for the existence of a structural capability for very fast communication among distant or unrelated neural groups.

With closed eyes, instead of registering or selecting a veridical observation or map, the brain of the LSD subject evidently creates maps on the basis of the flood of endogenous activation. In the absence of either spatial information or objects to recognize, the mind "sees" in the flood of activity something like patterns of changing and dissolving objects moving through shifting spaces, in varying colors.

Figure 10, below, represents the visual experience of a psychedelic subject who sees a red cross, then closes her eyes, upon which that object decomposes into a 3 x 3 array of squares which are then processed according to non-ordinary but simple rules of radiation, rotation, and iteration. (Almost certainly harmless but not advised for seizure-prone readers. To initiate, click once on "start".) The series of images in the figure are meant to suggest the ramification of possibilities, not to depict a series of images which might actually be seen under the influence of LSD. In actual psychedelic experience, the input could be anything seen, heard, or thought, that is, remembered or imagined, and, in contrast to the more-or less regular processes which the brain regularly employs, the processing rules can change arbitrarily and continuously, producing results which might be described as literally unimaginable in the sense that they will certainly be novel to almost anyone who has no psychedelic experience.

(The form-constants referred to in the chart were identified by Klüver as organizing visual space in psychedelic and spontaneous visions, in dreams and seizures, as well as appearing in art. They are: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral. [Klüver, Mechanisms of Hallucination])

Presumably, in addition to the spontaneous activation of neural groups, elevated re-entrant activity plays a role in recruiting groups which otherwise would not be contributing to the succession of dynamic cores. Almost anyone who tries LSD will likely intuit that in the place of veridical visual input, she is instead seeing maps (and maps of maps) which have been inappropriately ramified or evoked outright, whatever language she uses to describe the effect. At most doses, subjects can readily distinguish between reality and the visions, although this is not always the case. Actual hallucinations are rarer than elaborations or distortions of inputs, although not unknown.

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The point for the study of LSD is that once the visual mapping process is cut off from external input and psychedelically stimulated, it can produce a variety of unusual visual phenomena based on the exploitation or spoofing of ordinarily unnoticed fundamental mapping capabilities. Stace points out that the phenomenon can also occur without artificial stimulation, when the senses are turned inward in meditation. According to the Svetasvatara Upanishad:

As you practice meditation you may see in vision forms resembling snow, crystal, wind, smoke, fire, lightning, fireflies, the sun, the moon. These are signs that you are on the way to the revelation of Brahman. (quoted in Stace, ibid. p. 50)

The brain routinely assembles pictures based on the perception of novel complex scenes in any colors. Accordingly, there are almost no intrinsic limits on the variability and detail of spontaneous visualizations: on LSD one might see anything that one could see. Furthermore, compared to the LSD effect, the sequence above is slowed to a crawl. (Given sufficient graphics processing capacity, it would be easy to add sufficient details and speed to produce a definite overload in the form of a more cluttered sequence of faster-changing images.) The brain is capable of producing a hundred or so far-more-detailed maps per second. Ordinarily, all hundred would contribute to a single integrated picture of a (relatively) slowly-changing external situation, but when this capability is hijacked by a flood of activity triggered by a psychedelic, the resulting visual effect may be something like a smoothly integrated sequence composed of dozens of mappings more ornate than the sequence above—per second. At high doses such patterns can dominate the visual field even with eyes open, creating, for example, the effect of moving through a space or tunnel whose walls are visions.

(Wittgenstein might have pointed out that the subject could not even have a private language with which to describe the images to herself. Their private meaning is just the sequence of images which the LSD subject sees in her mind's eye. The patterns perceived already represent a mapping or attempt at compressing more-or-less random activity and are of low further compressibility.)

The situation is apparently paradoxical; despite the lack of public meaning, the images are entirely novel to the subject. They are personally "informative" (striking, etc.) despite being literally indescribable. The result could be described as degenerate, not in the typical scientific sense of having many possible equivalent implementations, but in the opposite sense of potentially producing many different non-veridical maps or interpretations from the same noisy dataset.

The psychedelic experience of internal geometric or fractal visions corresponds to the elevation of a series of artifacts, spontaneously triggered degenerate maps, to the status of clusters or pictures. The brain is accustomed to mapping more organized data which is comparable to previous maps, and mapping very noisy data with an aroused mapping capability appears capable of producing the most varied non-ordinary maps.

These may be highly differentiated in the range of sensory qualia involved, as well as being integrated to an unusual degree by elevated re-entrant activity, so they have a persistently high cluster index (roughly: integration within a subset relative to its coupling to the rest; see Eq. 3). Vision typically contributes to highly salient clusters, and the elevated cluster index of the LSD state is confirmed by the salience (i.e. internal registration or observation) of the spontaneous visualization, mostly when the eyes are closed but potentially exceeding the salience even of visual inputs.

Because the brain is rapidly producing a series of maps of its own elevated activity (however degenerate), the integrated state is often reported as unusually complex (or simply salient—Huxley's flower was simple but urgent.) However in terms of complexity theory, complexity drops as degenerate patterns take over visual processing, the peak of complexity having been reached with peak efficiency in mapping normal vision, even if patterns are already visible when eyes are closed.

The three stages of visual input—normal, slightly amplified, and threshold psychedelic (figs. 7, 8, and 9)—correspond to different levels of arousal on the first chart of psychedelic experience (fig. 1), from which the purple rectangle representing a single state of consciousness is reproduced below, turned horizontally:

Of course this graph with its sharp lines is really only a rough representation of relationships. As in Figure 1, it indicates that there may be natural peak experiences beyond the normal level of arousal. Even without ingesting psychedelics, one might experience the onset of spontaneous internal visions—in other words, cross the green line. Most obviously, this may happen during the kindling of epileptic seizures. In fact, Grof warns that the LSD effect is similar enough to epilepsy that it is strongly contraindicated for sufferers from grand mal seizures, since it can kindle a chain of seizures, known as status epilepticus, which may be very difficult to interrupt.

One caveat which applies to the figure above is that the response to a particular dose of LSD can vary wildly. Grof mentions one obsessive-compulsive subject who showed no effect after being given 1500 micrograms, although the effective dose of about 50 µg may have a surprisingly strong effect on some subjects at some times.

New to this chart is the red line at the right edge which marks the highest possible level of arousal, which, as a theoretical limit, could only be approached by high doses of LSD. (Grof suggests that LSD reaches a saturation point at about 500 µg after which the intensity of the effect does not increase, just the duration.) The weaponization of LSD was explored because of its ability to cause an incapacitating overload (documented in the record of the Macy conference by Malitz's films and photographs of prostrate monkeys.) To repeat, West, a leading expert on the military use of LSD, commented:

The input would become so great that the resulting phenomenon would be that of input overload. Intead of orderly information reaching the cortex, the net result would be a great deal of static and not very much in the way of ordered perceptions.

As Klüver suggested, because vision is our primary sensory modality, the analysis of the visual component has great heuristic value in understanding the broader effects of any psychedelic. The internal visions which mark psychedelic onset are often accessible during the session, and LSD is also known to stimulate a variety of higher aspects of visual processing, such as facial recognition—one may see faces in the patterns of plaster on a wall, for example. During the recovery of traumatic memories, elements drawn from repressed material may influence visual phenomena, and fantastical or mythological narratives can be sustained in visual imagery. The sheer variety of possible visual experience is remarkable, and often includes some degree of synesthesia, especially with music. The visual evidence indicates that the LSD effect entails a high degree of arousal, evocation of memory and fantasy, and crosstalk with other sensory modalities.

Klüver's insight is particularly relevant to the boundary state—reliably created by the saturation dose—at the red end of Figure 11. Within the astronomical number of possible visual states, there is a fairly well-defined group of photic phenomena, characteristic of high dosage, and sometimes the peak of therapeutic sessions, which have been described collectively as the "white light experience." It is not going too far to say that they became famous as the hallmark of high-dose LSD experience. Considering that the randomization of neural data might reasonably be expected to drive the individuation of imagery, which is normally centered on mapping our common physical world, the fact that reports converge on the white-light experience is itself of singular significance. Two reports can stand for many:

There were great processions in enormous cathedrals—candles and light and gold and incense, all moving up. I had no sense of my personal existence at this time. I was in all the processions, and all the processions were in me; I was every man and every man began to rise. The awe and splendor of this rising was almost beyond description. We were rising toward light, higher and higher through majestic white marble pillars. We left behind the blues, the greeens, the reds, and the purples, the gold of the cathedrals, and the royal garb of some of the people. We rose into whiteness; the columns we were rising between were white and pure. (p. 147, Grof, 1975, ibid.)

And a report by the author (which illustrates the appearance in close proximity of material from a COEX system, BPMs, and mystical experience):

After suffering waves of physical tension and a growing awareness of chronically constricted respiration, I recalled a moment of inhaling anesthetic on the operating table and then viscerally re-experienced my emergency appendectomy at age ten. At one point I was looking downward through my body at an x-ray view of my spine, and seeing it untwist and straighten as muscular tension dissipated. After this episode, my purged body seemed relaxed for the first time since the operation. As I lay on the floor I seemed to drift beyond a boundary marking the end of the world, beyond the objects of thought, into an infinite space filled by white light.

Experiences like these inspired users of LSD to look for comparisons, and they found them primarily in Eastern meditation literature, such as references in the Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead to the "clear white light of the void." As the two reports suggest, the photic phenomena are not confined to the color white, and are often associated with the sensation of vast space as well as mystical experience.

The "white" signal is important in information theory beyond the visual spectrum: it refers to the most random or highest-entropy signal in any frequency domain, and just considering the photic element, the obvious inference is that the white-light experience is, very simply, the effect in the visual domain of the high-entropy internal signal triggered by LSD.

The notion that LSD creates a random stimulation of the brain is as old as the drug itself, but complexity theory gives us a new way to think about the idea and to represent it graphically. Figure 12 represents a brain mapping itself under ordinary conditions as the blue complexity spectrum, and the LSD effect as the purple curve, reflecting both the increased intensity and entropy of internal signal triggered by LSD. At the extreme right of the graph, the level of complexity goes toward zero, corresponding to the overwhelming overload typical of very high doses.

        ,

The arousal of the brain mapping itself can be read along the dashed orange line: as arousal increases, both complexity (or integrative capacity) and data entropy (or differentiation) increase, as measured on the y- and x-axis respectively. Under ordinary conditions, the optimal operating point will be in the region of the peak of the blue curve. The purple curve represents the average response to various dosages of LSD, beginning with the onset of effects at about 30 µg, marked by the vertical green line. The horizontal scale measures the level of arousal, entropy, or differentiation of data—associated with everything which contributes inputs to a dynamic core or state of consciousness, such as sensory data, as well as the immediately previous dynamic core—and the vertical scale represents the "observing" or mapping function, with its associated costs of processing and storage.

On EST, self awareness depends on the statistical dependence between the internal "observer" and the internal "observed," the extent to which the entropy of X^k_j is accounted for by the entropy of its complement X-X^k_j. (Edelman and Tononi, p. 121) The LSD effect apparently occurs when the brain is trying to map its own internal activity at unusually high levels of arousal or internal entropy.

As with naive interpretations of information theory, the orange line is the expected trajectory of consciousness as arousal increases. However, experience reflects the complexity spectrum. The scale on the left represents the capacity to map or reduce the entropy of the internal data, and while the ability to sustain the cost of making that record is necessarily a function of arousal, above a certain peak the efficiency of the mapping effort declines, following the complexity curve. Despite increased effort, arousal, or cost of record, the maps which can be gleaned from data which is growing too random will decline in complexity. With a high dose of LSD, the subject will typically be overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of sensation and suffer from confusion as even the degenerate maps seen beyond peak complexity (such as patterned visions) appear to fragment and melt together as the randomness of internal data increases.

The limit, on the far right of the above graph—the convergence of the complexity curve with the horizontal baseline at the vertical red line—is a locus relatively well-defined by highly random data and minimal mappability. Near that point, the brain under the influence of LSD can be compared to an observer who has been suddenly transported to a time near the heat-death of the universe, at which point most structures have dissolved and the universe can be regarded as a statistically uniform or random gas of particles. The spontaneous experience of white light by itself evidently corresponds to the brain's interpretation of its own highly randomized signal. This is the region of West's "input overload," as marked on the graph.

White light and white noise are familiar examples of high-entropy signals, and as the respective connotations of the terms imply, the white signal may illuminate a space or interfere with or even overwhelm competing signal. In the sonic domain, the perfectly random signal is well-known: white noise contains all audible frequencies at amplitudes reflecting the power of the signal. A sufficiently loud white noise will mask lower amplitude signals—think of standing next to a big waterfall and being unable to make out the speech of someone a few feet away.

Because the white or random signal is the highest entropy signal in any frequency domain, it is also the appropriate test input for a system or filter in its range.

For example, white sunlight contains a (more-or-less) random distribution of frequencies in the range to which we are visually adapted, and if we hold a red optical filter up to the sunlight, we see that it passes the red frequencies while blocking others. Likewise, a randomized "shot-effect" electrical signal passed through a "black box" will reveal its filter characteristics well enough that the box can be duplicated. (cf. Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.)

White noise is also used as a test input (actually pink noise, i.e. one with extra bass input, because that normalizes energy levels within octaves, which is how we actually hear.) White (pink) noise played through a sound system at a sound check allows the amplification of the various frequency bands to be adjusted for the filter characteristics of the hall or environment.

The intrusion of noise into the perceptual process is actually observable from the onset of the LSD effect. Even the initial enhancement or amplification of perception of the type described by Huxley can be attributed to the increased entropy of the existing signal. This is analogous to a technique known as stochastic amplification, in which small amounts of noise are deliberately added to a tenuous signal in order to enhance it. The effect can be described as "(white) light-like" rather than "noise-like," and is reflected in the general illumination reported by Huxley.

The addition of small amounts of noise can also be compared to Wiener and McCulloch's characterization of the brain's alpha frequency as a scanning signal, a recirculating wave of facilitation which boosts neurons close to firing over their thresholds as it passes. (cf. Wiener, Cybernetics; McCulloch & Pitts, How We Know Universals) On this picture, the arousal caused by LSD just before onset can be described equivalently as either a slight nonspecific amplification or as a slight increase in the noise, randomness, or entropy of neural signal.

With the onset of visual patterns, as we have seen, complexity theory and EST provide a more detailed explanation than possible on plain information theory or cybernetics. Considering that the activation (or spoofing) of otherwise invisible visual mapping capabilities provides a good explanation of the characteristic patterning of internal psychedelic visualization, and that the white-light experience suggests that LSD drives the brain very close to a state of maximum entropy, the obvious first hypothesis on the model is that what we call "mystical experience" just is our experience of maximal neural entropy.

One argument in favor of this rather sketchy identification is that Stace's attributes of mystical experience do appear to reflect the loss of complexity one would expect from a high-entropy signal based on complexity theory, the most obvious example being the lack of differentiation, in other words, the simplicity of the unitary state.

The following table of categories or attributes derives from Stace's analysis of mystical experience; it is based on the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire, but includes some comments from Grof.(cf. Tart Altered States, pp. 411-417; sample psychology of religion questionnaire.) Comments relating features of mystical experience to features of raised neural entropy and particularly the loss of complexity are in the green fields.

To recap, a brief survey of the range of visual alterations caused by LSD, from the onset of spontaneous visualization (Fig. 9) to the white light experience, suggests that states of maximum entropy may be correlated with mystical experience. On complexity theory a complete overload would necessarily be undifferentiable and ineffable, corresponding to two of the main points of Stace's characterization of mystical experience. An overload of signal could also plausibly be experienced as a form of self-transcendence, a hallmark of mystical experience:

Now the fact that self-transcendence is a part of the experience itself is the reason why the mystic is absolutely certain of its truth beyond all possibility of arguing him out of it. An interpretation of any experience can be doubted, but the experience itself is indubitable. (Stace, p. 154)

However, the tentative correlation of the white-light experience with a state of (near-) maximum entropy in the brain is a narrow techical proposition. Just because the white light experience is often an element of mystical experience during advanced LSD therapy or with high dosages doesn't imply that mystical experience in general can be chalked up to an effect of elevated entropy. Outside the realm of chemical arousal, it is not even clear what the correlation would mean.

As Stace acknowledged, Bertrand Russell's essay Mysticism and Logic provided him a certain philosophical cover by describing the historical discourse within which terms such as "mysticism," "God," and "unity" developed their various meanings. Despite this pedigree, Stace's apparently straightforward definition of mystical experience as a state of "undifferentiated unity" led him into expressions which defy logic:

Since the experience has no content, it is often spoken of by the mystics as the Void or as nothingness; but also as the One, and as the Infinite. (ibid. p. 86)

This conclusion (or rather, confusion) can be represented arithmetically:

Substituting God for infinity—or one—doesn't simplify the equation. Joking aside, the problem is not in the arithmetic but in the philosophy, which is to say in the definitions of terms such as "the One," and "undifferentiated unity." Stace himself distinguished two approaches to (or interpretations of) mystical experience, the extrovertive and the introvertive:

A distinction should…be made between those mystical states which have come to men unsought, without any effort on their part and often quite unexpectedly, and those which, on the other hand, have been preceded by deliberate exercises, disciplines, or techniques, which have sometimes involved long periods of sustained effort. The former may be called "spontaneous," the latter —for lack of a better label—"acquired."

Spontaneous experiences are usually of the extrovertive type, though not invariably. Those which are acquired are usually introvertive, because there are special techniques of introversion—which differ only slightly and superficially in different cultures. So far as I know there are no corresponding techniques of extroversion. (MP, 60)

Many anthropologists, mythologists, and sociologists would disagree with this assertion. Eliade, Campbell, and Weber, for example, argued for the origin of religion in the kinds of experiences mediated by magicians and shamans through techniques of producing ecstasy which are rooted in the neolithic, such as ritual, dance, drumming, singing, fasting, ordeal—and drugs, including alcohol, tobacco, and natural psychedelics. These are not what Stace had in mind when he mentioned "special techniques of introversion:"

…The essential difference between them is that the extrovertive experience looks outward through the senses, while the introvertive looks inward into the mind.… The introvertive mystic…seeks by deliberately shutting off the senses, by obliterating from consciousness the entire multiplicity of sensations, images, and thoughts, to plunge into the depths of his own ego. There, in that darkness and silence, he alleges that he perceives the One—and is united with it—not as a Unity seen through a multiplicity (as in the extrovertive experience), but as the wholly naked One devoid of any plurality whatever. (Ibid. 61-62)

The reference to "techniques of introversion" excludes the typical recreational use of LSD and other psychedelics. The recreational user may be described as seeking easy ecstasy, and LSD in this case can be described as a "special technique of extroversion." In contrast, Grof uses LSD as a "special technique of introversion," in conjunction with others, such as extreme sensory restriction. If the white-light effect is the result of overload, the cultivation of introvertive experience is typically an act of subtraction:

Suppose that, after having got rid of all sensations, one should go on to exclude from consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning processes, volitions and other particular mental contents; what would there then be left of consciousness? There would be no mental content whatever but rather a complete emptiness, vacuum, void.…

The association of high-dosage LSD experience with mystical experience is a well-attested empirical observation, and the visual component, the white light experience, implies that the LSD effect can be usefully characterized in terms of a peak of neural entropy, and leads to the proposal that extrovertive mystical experience can be identified with the collapse of complexity due to overload. Since Stace defines the introvertive state in terms of the restriction of mental contents, the corollary suggests itself: that it can be identified with the other boundary state on the complexity curve, representing low entropy and (ideally) zero complexity.

The most uncertain component of the proposed correlation is actually Stace's definition, which is an inevitable result of the ambitious scope of his synthesis, encompassing the philosophy, religion, theology, and mysticism of both West and East. Stace is juggling multiple discourses unfolding at different rates, and he is also engaged in the philosophical disputes of his moment:

One may also say that the mystic gets rid of the empirical ego wherepon the pure ego, normally hidden, emerges into the light. The empirical ego is the stream of consciousness. The pure ego is the unity which holds the manifold of the stream together. This undifferentiated unity is the essence of the introvertive mystical experience.

…Hume concludes that there is no such thing as a self or ego; but that a person is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions," i.e. nothing but the stream of consciousness. The ego which Hume was denying was of course the ego considered as a substance, whereas what the mystic is affirming is the ego in the sense of what Kant called "the transcendental unity of apperception." (ibid. 86-87)

The near target of this statement was not Hume, but the behaviorists who dominated both psychology and philosophy during the 1950s, and who (like Hume) deprecated the notion of consciousness. From the behaviorist point of view, the development of NNT by McCulloch and Pitts was a triumph which definitively reduced conceptions such as soul, mind, and consciousness to physical states, thereby eliminating them. What the behaviorists could not anticipate at that moment of apparent victory was that by explaining consciousness, computationalism would not eliminate it but rather restore it as a legitimate scientific topic, justifying Stace's faith that the explanation of mystical experience is to be found not in metaphysics, but in theories of mind.

Although the advance of computationalism confirmed Stace's good philosophical judgment in opposing behaviorism, the intervening years have seen profound changes in almost every tributary discourse of his multi-faceted discussion. I have argued that Stace's endorsement of psychedelic experience unexpectedly implied a correlation between his dual definition of mystical experience and the two boundary conditions of the complexity spectrum representing neural data. This possibility alone suggests the need to rethink his entire enterprise.

Accordingly, where the first part of this paper converged on the rather technical point that the psychedelic white-light experience represents a peak of internal entropy, the second part widens its focus to other post-Stacian developments which impinge on the study of mystical experience and psychedelic therapy, including new thinking about metaphysics and the foundations of knowledge, about religion and values, and about science and the situation of human observers in the universe.

Interpretation and misinterpretation

…[M]ystical experiences may be misinterpreted by mystics. (Stace, ibid., p. 18)

Like Stace, Russell located the origin of mysticism in experience, but he was primarily concerned with its influence on the history of philosophy:

Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. (Russell, Mysticism and Logic, p. 12)

Mysticism, then, is not just a unique form of experience, but a tendency in human thought.

One of the most convincing aspects of the mystic illumination is the apparent revelation of the oneness of all things, giving rise to pantheism in religion and monism in philosophy. (Ibid. p. 28)

One example of the monism to which Russell objects is the Platonic association of the real and the good, as in the attribution of both physical Creation and ethical instruction to one Supreme Being. But the influence of mysticism extends beyond the merely religious.

The conception of a Reality quite other than the world of appearance, a reality one, indivisible, and unchanging, was introduced into Western philosophy by Parmenides, not, nominally at least, for mystical or religious reasons, but on the basis of a logical argument as to the impossibility of not-being, and most subsequent metaphysical systems are the outcome of this fundamental idea. (ibid. p. 28)

Where Stace implicitly valorizes mysticism as a positive element in human thought, Russell emphasizes its pernicious effects when interpreted too literally. He remarks that the mystical preference for intuition over reason does have a legitimate scope, for example in the formation of hypotheses which reason can confirm or falsify.

…[I]nsight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth…But in fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes, but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new. (ibid. p. 22)

Leo Frobenius was the first, I believe, to point out that two contrasting attitudes toward death appear among the primitive peoples of the world. Among the hunting tribes, whose life style is based on the art of killing, who live in a world of animals that kill and are killed and hardly know the organic experience of a natural death, all death is a consequence of violence and is generally ascribed not to the natural destiny of temporal beings but to magic. Magic is employed to defend against it and to deliver it to others, and the dead themselves are regarded as dangerous spirits, resenting their dispatch to the other world and now seeking revenge for their miserable state on those still alive.…

…For the planting folk of the fertile steppes and tropical jungles, on the other hand, death is a natural phase of life, comparable to the moment of the planting of the seed, for rebirth.

…Frobenius terms the attitude of the first order "magical," and the latter "mystical," observing that whereas the plane of reference of the first is physical, the ghost being conceived as physical, the second renders a profound sense of communion of death and life in the entity of the sib. (Campbell, Primitive Mythology, pp. 125-130)

Campbell argued that these two patterns, the magical and the mystical, were neolithic matrices which imparted rough form to the respective historical, literate cultures of West and East. The magical notion of the soul or ghost which leaves the body at death dominated Western religion and philosophy until the dawn of modernity. In Russell's terms, the mystical attitude of Platonism (or rationalism) is the successor to magical thinking.

Whitehead famously quipped: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Nietzsche, retrospectively contemplating their joint demise, commented that Christianity is Platonism for the masses and Platonism is Christianity for the educated. They shared (or share) the mystical (or magical) notion of a higher Reality. (Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being can be recommended as an introduction to the internal contradictions which led to the collapse of Platonism, the subject of thousands of texts.)

The pre-Socratics and, later, Aristotle and Epicurus had proposed an early form of the argument against a pure rationalism and for empiricism, which is to say for the notion that knowledge is based on observations (or experience) rather than on the Platonic apprehension of ideal forms. (cf. Markie, P. and Folescu, M., SEP, Rationalism vs. Empiricism.)

In the context of Russell's association of mysticism with rationalism, the formulation "mystical experience" stands out as contradictory. Experience typically reflects the changing world; every state of mind is unique just because its contents are unique, which is to say differentiable. On the other hand, "mystical experience" is by definition invariable, not determined by the changing data associated with being in the world: undifferentiated. Russell does use the term "mystical experience" but in a dual sense, since he rejects the conclusion that the unitary vision is evidence of a higher Reality; his main contribution to philosophy was his effort to replace the notion that knowledge is based on correspondence to an ideal realm with new foundations based on set theory.

The psychedelic crisis—Grof relays reports of the “loss of all reference points”—bears a family resemblance to the collapse of Platonic certainties under the assault of empiricism. As a result, not only has scientific and philosophical thought about thought produced the theories of mind which are the best tools we have for explaining the effects of the psychedelics, a topic mainly of interest to academic specialists, but it is also of practical relevance to individual subjects who are integrating experiences which seem meaningful but which it is impossible to forget are also triggered by a drug. As a result, subjects are almost certain to have questions about how their apparently stable consciousness was changed so profoundly by a few molecules of LSD and the implications for their own identity.

The British Empiricist John Locke (1632-1704) is generally credited with naturalizing the traditional Platonic (i.e. Christian) notion of identity, replacing the magical soul conceived as an integral or unified substance—in Leibniz's terms, a monad—with a psychological explanation, the continuity of what Locke called "consciousness:"

For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come.…

For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self… in this alone consists personal identity. (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 27, §9)

On the Platonic picture of the soul as monadic and eternal, identity is more-or-less viewed as a given fact, separable from the question of the nature of ideas. But Locke's notion of consciousness entailed that identity, like any idea, is formed through the association of sensory experiences:

Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? …To this I answer, in one word, from experience. (Locke, ibid., Book II, Chapter I, §2)

Locke emphasized the importance of memory in the formation of identity, but Hume (1711-1776) went even further in deflating the notion of a unitary self, insisting that self-observation yields only the flux of thought, not any permanent or unified self:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.…

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section VI)

In addition to his extreme skepticism about identity, Hume is remembered for his critical attitude towards such commonplace notions as ideas, reason, and truth.

Redefining "reality"

According to Hume, all ideas are based on the "connexion" of perceptions:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call Impressions and Ideas. (Hume, Treatise, Book 1, Part 1, Section 1)

Associationism entails the rejection of Platonism, but the argument over how to replace that foundation was to play out over centuries, and Hume's comment about the mind as "a kind of theatre" in retrospect was held to be excessively skeptical, anti-realist or solipsistic. But compared to most of his contemporaries and nearly all of his predecessors, Hume was offering by default an alternative explanation of abstract objects, that they are constructed by humans. It is only a slight dramatization to say that Hume's extreme skepticism (or "nominalism" about abstract objects) stimulated a vast discourse about the metaphysical status of abstract objects which continues today.

As Russell points out in The History of Western Philosophy, numbers are paradigmatic abstract objects, so one version of the metaphysical problematic is the question of whether numbers "exist," whether they are "real:" Are numbers discovered or created by humans? According to traditional criteria, numbers "exist" or are "real" in the sense of being eternal ideal objects.

Russell attempted to replace this naive notion with the idea that numbers and arithmetic are universal (that is, real) by deriving them from set theory, but this program was apparently checked by Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which showed that no proposal concerning the foundation of mathematics could be proved to be complete. Continued efforts by the so-called logical positivists to salvage Russell's approach were effectively terminated at mid-century by Quine's attack on the entire idea that human knowledge rests on solid foundations: he rejected traditional metaphysics as a whole, arguing in effect that, like our traditional idealist definitions of identity and reality, the expectation of Gödelian completeness is itself a relic of Platonism. (Uebel, T., SEP, Vienna Circle, Leitgeb, H. and Carus, A., SEP, Rudolf Carnap)

Although Quine was known for his careful, dry prose, he also had a gift for the shocking statement:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. We adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. Simplicity, as a guiding principle in constructing the scientific edifice, is not a matter of logic, but of pragmatic efficacy. (Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 1951)

Quine's work is generally seen as marking the end of foundationalism, and specifically its most modern form, positivism or logical positivism (the "empiricism" of Two Dogmas), and a new dawn of pragmatism (although Wittgenstein had followed a similar trajectory.) Quine explicitly included arithmetic in his picture of science as a single group of revisable propositions, commenting:

No statement is immune to revision… even that 2 + 2 = 4. (ibid.)

Quantification over mathematical entities is indispensable for science, both formal and physical; therefore we should accept such quantification; but this commits us to accepting the existence of the mathematical entities in question. (Putnam, Philosophy of Logic)

So-called Quine-Putnam indispensability, then, redefines terms such as "exist" and "real." Numbers exist. They are real. But reality and existence no longer entail residence in an eternal changeless realm of ideas. (cf. Colyvan, M., SEP, Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics) Putnam argued that we have no criteria on which to say that numbers or arithmetic are not completely real, even if they are merely indispensable, and therefore revisable, as Quine had said, a position Putnam identified as "modal structuralism." What is primordial is mathematical possibility, not Russell's set theory as such. Putnam is sometimes called a neo-pragmatist but he consistently characterized his (frequently mutating) position as a variety of scientific realism.

In this light, Edelman and Tononi's comment that their model is noncomputational does not rise to the level of a philosophical dispute, despite their otherwise surprising deprecation of the Church-Turing formalism. Notably, they formulate their model of neural processes in terms of complexity theory, and propose that algorithmic complexity is a good proxy for the neural complexity of dynamic cores. My point is that objections to the entire enterprise of correlating functional states to experience which take the form "but the brain is not a computer, and a computer could never do what a brain does" are targeting a model which philosophers have abandoned. As Putnam comments:

What I have in mind in speaking of a "liberal functionalist" is someone who, like me (or like me today), accepts the basic functionalist idea that what matters for consciousnessness and for mental properties generally is the right sort of functional capacities and not the particular matter that subserves those capacities, but (1) does not insist that those functions be "internal," that is, completely describable without going outside the organism's "brain" (thus Gibsonian "affordances" and Millikan's "normal biological functioning" in an environment can all be involved in the description of the "functional organization" of an organism); (2) does not insist that those capacities be described as capacities to compute (although she is naturally happy when computer science sheds light on some part of our functioning); and (3) does not even eschew intentional idioms, if they are needed, in describing our functioning, although she naturally wants an account of how intentional capacities grow out of protointentional capacities on our evolutionary history. (Putnam, "Corresponding with Reality" in Philosophy in an Age of Science, p. 83)

However interesting to philosophers, the problematic around the foundations of knowledge is a technical matter, and mostly irrelevant to daily life, where we have always found numbers and arithmetic indispensable in talking about distance and time, and physical objects to be useful posits indeed. Users of psychedelics may become interested in philosophical staples such as the origin of ideas, but they are almost certain to be confronted with the related question of the nature of their own identity.

Skepticism about identity

Associationism not only offers an alternative explanation to the Platonic notion of an eternal realm of ideas, it undermines the Western assignment of human identity to an integral soul which persists after the death of the body. Against this picture Locke proposed the psychological mechanism of consciousness, defined by awareness of sensory inputs, and of immediately previous states, in addition to memory of earlier states. The notion of consciousness was originally not a problem to be explained, but the solution to a problem posed by the incoherence of traditional dualism.

From the beginning, computationalist ideas were a good fit with their associationist antecedents:

[T]he brain… is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. (Wiener, Cybernetics).

Wiener's point is that human memory is never completely cleared, an implication of Locke's picture of consciousness. But the discourse over identity which emerged in the decades after the advent of information theory (i.e. both computers and neural network theory) was also shaped by Kant's response to the British empiricists, and particularly to Hume's extreme skepticism.

In the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant argued that experience is not a simple bundle of impressions, but is highly structured by innate "synthetic a priori" categories such as space and time. We only know the world through these categories and the "thing in itself," is unknowable. Today this is regarded as a form of anti-realism or idealism which is incompatible with science. However, although Kant's philosophy as a whole is outdated, one can draw a straight line from Kant's insistence on the "transcendental unity of apperception" to the computationalist idea that consciousness is highly structured, not a simple substance. For example, consciousness can be compared to the user-friendly GUI on a modern computer, which is subserved by elaborate hardware and layers or modules of software which are invisible to the user, or which are taken for granted, like the machine itself and the screen. In the words of Marvin Minsky, "the mind is what the brain does."

Chomsky and Fodor were only the best-known advocates of the notion that experience is highly structured by the computational analogues of Kant's categories and synthetic a priori ideas. Putnam was also an early advocate of the analogy between computer and the brain, but his opposition to Chomsky's so-called innateness hypothesis dates back at least to his 1967 article "The 'innateness hypothesis' and explanatory models in linguistics:"

The 'innateness hypothesis' (henceforth, the 'IH') is a daring—or apparently daring; it may be meaningless, in which case it is not daring—hypothesis proposed by Noam Chomsky.

…[T]he IH is the hypothesis that the human brain is 'programmed' at birth in some quite specific and structured aspects of human natural language.

Chomsky's primary evidence for his hypothesis (sometimes described as Universal Grammar, or a Fixed Nucleus of innate programming) is the ease and speed of language learning and the poverty of the linguistic stimulus required. Putnam countered that general intelligence could account for the same phenomena:

The theorems of mathematics, the solutions to puzzles, etc. cannot on any theory be individually 'innate'; what must be 'innate' are heuristics, i.e. learning strategies. In the absence of any knowledge of what general multipurpose learning strategies might even look like, the assertion that such strategies (which absolutely must exist and be employed by all humans) cannot account for this or that learning process, that the answer or an answer schema must be 'innate', is utterly unfounded. (ibid.)

By the time of the well-known debate between Chomsky and Piaget—an advocate of associationism who, like Chomsky, studied learning in children—Putnam had sharpened his attack on both Chomsky's use of evidence and his willingness to employ something like Kantian a priori categories:

How wide is a domain? Is all of mathematics one domain? If so, what about empirical science? Or are physics, chemistry, and so on, all different domains?

If Chomsky admits that a domain can be as wide as empirical science (that there can be a "learning theory for empirical science"), then he has granted that something exists that may fittingly be called "general intelligence".… Once it is granted that such mutipurpose learning strategies exist, the claim that they cannot account for language learning becomes highly dubious … (p. 297)… It is one thing to say that we cannot scientifically explain how certain structures were produced (and the theory of natural selection does not even claim that those structures were probable), and quite another to say that we now have scientific reason to postulate a large number of "mental organs" as specific as the various domains and subdomains of human knowledge…

Why should [God] pack our heads with a billion different "mental organs," rather than just making us smart? (Piatelli-Palmarini, ed., Language and Learning: The Debate Between Piaget and Chomsky, 1980, p. 298)

Putnam was particularly deprecatory of Fodor's proposal that the brain has an innate "language of thought":

[Fodor]… contends… that such a [digital] computer, [i.e. the brain] if it "learns" at all, must have an innate "program" for making generalizations in its built-in computer language… Second, he concludes that every predicate that a brain could learn to use must have a translation into the computer language of that brain. So no "new" concepts can be acquired: all concepts are innate! (ibid.)

Chomsky did not want to die on that metaphysical hill, and he was pressed by Piaget and his allies to acknowledge that his innateness hypothesis overlapped explanations of psychogenesis based on genetically-encoded structures which, as Cellerier commented, entail "the successive maturation of specialized hardware." (p. 72) Chomsky had to admit that he didn't disagree with the point. The Piaget faction pointed out that such genetic programming might be triggered by experience; it had become a truism that learning entails the hard-wiring of neural connections, further blurring the line between Chomsky's innate programming and Piaget's construction of so-called cognitive objects. Putnam concluded:

If all that is meant by 'innateness' is that children are biologically prepared to acquire language under appropriate conditions, then the debate becomes an unnecessary sectarian squabble. (ibid., p. 301)

By the end of the pivotal confrontation, Piaget and Putnam had prevailed on Chomsky to admit that ideas do not reside in a metaphysical realm and that human identity does not consist in an eternal soul or ghost—which were never his arguments anyway. This was an armistice if not quite a peace.

One of Chomsky's avowed reasons for his persistence in advancing a series of models of his innateness hypothesis was his alarm over the social implications of behaviorism,whose sinister potential was foreshadowed by the title of B.F. Skinner's behaviorist manifesto, Beyond Freedom and Dignity:

The doctrine that the human mind is initially unstructured and plastic and that human nature is entirely a social product has often been associated with progressive and even revolutionary social thinking, while speculations with regard to human instinct have often had a conservative and pessimistic cast… But a deeper look will show that the concept of the "empty organism," plastic and unstructured, apart from being false, also serves naturally as the support for the most reactionary social doctrines. If people are, in fact, malleable and plastic beings with no essential psychological nature, then why should they not be controlled and coerced by those who claim authority, special knowledge, and a unique insight into what is best for those less enlightened? (Chomsky, Reflections on Language, p. 132)

Chomsky could be characterized as trying to stake out a domain of freedom and dignity within a computational model, locating the essential humanity of the individual in a genetically-determined capability. Putnam's disagreement with Chomsky and Fodor is not over their computationalism, it is that computational processes are purely syntactic, and that content and meaning are supplied by experience and memory:

… [M]achine language does not contain (nor can one introduce into it by definition) such notions as "tree," "cow," jumps," "spontaneous," "pert," and so on—it only contains such notions as "add," "subtract," "O," "l " "put result in address 17," "go back to instruction so-and-so," and "print out contents of address blah-blah." (ibid., pp. 304-5)

Putnam's argument here echoes an old objection to Plato: even if there were an ideal realm, the physical processes of the brain alone could not interact with them. But Putnam is proposing an empiricist solution to the puzzle. As he had put it in 1975 in The meaning of 'meaning': "Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just ain't in the head!" (At least one interpreter has suggested the restatement: "'meanings' ain't just in the head.")

Putnam's renunciation of functionalism was widely recognized for delimiting the scope of computationalism, but as his devastating riposte to Fodor illustrated, his picture of identity was only part of his project to salvage both Kant's intuition that consciousness is highly structured and Hume's pure empiricism. (Putnam even critiques Hume's notion of the mind as theater for being insufficiently externalist—that is, for being tinged with anti-realism.)

Putnam, in other words, accepts computationalism but rejects innatism on philosophical grounds, locating the semantic component of meaning in external reference. Human identity isn't even exactly "individual," it is embedded in language, culture, family, education, history and so on. With respect to meaning in general, Putnam is clear that externalism implies anti-individualism. (cf. e.g. "Corresponding with Reality" in Philosophy in an Age of Science, p. 81)

Putnam's consistent defense of realism encompassed both modal structuralism with respect to the foundations of mathematics and moral realism. Quine, attacking the analytic-synthetic distinction had writtent that ""The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences… It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention." Morton White had argued that facts and values are likewise woven together, a theme which Putnam would take up in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. The notion that moral and ethical values are unreal because we have done away with the authority of revelation makes as little sense as rejecting mathematics because we no longer believe that numbers are pre-existing abstract objects.

Putnam's realist reconstruction of foundations has both radical and conservative implications (one may say) for the study of mystical experience and religion. On the one hand, the endorsement by philosophers of a story about foundations compatible with empiricism parallels the effort by sociologists and anthropologists to discover human origins of religion and ethics. On the other hand, the stripping of divine authority from the scriptures and traditions of the world compel a revaluation which valorizes human teachers and teaching.

Of immediate relevance, Putnam countered the naive argument that computationalism had succeeded in naturalizing consciousness, insisting that psychology cannot be reduced to neurology. (cf. Fodor, "Special Sciences," 1974):

I argued in "The Idea of Science" and in "The Diversity of the Sciences" that (1) different sciences exemplify different methodologies; and (2) unless we want to declare that history, including historical linguistics, and many other human sciences are not "science," it is wrong to posit that only what resembles physics is really "science." [note 9: And if we do declare this, what is supposed to follow? That there is no well-confirmed knowledge in these areas? That would be absurd.] (Putnam, "On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism," in Philosophy in Age of Science p. 94)

The white-light experience is a unique exception to the principle that thoughts can not be closely correlated with functional states, reflecting its status as a boundary condition. Its description as a signal is purely statistical—one might say syntactic, in the sense that it has no differentiable content. Even describing the experience requires interpretation.

interpreting Stace

The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight. Often, beliefs which have no real connection with this moment become subsequently attracted into the central nucleus; thus in addition to the convictions which all mystics share, we find, in many of them, other convictions of a more local and temporary character, which no doubt become amalgamated with what was essentially mystical in virtue of their subjective certainty. (Russell, "Mysticism and Logic," p. 19)

Where Russell was careful to distinguish between the phenomenology of mystical experience, the role of mysticism (or intuition) in thought in general, and the metaphysical conclusions which are typically based on mysticism, Stace was primarily concerned with the experience itself. Where Russell identified competing metaphysical systems, Stace deliberately groups them together.

Russell's main topic is the mysticism of the West and its metaphysical implications. Stace, on the other hand, finds reasons to distinguish between its various forms. For example, he writes that "unity with God" is a valid Christian interpretation of mystical experience, but he insists that Jewish mystics, whose strict monotheism forbids an experience of unity with God and who instead describe "visions of the Throne of God", have not had genuine mystical experiences. At best, this distinction seems arbitrary because it turns on the metaphysical conclusions drawn, not the experience itself.

On the other hand, Stace effaces the distinctions between Western mysticism and that of the East:

Everyone knows that there are breathing exercises which tend to produce mystical states. In the same way there are many mental exercises, certain kinds of disciplined meditation and concentration, which are undertaken with the same end in view. Prayer, properly understood, is another name for these spiritual efforts to reach up to mystical experiences. (p 24)

When Stace says that "everyone knows" about breathing exercises, he is not referring to any substantial Western tradition, but to pranayama, the Indian science of breath, which has provided both principles and practical techniques which are applicable during psychedelic therapy. (Grof himself developed "holotropic breathwork" as a non-drug way of exteriorizing birth trauma, a practice which was popularized by the so-called "rebirthing" movement.) By equating prayer and meditation, as well as Western breathwork (whatever that might be) and pranayama, Stace is implicitly flattering the East, but in effect he lumps East and West together just to serve his definition of mystical experience.

To be fair, Stace was writing for a largely Christian country from a chair at a traditionally Protestant university. Further, to the degree that he was addressing the general public, he needed to anticipate deeply established metaphysical attitudes (effectively, a thoroughgoing dualism) which Pew Research polls consistently show are held by about four out of five Westerners (or at least Americans). Compared to Russell, he is notably charitable toward Western metaphysics, and this appears to be a factor in a somewhat puzzling series of comments, which arrive at the surprising conclusion that the metaphysical position of the Mahayana school of Buddhism is more akin to that of Christianity than it is to the Hinayana school. It is certainly not the case that Stace was unaware of metaphysical distinctions between East and West. He displays a subtle understanding of Buddhism in its own terms:

According to Professor D. T. Suzuki, sunyata, the Buddhist Void or emptiness, means:

Absolute Emptiness transcending all forms of mutual relationship… In Buddhist Emptiness there is no time, no space, no becoming, no thingness. Pure experience is the mind seeing itself as reflected in itself… This is possible only when the mind is sunyata itself, that is, when the mind is devoid of all it's possible contents except itself. (Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, 1927)

In this passage we should note those features which the Buddhist experience of the Void has in common with the introvertive experience of the Void elsewhere. The mind "is devoid of all its possible contents except itself." To be emptied of all empirical contents is the universal character of that experience. And what is left? Not unconsciousness, as would follow from Hume's passage dismissing existence of the self. What is left is the pure ego, the self itself, seeing itself "as reflected in itself." And it is possible thus to experience sunyata, the Void, "only when the mind is sunyata itself." (109-110, Stace, ibid.)

Stace here is describing the Void of the Mahayana school of Buddhism as a theory of mind; the Void is a positive capability, an idea he contrasts with Hume's skepticism. But he then uses the term in a metaphysical sense:

The meaning of this is identical with that of Ruysbroeck when he says that the spirit of the God-seeing man "is undifferentiated and without distinction, and therefore it feels nothing but the unity." Further, this fact that the mind, in this experience, is itself what it perceives, whether that is spoken of as the Void, or as the unity, or the One, or the Universal Self, or whether it is interpreted as God, is the source of all doctrines of "union with God" or "identity with Brahman," whether found in the East or the West and whether they are expressed in pantheistic, nihilistic, or theistic language. (ibid.)

Some pages later, Stace contrasts the Hinayana rejection of the soul with the Mahayana theory of the mind as a positive capability.

Thus, even if the Hinayana doctrines were the original interpretations which the Buddha himself put upon his own enlightenment experience, there is no direct evidence that his experience differed in any basic way from that of other great mystics. The evidence, so far as it goes, is the other way.

But it may be said that the doctrine of anatta, or no-soul, if the account of it in the Pali canon is accepted as being the Buddha's view, is, at least in spirit and probably in substance, inconsistent with the experiences of non-Buddhist mystics.

This doctrine rejects, by means of an argument which is practically identical with the famous argument of David Hume, the whole concept of a self or soul. It urges that there is nothing in the mind except its empirical contents, and from this premiss concludes, as Hume did, that the "I" is nothing but the stream of conscious states. The Hinayanist also rejects, of course, the Hindu concept of the Universal Self, which is identical with Brahman or the Supreme Being. Thus it is not only sceptical of the soul, but is also atheistic.

…[T]he concept of God is an interpretation of the experience, not part of the experience itself. (ibid. p. 124)

While Stace's positions are carefully stated and reasonable within their historical context, by Russell's lights he is insufficiently emphatic about the unreliability of mystical experience, although it is implied by his discussion of the variety of metaphysical conclusions drawn by mystics.

On Platonic metaphysics, ideas are intrinsically reliable, even if human access to them is not entirely so (or even logically conceivable). But it was clear even to the early modern empiricists that, on the associationist model, the formation of ideas is no guarantee of their reliability. As Locke put it:

Of those associations which arise from custom and education, many are so ill-grounded, and the ideas so loosely connected, that the mind takes them for one and the same, though in things themselves they are quite distinct. This is the source of no small part of the errors of human life. To this we may impute a great many of the absurdities which are to be met with in the world, and are not easily to be accounted for by reason. (ibid., Book II, Ch. XXXIII, §5)

Hume was even more skeptical of the reliability of association:

The imagination is apt to carry its views beyond those objects which are immediately present to the senses… By this means, we are apt to imagine greater force in arguments, than they really have; and are seduced by the resemblance and contiguity of ideas to confound things which are in themselves entirely distinct. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part I, Section IV)

Among the early modern empiricists, Kant's arguments about the unreliability of reason are the most pointed and well-known. He described the human desire for unity, coherence, and systematicity as leading to transcendental illusions such as the concretization of indefinite non-objects such as God, Soul, and World. Such terms are "regulative," like undefinable practical concepts such as "happiness." For example, even Newton's laws of motion posited God as a Prime Mover, and traditional ideas about ethics looked to God as the exemplar of the ideal Good. Kant arguably saw more clearly than Hume that early empiricism left important questions unaddressed, and his detailed critique of traditional metaphysics earned Mendelssohn's epithet "the All-Destroyer."

[V]ery strong instinctive beliefs are sometimes wholly mistaken. (Russell, ibid. p. 23)

The "sense of certainty and revelation" associated with mystical experience (intuition, instinct) is paradoxically suspect:

But if it should appear, on examination, to be at least as fallible as intellect, its greater subjective certainty becomes a demerit, making it only the more irresistibly deceptive. (ibid. p. 25)

The potential unreliability of association is greatly exaggerated under the influence of psychedelics, when visual effects, a picture, concept, or narrative may have an artificially enhanced salience (i.e. meaningfulness) combined with a loss of selectivity, specificity, or veridicality (i.e. meaning). During LSD therapy, mechanically driven association can produce thoughts, such as extreme paranoia, as well as religious and mystical experience, which are both utterly convincing and completely unreliable.

The effects of LSD on concepts and narratives: mysticism and paranoia

Ordinarily, as West commented, states of consciousness are strongly structured by external events and states of affairs, but psychedelic narratives often appear to be constructed as a frame or contextualization of the emotional states associated with COEX systems and the BPMs as they are exteriorized. This dream-logic can be illustrated with a thought experiment:

The observation that LSD has a tendency to produce mystical states more-or-less systematically is discussed with two subjects, Alice and Bob. With minimal instruction, each is given a flower "to meditate on" during a recreational-dose session, under conditions of isolation with quiet support. The following fictional reports are stripped to the bare essentials to illustrate the role of emotion in shaping psychedelic experience.

Alice imagines that she is involved in a sacred ceremony of initiation administered by an eternal priesthood, sees herself as if from above with all her imperfections, but merges with the purity and vitality of the flower, symbol of the renewal of spring. In the flower she sees the universe with which she and the flower are one. She leaves the session feeling renewed and honoring those who have assisted her, the process, and herself. She has had a successful and therapeutic mystical experience

Bob is disturbed to identify with his flower, which, however fresh, is doomed to wither. Perhaps, like the flower, his own death is imminent. Those who have involved him in the session, the staff, are conspiring to kill him, to sacrifice him in some ritual. Perhaps the CIA itself is involved! Maybe the world is coming to an end! It is up to him to save it. He must act! He suddenly attempts to flee the therapeutic setting. Almost certainly his paranoid delusion will wear off in a few hours at most, but the experience has been unsettling and alienating.

Alice was more-or-less continuously aware that her intuition of participating in a ritual was a species of fantasy, even if it reflected the meaning to her of the session. Bob, panicking, lost that perspective. Both subjects experienced "degenerate" mappings (many-to-one compression that collapses distinctions) yielding non-veridical narratives which they nevertheless interpreted in personal terms. Alice's narrative seems relatively benign, and she was not driven by emotion into a radically or dangerously non-veridical interpretation of her experience. In contrast, Bob's map was structured to contextualize his fear, and apparently added to it. Unfortunately, in this thought experiment he did not receive the thorough preparation Grof afforded his subjects, nor was the session interiorized with eyeshades and music.

Both setting and events during a session may have an outsized impact: if Alice's experience had taken place in a beautiful natural environment while Bob's session took place in a lab or with too many observers, that difference alone could have been sufficient to drive their experiences toward mystical and paranoid forms of transcendental ideation respectively.

Recreational users typically manipulate their own "set" (or expectation) by using psychedelics in enjoyable circumstances or settings. But where recreational use is oriented toward making the experience pleasant, the technique of high-dose therapy is to elicit COEX systems, rebirth sequences, and ultimately the death-rebirth experience—really difficult material. Grof emphasizes the importance of preparedness:

The intensity of psychedelic states also deserves notice; it is important to prepare the client for the fact that the dimensions of the experience will probably be beyond anything that he or she has faced before or could even imagine in the usual state of consciousness. Although no words can adequately communicate the intensity of a high-dose LSD experience, such a warning can save the candidate from shock and panic during the session. (Grof, 1980, ibid.)

On the therapeutic trajectory, the encounter with fear and anxiety is essentially inevitable, particularly during the so-called death-rebirth experience. Bob's case, above, illustrated the reason for Grof's careful preparation and sensory isolation of his subjects. The sheer intensity of the death-rebirth experience is "beyond anything that he or she has faced," comparable to that of actual birth or death. At the Macy conference, Denber commented about his own experience, "It actually has to have been felt to believe anyone else telling of it."

Paranoia is so typical of the LSD response that some therapists at Macy had begun to think of it as having utility:

Fremont-Smith: Do you think it is a good thing to get the paranoid reaction; that this is a useful stage in the patient's therapy?

Chandler: Yes. It is something that is in everyone's subconscious.

Fremont-Smith: So that you, in a sense, are looking for it in your patients?

Chandler: Yes.

Fremont-Smith: And you find it?

Chandler: Then you are taking the Kleinian approach? Are you following Melanie Klein?

Chandler: I am following LSD, really. This was not something I believed before I started LSD, but I found it so consistently in regressive experiences with LSD that I have just adopted it as something that seems to be just about universal, with all patients.

Grof also recognizes paranoia as an important symptom, an effect of the primal fear which accompanies recovery of birth trauma in particular. Since the fear actually precedes the mapping or recall of the memory, it can evoke unrelated fantastical narratives which correspond to the depth and intensity of the emotion; typically these dissipate permanently with recovery of the actual memory of birth.

A therapist who does more than act as a sitter during a session increases the risk of becoming the object of the paranoid reaction, driven to mechanical heights of association by the drug. Bodywork can be effective at any point during a session, but any kind of physical interaction during the peak of the effect is susceptible to misinterpretation as threat, sexual approach, or medical intervention (even attempted torture or examination by extraterrestrials!) Grof's strategies for internalizing the peak of the drug effect are designed to avoid the projection of any paranoid reaction onto the world—particularly onto therapists and the therapeutic procedure. His use of higher dosages is also intended to allow the subject to briskly move through difficult states, including paranoia.

By the time of the 1959 Macy conference, it was recognized that repeated administration of LSD can help the subject develop insight into the distinction between fantasy and reality:

Sandison:

The success or failure of LSD treatment depends to a large extent on what the ego makes of the unconscious manifestations presented to it through the medium of LSD…

I am therefore tempted to discuss the phenomenon of integration of the personality after LSD in two other terminologies. One, using again an "ego" system, refers to the boundaries of the ego, rather than to the qualities of the ego itself. The other terminology is that of existentialism. The former view is propounded by Scott, who says that the relationship between the ego and the self (using the latter term in the Jungian sense) can only be appreciated if we can allow the ego boundaries to dissolve and to let ourselves become identified with the cosmos. The "cosmos," from the extroverted point of view, might be the universe; from the introverted point of view, it is in the inner world of ideas and conceptions. Scott writes: "Thus shuttling to and from between inner and outer, we become aware of what body image means, the boundary which gives form to our ego selves." This, to my mind, is also an accurate description of what happens during repeated administration of LSD. The shuttling to and fro between reality and fantasy defines the borders of both, just as a man traveling by rocket from earth to moon and back would at last begin to understand something about his relation to the physical universe. This is the best way I can account for the growth of mental stature, the insight, and the sense of psychological solidity which the patients experience. (143-145)

Repeated administration occurs in recreational use as well as in therapy, however not in systematic pursuit of clear therapeutic goals, nor is there a therapist to assist in dispelling fantasy and integrating the experience. The history of widespread self-experimentation indicates that the risks entailed by recreational use include poor integration of the fantastical elements of the experience. In particular, subjects risk activating latent mental illness. There is an argument to be made that even if there is a place for more-or-less casual recreational use of the psychedelics, experimentation with high dosages shouldn't be undertaken without due preparation.

Paranoia is only one potential component of rebirth sequences. The sheer strangeness of the visions accompanying the death-rebirth crisis is suggested by the following list of phenomena observed by Grof during the exteriorization of the third perinatal matrix, which contains the memorial record of the crux of the labor, passage through the birth canal:

BPMIII—Phenomenology in LSD Sessions:

intensification of suffering to cosmic dimensions; borderline between pain and pleasure; "volcanic" type of ecstasy; brilliant colors; explosions and fireworks; sadomasochistic orgies; murders and bloody sacrifice; active engagement in fierce battles; atmosphere of wild adventure and dangerous explorations; intense sexual orgiastic feelings and scenes of harems and carnivals; experiences of dying and being reborn; religions involving bloody sacrifice (Aztecs, Christ's suffering and death on the cross, Dionysus, etc.); intense physical manifestations (pressures and pains, suffocation, muscular tension and discharge in tremors and twitches, nausea and vomiting, hot flushes and chills, sweating, cardiac distress, problems of sphincter control, ringing in the ears)

Skillful management of this phase of the rebirth sequences (which may need to be repeated from "less than ten to several scores" of times) is essential to the success of therapy. (Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, p. 215) The partial arousal of this material from the unconscious without its full exteriorization and integration undoubtedly accounts for many bad outcomes in lay use, and Grof recommends the completion of psychedelic therapy in any such cases:

It is of critical importance for the practice of LSD psychotherapy to know the concomitants of the experiential transition from death to rebirth intimately. Some of the states the subject has to face in this context are so unbearable that he or she may not be able to do it without sufficient acquaintance with this territory on the part of, and constant encouragement and support from the sitter. If this is not available, desperate avoidance of the frightening aspects of the critical turning-point can become a long-term impediment or even a permanent block to the completion of the perinatal process. The expectation of a catastrophic global explosion, excessive degrees of suffocation, feeling an impending loss of consciousness ("black-out"), a sense of bodily disintegration, and the collapse of all reference points are the most frequent final obstacles that subjects have to face in the death-rebirth process. (ibid., p. 210)

On Grof's account, the exteriorization of BPM III evokes a primal fear so intense that it drives a totalistic framing narrative, often in the form of a spasm of overwhelming paranoia or dread of imminent death or the end of the world, suggesting that apocalypticism is just the most extreme form of paranoia. Specifically birth-related memories may appear only occasionally or not at all. To the LSD subject who has evoked BPM III, the fear is real and any associated narrative which the mind generates to map or contextualize that fear will tend to be gripping, to the point that it may seem realer than ordinary life, to be a revelation. The state could be characterized as a fugue which takes on a salience which may exceed the subject's well-grounded everyday narratives, which accounts for the possibility of a mixed state, a waking realistic fantasy—effectively a waking dream—with the difference that subjects may take real action on the basis of their delusions.

These dark possibilities seem entirely alien from Stace's description of mystical experience as having a "deeply felt positive mood." Grof, evidently of the opinion that existing language was inadequate to describe his observations, proposed the term "transpersonal experience," which he defined as "experiences involving an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual ego boundaries and beyond the limitations of time and/or space." (Grof, ibid., p. 155) If we represent identity as a map of the self designated by "A," then transpersonal experience corresponds to the integration of multiple clusters, corresponding to A + B + C, where B and C may represent other real or abstract objects (animals, people, etc.) Accordingly, any transpersonal experience by definition involves a degree of self-transcendence, an experience of unity with a greater whole; Stace's definition presumably refers to the limit of the infinite series of additions to the map, the experience of unity with everything.

Each iteration of the map in the transcendental series (A + B + C + … + ∞) is less selective, less veridical, and less complex. In a technical sense, then, transpersonal maps are examples of degenerate mapping. The term may be unfortunate in this context, where it just sounds pejorative, but it points to the loss of complexity (or selectivity) which maps in the overload zone all share.

Schematically, the pure paranoid state closely resembles the pure mystical state, except cosmic harmony is replaced by opposition. If, once again, the map of the self is represented by A, then the feared Other comes to be represented by the string B + C + D + … + ∞, which A would naturally interpret in the classic paranoid statements, "They're all against me," or, "They're all out to get me."

On this analysis, mystic experience is neither a vision of heaven, nor a visit to a metaphysical island. Like other thoughts, both mystical experience and paranoia are interpretations of states of the brain, and while mystical experience may be a marker of therapeutic success, negative feelings and the thoughts associated with them—such as paranoia—are actually more immediately significant in the sense that they constitute a series of resistances to the therapeutic process; grist for the therapeutic mill.

Interpretation, delusion, and paranoia

The topic of unreliability opens into a variety of discourses—psychological, sociological, economic, philosophical, etc.—which give good reasons why modern humans live in fear, anxiety, resentment, and paranoia, as well as documenting the demise of religious certainties.

Since both fear and mystical experience are subject to interpretation, and since (on the associationist model) each human is a unique product of all the influences and ideas in their experience, these issues are unavoidably relevant to the course of psychedelic therapy. However, they are tangential to the information-theoretical armature of this paper, and accordingly treated as digressions, subject to brief summary and collapsible by using the arrows in the text.

LSD research added deep shadows to Stace's sunny survey of mystical experience. While Stace defended LSD as an effective trigger of mystical experience, it also drives subjects to encounter fearful states such as social anxiety, paranoia, apocalypticism, and the death-rebirth experience itself. Some of these states are indistinguishable from psychosis, except for their transience—and Grof has pointed out that such apparently psychotic states may become exteriorized without being resolved. If unresolved during a session they may even come to dominate consciousness until they are mobilized and resolved, typically by another therapeutic session. The legal prohibition of LSD was largely a response to the negative outcomes of its early mass adoption, many of which may have been the result of the failure to manage memorial material, which Grof's therapeutic techniques could have prevented or resolved.

In addition to social alarm about the risks—indeed, the manifest harms—associated with the widespread popular use of psychedelics, Western religion, as Stace documented, tends to be hostile to mysticism in itself and to enforce a theistic interpretation on any expression of it. Naturally, LSD has aroused the special enmity of religious authorities, even in comparison to more dangerous drugs. Because this hostility affects the cultural, social, and legal status of LSD and the other psychedelics, the next sections briefly discuss the origin of that hostility, which is as old as the separation of religion from magic. In those depths, scholars have also found the inception of ideas about the ultimate magician, to wit the returning prophet or messiah, and his eschatological role; ideas which may influence LSD subjects' ideation, particularly in the region of the death-rebirth experience.

Magic, religion, and prophecy

In The Sociology of Religion Max Weber made an argument which I think is indispensable in understanding the full death-rebirth experience. He describes the process whereby a priesthood apotheosizes a prophet, enforcing a dogma in which the individual is of no spiritual value, and is condemned to await the return at the end of time of the only spiritual power capable of dispensing grace, the prophet-god. Prophetic charisma can only belong to the prophet, a chunk of cultural programming which can lead the chemically inspired to conclude that he is the messiah, or involved in apocalyptic works. The text discoverable by the arrow below is mostly a quotation-heavy reconstruction of Weber's argument.

Science has long looked to indigenous people for knowledge of psychedelic substances, and considering the hostility of mass religion to the psychedelics, and the actually counterproductive messianic model of the charisma of prophetic ecstasy, it is only natural that even scientifically-oriented therapists would look to indigenous shamans or magicians for ideas about managing sessions and working with the psychedelics in general. The initiatory model of the lineages of magicians may help to address the problem posed by the tendency of subjects to interpret their experience in terms of prophetic charisma, but as a result, in addition to distinguishing mystical experience from religious (particularly apocalyptic and messianic) interpretation, the psychedelic therapist will need to distinguish the mystical from the merely magical.

Magic, ecstasy, and mysticism

Weber (and many anthropologists) argued that the shamans and magicians of prehistory were technicians of ecstasy, and that ecstasy—or, as we would say, mystical experience—is the origin of religion. The text discoverable with the arrow below suggests the broad historical and cultural context within which the human use of psychedelics has survived since the neolithic.

Ecstasy, mysticism, and science

The mystical monism which Russell counterposed to science generated the malicious dualism of idealism or rationalism. In contrast, empiricism represents a metaphysical monism in the sense that it posits no unique real or supreme being to set over against the world. Any scientific evaluation of LSD has to cope with what we might call linguistic and historical ironies, in which terminology itself is unreliable unless gripped tightly.

The discoverable text below discusses the value of scientific perspectives on the psychedelics, in view of the manifold unreliabilities entailed by the vagaries of interpretation.

Despite occasional claims to the contrary, LSD research reveals no magical effect which challenges physics: our own existence depends on physical (or energetic) structures and events. Philosophy and science agree that there is no grand metaphysical foundation, no complete certainty, only a series of observations or measurements of limited accuracy. This pragmatic mode may be the only scientific or philosophical stance truly consistent with mysticism, because it depicts humans as part of nature, not as souls or ghosts looking out at an independent physical world.

Even in successful therapy, subjects typically pass through states of fear, paranoid ideation, and seemingly real fantasy, often with mythical elements. Due to the increased arousal associated with these states, they tend to appear to be uniquely meaningful to the subject, often leaving subjects with viscerally felt questions about the nature of self and the world—or worse, false conclusions. The impression that science and philosophy are somehow silent with respect to those questions might contribute to difficulties resolving the therapeutic crisis. However, this impression is false, and subjects can be referred with confidence to the substantial discourse—now a century old—about information theory, complexity theory, quantum theory, foundations of knowledge, and the nature of consciousness.

Information-theoretical models of mental illness, from cybernetics to EST

The propensity of LSD and other psychedelics to activate and amplify various neurological processes is so striking that it has been used by several Czech neurologists as a diagnostic tool for the exteriorization of latent paralyses and other subtle organic damage of the central nervous system. (Grof, LP)

In the case of a latent paralysis it would seem that exteriorization, which is to say bringing it to attention, is less a question of activation (as it presumably is in the case of the BPMs) and more a question of "backlighting" a blockage, as the sun does in showing that a red filter doesn't pass green light. It is hardly novel to describe psychedelics as revealing the filter characteristics of the individual psyche. But the EST model makes explicit the neural organization by which the brain can not only serve as the source of its own endogenously-produced test signal, but also assemble non-ordinary maps, thoughts, concepts, and narratives in response.

In addition to this diagnostic effect, both cybernetics and EST's neural network theory offer models of mental illness (and, therefore, health) which can be interpreted as applying to the observation that LSD facilitates the abreaction of birth trauma.

The standard psychotherapeutic idea that neurosis may be caused by the repression of traumatic memory was of intrinsic interest to McCulloch and Wiener, who separately advanced a cybernetic model of mental illness:

There is…nothing surprising in considering the functional mental disorders as fundamentally diseases of memory, of the circulating information kept by the brain in the active state, and of the long-time permeability of synapses.… In a system containing a large number of neurons, circular processes can hardly be stable for long periods of time. Either, as in the case of memories belonging to the specious present, they run their course, dissipate themselves, and die out, or they comprehend more and more neurons in their system, until they occupy an inordinate part of the neuron pool. This is what we should expect to be the case in the malignant worry which accompanies anxiety neuroses. In such a case, it is possible that the patient simply does not have the room, the sufficient number of neurons, to carry out his normal processes of thought. Under such conditions, there may be less going on in the brain to load up the neurons not yet affected, so that they are all the more readily involved in the expanding process. Furthermore, the permanent memory becomes more and more deeply involved, and the pathological process which occured at first at the level of the circulating memories may repeat itself in a more intractable form at the level of the permanent memories. Thus what started as a relatively trivial and accidental reversal of stability may build itself up into a process totally destructive to the ordinary mental life. (Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 147)

McCulloch opined that Freud's theories were as haphazard as his data was anecdotal, and looked forward to scientific progress in psychiatry, a goal which at the time seemed to be coming into view. (cf. The Past of a Delusion, 1952, text) Like Wiener, he proposed a cybernetic reconstruction of the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious:

In common with other psycho-analysts, Kubie makes a sharp distinction between processes which are conscious, and others which were or might have been conscious, but are now shut out of consciousness. In the latter he puts the core of the neurosis. Now the psycho-analytical use of the term unconscious, if somewhat indefinite, is quite a special one. In essence, I believe, it is nothing but the suppression of information as we have just described it. The memories and learned reactions subserved by circuits connected with the regenerative circuit, now produce only the invariable neurotic response, which displaces all the others. In effect, such memories and such learning become inaccessible, although they return as soon as the circuit ceases to regenerate. The process looks like an active repression, particularly when combined with the secondary effect the psycho-analyst calls resistance. (p. 377, Embodiments of Mind)

According to the cybernetic model, then, repression can be described as the system's means of preserving operating capacity by encapsulating or isolating one of Wiener's malignant processes or loops, which otherwise would tend to ramify further.

The intervening years have seen great progress on the organic correlates of mental illness, with corresponding advances in its control through medication. But there is no discovery which more closely matches the speculations of the cyberneticists than the findings of LSD research. A machine analogy offered by Wiener is particularly suggestive:

Pathological processes of a somewhat similar nature are not unknown in the case of mechanical or electrical computing machines. A tooth of a wheel may slip under just such conditions that no tooth with which it engages can pull it back into its normal relations, or a high-speed electrical computing machine may go into a circular process which there seems to be no way to stop. These contingencies may depend on a highly improbable instantaneous configuration of the system, and, when remedied, may never—or very rarely—repeat themselves. However, when they occur, they temporarily put the machine out of action.

How do we deal with these accidents in the use of the machine? The first thing which we try is to clear the machine of all information, in the hope that when it starts again with different data the difficulty may not recur. Failing this, if the difficulty is in some point permanently inaccessible to the clearing mechanism, we shake the machine, or, if it is electrical, subject it to an abnormally large electrical impulse, in the hope that we may reach the inaccessible part and throw it into a position where the false cycle of its activities will be interrupted. If even this fails, we may disconnect an erring part of the apparatus, for it is possible that what yet remains may be adequate for our purpose. (pp. 147-148, Cybernetics)

The white or random component of the signal generated under the influence of LSD may manifest as an illuminating test signal which will expose the filter characterics of the observer to the "next" self-observer in the sequence of conscious states or dynamic cores, or as a more-or-less degenerate sequence of maps, or as a white light experience. (Or as all of them simultaneously.) However, particularly with higher doses, the LSD effect could plausibly be characterized as an "abnormally large electrical impulse." Since it is generated endogenously, it is not as crude as a large externally-applied shock, as in electroshock therapy, but the effect is that of a noise-like shock, not the relatively gentle illumination offered by lower doses.

Edelman and Tononi identify repressed memories with "splinter cores or autonomously functional thalamocortical breakaways," which appear to bear a close resemblance to McCulloch's regenerative circuits and Wiener's circular pathological processes. Edelman and Tononi echo the concerns of the cyberneticists when they ask: "Can such circuits be created by mechanisms of repression?" Where McCulloch suggested that repression is an effect of the loss of normal function due to the production of a stereotypical neurotic response by a "regenerative circuit," Edelman and Tononi describe the repression of traumatic memory as creating a "breakaway core," a position arguably closer to Wiener's. If they did not have the cybernetic model(s) in mind, the similarity represents either genetic influence or independent convergence.

Historical questions aside, what is remarkable is that since LSD research systematically exteriorizes repressed memories, it constitutes unique empirical evidence in favor of the cybernetic or updated splinter core model. Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices are prima facie the paradigmatic instances of splinter cores, their universality a result of the intensity of the experience of birth as well as its earliness in the life of the individual. (Grof notes that memories of experiences involving life-threatening physical trauma appear to be close in depth to perinatal memories, and may connect COEX-based and BPM-based experience.) It would seem difficult to avoid the judgment that LSD provides a clearer and more robust confirmation of the cybernetic or splinter-core model than any less systematic research—conducted with lower-entropy signals—does or probably could.

In addition, once a pattern has been recognized, that map may be useful in recognizing other instances of the pattern. In psychedelic therapy, the first rebirth sequence to exteriorize—to be mapped or remembered—may engender resistance because of its sheer strangeness. Where recreational users may instinctively avoid the associated discomfort, therapeutic subjects ideally learn to recognize and accept subsequent rebirth sequences, and to evoke them or seek them out by internalizing attention. Techniques such as pranayama, bodywork, stretching, and hot soaking are particularly useful once subjects are actively engaged in searching out and clearing rebirth sequences.

I should think the most likely response of any reader who has made it so far would be: 'So what? Our understanding of the brain has evolved, so too has our understanding of the neural mechanisms which produce the LSD effect. Grof wrote the book half a century ago, and changes to our theories about brain mechanisms change nothing whatsoever.'

This is not wrong: LSD psychotherapy is based on empirical research in the domain of psychology and is not concerned with general correlations with brain mechanisms. Neuroscientists could come up with an entirely novel account of the brain mechanisms involved and it wouldn't affect the practice or principles of LSD therapy.

Grof's description of LSD as a nonspecific amplifier is notable because it presents the information-theoretical insights articulated by West in 1959 in the context of a psychotherapeutic model. The general notion that psychedelics backlight the human psyche as a test signal does a filter is an idea common enough among scientists, or simply obvious enough, that Huxley employed it seventy years ago. Since an amplified endogenous signal could serve as a test input for the observer, the two descriptions are roughly equivalent, but EST provides a better explanation of how such a signal is simultaneously produced and integrated.

The following figures step through the application of EST's insight to aspects of LSD experience, including sensory intensification, recovery of birth trauma, loss of complexity, the white light experience, mystical experience, and challenges to integration such as paranoia.

Appendix 1: Excerpts from The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy (Abramson, ed. 1959)

Excerpts from:

Abramson, ed. The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy, Josiah Macy Foundation, Princeton, 1959

Ch. 1: Introductory Remarks

Charles Savage: In 1949, under Navy auspices, I was looking for improved methods of inducing psychocatharsis and facilitating psychotherapy…

We have used LSD in psychotherapy for a number of years. Our results have been inconstant, and we have blown hot and cold about its value, sometimes feeling that it was revolutionary and at other times feeling it was actually detrimental.

Sidney Cohen:… My first subject was myself, and I was taken by surprise. This was no confused, disoriented delirium, but something quite different. Just what it was, I could not say. But since then, our efforts toward understanding and defining this remarkable experience have been futile. Though we have been using the available measuring instruments, the check lists, the performance tests, the psychological batteries, and so forth, the core of the LSD situation remains in the dark, quite untouched by our activities. (11)

Louis West: … I have been surprised at developments in the use of LSD as a therapeutic agent, and so perhaps I am here under false pretenses. I have never used LSD in psychotherapy; my interest in it has been primarily in the realm of experimental psychopathology. I am perfectly willing to be convinced of its value in treatment, but at this moment I have many reservations about it.

T. T. Peck, Jr.: When I went into general practice as a a country doctor in Texas, I was very impressed that some of our Latin American patients, despite their poverty and living conditions, were extremely healthy. One day, I asked one of my patients how he stayed so healthy, and he told me that he chewed peyote buttons.

From the peyote buttons, then, I became interested in these drugs that could promise physical as well as mental health. (12)

C H. von Rhijn: . . . I tried, in 1956, to find a method of therapy in which the role of the therapist could be so much reduced that by means of LSD stimulation the patient could work out his problems largely by himself.…

I have been influenced in my thinking in this area by the work of Jung in Zurich. He speaks often of the transcendental function, which seems to be an unconscious working or a harmonizing process, a harmonizing between the conscious and the subconscious.…

I had a vision, and I still have this vision, of mass therapy: institutions in which every patient with a neurosis could get LSD treatment and work out his problems largely by himself. Classical psychotherapy or psychoanalytical therapy is, of course, a costly procedure, and most people do not have the money to undertake it; nor do we have health benefits to pay for individual psychotherapy. I hope that there will eventually be health insurance funds to pay for LSD therapy. (14)

Ronald Sandison: The work of Busch and Johnson drew my attention to the nature of the LSD response, which, it seems to me, bore out so much of what Jung has taught. Later on, the material from my patients also convinced me of the importance of Freudian theory, because so many of their responses are classically Freudian and cannot be explained in any other terms. (14-15)

Betty Eisner: I am a clinical psychologist. I first read about LSD in Life, Then I heard that a friend of mine was to do an experiment with LSD. I offered to help, with the proviso that I be one of the subjects. The experience so impressed me that I felt that LSD had therapeutic possibilities, and so I tried it therapeutically on myself, with such extraordinary results that Dr. Cohen and I felt that a therapeutic study should be done. The study turned up some quite remarkable phenomena.

My work with LSD, while extremely interesting therapeutically, uncovered the possibility for research into psychodynamics and into the unconscious. Even more exciting than the therapeutic possibilities of LSD are its potentials, and those of similar drugs, for helping us to answer the many questions we have about what makes us what we are as human beings. (15)

Abram Hoffer: …LSD had just become familiar to most of us, and we used it at first to produce a model of schizophrenia . Within 1 or 2 years, we found that LSD was more than just a psychotomimetic, and so we began to experiment with what we called the "psychodelic" properties of LSD, that is, its utility in changing personality for the better, and for therapeutic purposes.

Peck.: What is that word?

Hoffer: Psychodelic. I think Dr. Osmond coined it. It comes from the Greek, meaning "mind-manifesting." In particular, we began to study a group of very difficult psychopathic alcoholics. We have now treated sixty of them, and half are no longer alcoholic after one treatment; so we do see that this drug has great potential for changing people.

West: What is the period of follow-up?

Hoffer: Five years

West: One treatment, and a 5-year follow-up?

Hoffer: Yes, and half of them were no longer drinking. You will not believe it, and I would not have either. The results are very impressive, though I believe the drug must be used very carefully. It could also be harmful.

Gregory Bateson: Are they neither psychopathic nor alcoholic now?

Hoffer: That is correct. (19)

Arthur Chandler: … We found that we needed, or felt we did, to go a little farther with LSD, in terms of number of treatments, than had other investigators. We used 4 1/2 hour periods, and had around twenty or forty sessions with most of the patients in whom treatment had beneficial results. This was a group of private patients who were neurotics.

An interesting incidental finding was that without the drug we could get patients to reproduce almost all the effects of the LSD by using the sleepmask, music, and suggestion. This could be done with patients who had never been exposed to LSD; others needed a few treatments to learn what they were to do, and then they would go right on from there, often not to quite the same depth as with LSD, but into the deep unconscious, nonetheless. We found this a method of psychotherapy more rapid than anything we had ever used before, even without the drug, and with the drug as a stimulus and as a guide to the patient.

In taking the drug ourselves, we followed two general principles: (a) Nearly everything I see down in there is me, or some aspect of me, even if it looks like mother or father, there are many of my projections on it. (b) There is nothing I find in any of my patients that in some way is not also in me. If I cannot find it down in my subconscious, it must be blocking somewhere. On these principles, and with some prolonged treatment, we felt that we explored our own and other people's subconscious rather deeply. (20)

Mortimer Hartman: About a year and a half ago, Dr. Wesley told me that Dr. Cohen and Dr. Eisner had achieved some spectacular results with an hallucinating agent called LSD, and I joined Dr. Wesley in some research on it. When I took the drug myself, I found that I was suffering from the delusion that I had been psychoanalyzed. I had spent seven and a half years on the couch and over $20,000, and so I thought I had been psychoanalyzed. But a few sessions with LSD convinced me otherwise. (20-21)

Paul Hoch: Through anatomy and physiology, internal medicine, and neurology, I arrived at psychiatry. Judged by other disciplines, psychiatry is highly subjective. Very little is done experimentally in this field, to try to find out whether or not certain phenomena repeat themselves in the way one expects; or whether or not certain phenomena can be induced to repeat themselves in the way one would like to have them.

Drugs are one avenue through which to find out whether or not mental states can be altered experimentally; whether similar responses can always be evoked, or whether the responses vary; what the similarity is between experimentally-produced mental states and those occurring spontaneously. Therefore I became interested, first, in mescaline, then in LSD, and then in a number of other compounds, partly psychosis-producing, partly psychosis-relieving drugs, because these drugs might help to objectify some of our approaches to many phenomena. (21)

Ch. 2: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with LSD—Harold Abramson

Abramson: Psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as I see it, is a type of therapy in which emphasis is placed upon the patient's relationship with the physician, and the emotional transformations which occur during that transaction. In the quasi-Freudian school to which I belong, specialized terms like "transference" and "countertransference" are used to emphasize the nature of that relationship. (25)

… [S]o many physicians are unaware of countertransference and transference problems, and unless they are aware of them and can use and manipulate them to decrease their own anxiety and increase the psychodynamic processing of ego development in the patient, the therapy is not psychoanalytically oriented; it is only accidental therapy, resulting from the unique position of the physician in his relationship to the patient. The same type of nonanalytic therapy is used by many churches; it may involve exhortation, etc.; it is not a medical procedure. (26)

Abramson: With LSD a novel situation obtains, because both the conscious and the unconscious attitudes of the therapist and patient, as well as the community as a whole, toward the production of a psychotic process in the patient as part of therapy, may and usually do contaminate the therapeutic process in unusual ways. The therapist himself suffers more than the usual amount of scrutiny.( 27)

The attitude of the staff physicians was usually derogatory. They would come in and say to my assistants "What are you studying that stuff for?" Two young physicians, especially, with considerable laboratory experience, constantly visited my team and tried to reduce their morale. (28)

… [T]here were rumors of violent reactions. I know that extremely violent reactions do occur under LSD, and I do believe that if large doses are given, a hospital should be at hand. We have seen patients withdraw for 10 or 12 hours. But all our patients have recovered, though we have given fairly large doses hundreds of times.

I have also seen rather violent reactions when tap water was administered. One subject became so upset from a tap water "dose" of zero LSD administered in the morning that I had to be with him until 11 o'clock that night, and he was upset for a week thereafter. One young girl became paralyzed in both legs after tap water. Possibly, the more violent reactions are due more to the underlying personality than to the drug itself. (28)

Hoffer: … Some of our therapists are doing this as an experimental project, and they are so skilled at it that they can be given 100 μg. and, if they wish to conceal the fact that they have had LSD , they can do so; they are in perfect control. But this means taking it many, many times.

Abramson: Perfect control under 100μg. of LSD?

Savage: Yes, I have seen it happen.

Hoffer: Yes, that's right.

Savage: Dr. Evarts, Dr. Cholden, and I were working with LSD , and Dr. Evarts decided to take some. He was so perfectly controlled that we asked some outside observers who came in, "Which one had the LSD?" They all invariably chose Dr. Cholden, who had had nothing.

Fremont-Smith: If there can be a perfect lack of control with tap water, it seems to me there could be a considerable degree of control with LSD. The role of suggestion in producing symptoms will come up again and again, but it is quite clear that very strong reactions can occur if the subject thinks he is getting LSD but is getting tap water. Dosage is only one factor among others.

Our whole concept of pharmacology is built, perhaps, on an obsolete idea: that there is a response, an appropriate response, to a given stimulus. We know that the response to a stimulus is as much dependent upon the situation as it is upon the nature of the stimulus. … (30-31)

i: I would like to emphasize that, in the case of LSD, the pharmacological action in a given individual is not understood. This is the greatest weakness in these studies. We assume that the biochemical processes are the same in every individual. This is not true. We assume it is because we find that there are average reactions. However, there are striking exceptions about which we know very little, either chemically or psychologically. There probably are different metabolic formulas in different individuals; differences in the way these drugs are absorbed; in how they are actually anchored; in how they are counteracted; and so forth. One individual will tolerate this drug very well, while another, with a relatively small dose, may become very disturbed. This does not depend alone on the person's psychological status; most probably, it also depends on his particular sensitivity to the drug, or the way he deals with it. Very little progress has been made in our understanding of these matters, and much research must be done in this area. (31-32)

Abramson: Let me tell you how the attitude of the investigator influences the reaction of the group. In the group of five subjects which I have used for 5 years, there have been no difficulties under the laboratory or social conditions in which LSD is administered. At one time, when I was too busy to run the experiments myself, I engaged another physician, a well-trained psychiatrist, 40 years old, to run the sessions. She set up violent paranoid reactions under low dosages, because she made remarks of the following type: "I just heard the LSD produces thrombosis of the arteries in the brain. Have any of you heard that?"

Hoch: What was the therapeutic value of that remark?

Abramson: The group refused to see her again. They were paranoid about her for weeks. She became the topic of conversation.

West: Was she psychoanalytically oriented?

Abramson: I would say that she was not analyzable from my point of view.

Klee: Dr. Abramson, in these paranoid reactions, do the subjects develop delusions?

Abramson: I have seen paranoid reactions with hallucinations.

Klee: I mean toward this physician, for instance.

Abramson: No.

Klee: Were they paranoid, then, or were they just naturally angry?

Abramson: I withdraw the word paranoid because I don't want to get into its definition. I know that Dr. Hoch has very definite ideas on paranoid reactions. If he were willing to discuss it, I would give him the topic.

Hoch: I am sure that everyone here knows what a paranoid reaction is, and therefore I think we can omit the definition. Many symbols are used quite adequately until we try to define them; then no one knows what he's talking about anymore.

Abramson: In my experience, the use of LSD seemed to introduce a new era, a new search for magic. It had a glamorous appeal. Magazine articles distorted the situation very much. I, and I am sure many of you, have been besieged by people who wanted to take the drug, who wanted to experience the LSD reaction. This reaction produced anxiety in many of us and in many others connected with research in this field.

. . . (32-33)

Abramson: … May I mention the general effects of LSD? During the reaction to small oral doses of LSD, that is, about 25-50 μg., ego enhancement occurs simultaneously with ego depression. The therapist may take advantage of the reconstructive potential and integrative functions of the ego to provide insight into conflicting situations not hitherto readily accesible to the patient.

. . .

Hoch: This is measured on a baseline of how he was before?

Abramson: I usually measure it on the baseline of how he was able to utilize it in terms of his previous experiences. For example, one of my subjects who temporarily became a patient under LSD was able to see how his reaction to his father's marriage was unrealistic. He adapted to it more effectively in view of having uncovered conflict feelings with respect to his father. (34)

Hoch: … [Y]ou should define what particular ego function you have in mind. [i.e. that is enhanced, ed.]

Abramson: The adaptive function. … Which other functions do you think would not be included, for example?

Hoch: For instance, a control of the patient about some of the material that he has …

Abramson: Yes that is correct. There is less control.

Hoch: Less control, and therefore there are two contradictory—

Abramson: No, because I said both go on simultaneously. That is the value of the drug. (35)

Bateson: It might be important at this moment to say that it seems to me that Dr. Abramson is talking very largely about psychotherapies in which insight, awareness, or whatever you want to call it is a very important ingredient. This did not come into the original definition of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. The question we are going to be asking is: What orders of insight are favored by LSD? Clearly there would be certain orders of insight which would be favored by an ego enhancement, as I understand it, and certain orders which might be favored by an ego depression. … (35)

. . . [T]he drug perhaps brings it to the surface, and the therapist can then convert it into a particular sort of awareness of an unpleasant aspect of his life. However, there may also be insights which constitute awareness of positive possibilities in his life, of things he could correct, and so forth. (36)

Abramson: … [T]hese are the results of many years of study of many subjects, with different doses. …

Awareness of, and good memory for, experimental frame of reference.

Increased fantasy, with limited emergence of autistic ideation.

Facilitative interpretation of symbolic processes.

Acute awareness of need to maintain conscious volitional control of self.

Regressive modes of defense and self-preoccupation.

Mounting anxiety

Dysfunction of affect control

Depressive processes exceeding the euphoric component.

Alternating periods of disturbance in perception.

Rarely, hallucinatory phenomena, with some awareness of reality simultaneously.

Intensification of interpersonal bonds with members of the group, or with the group leader, or the psychologist doing the testing, or an accidental visitor to the laboratory, with, however, distorted dependence or hostility, or with both simultaneously.

Paranoid structuring of both people and circumstances.

Psychosexual stimulation induced either by external events or by the preceding items.

Rarely, improvement in performance in specific test situations.

As an example of this last, one of our engineers, who was a subject, could get 100 per cent under LSD in certain of the tests we used, which he never did without LSD. That is one of the anomalies we observed.

Bateson: Are there any irregularities there? Or are there any regularities as to the sort of test situations improved under LSD?

Abramson: We don't have too much data on that. However, these tests had to do with the subject's actual job. He was an engineer who used mechanical devices, and the tests in which his performance improved were of a mechanical nature.

Bateson: But was there actual manipulative improvement?

Abramson: Yes. There was another subject, a young woman, who was a technician working at Columbia, who was determined to get all her mathematics examples correct, and practiced at home. Although she was very disturbed over her sexual activities, under 100 μg. of LSD, she got 100 percent on her mathematics test. (37-38)

Bateson: Dr Abramson mentioned that sometimes under LSD the person improves his performance pattern in the test situation. The subject of our discussions is the use of LSD in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is, I take it, some sort of a task-oriented situation. The nature of that task is very imperfectly defined, but its definition is very important. In what is the LSD subject better? We have just had material which shows that in some cases he is better at giggling under LSD, or better at weeping, These are all performance situations, test situations, which may be relevant to our basic question: Why is he better at being a psychotherapeutic subject under LSD? … (39-40)

. . .

Hoch: We have data on psychological tests, of course. All these data indicate alterations. I feel that the difficulty with these studies is that no test to date is really able to cope with the rapidity of some of the psychic manifestations under the drug. … (40)

. . .

Fremont-Smith: One point just made by Dr. Hoch, which became very clear to me, is the subtlety of human thought and human relationships. Our whole experimental procedure in the area of human behavior is enormously gross. We need to remind ourselves that our most refined methods appear gross when measured by the subtleties of human interaction, even between only two people and over a period of only 15 seconds.

You spoke, Dr. Hoch, about a patient's fluctuations under LSD, and the difficulty of keeping track of them. But we are just unable even to produce an accurate description of the fluctuations between two people just exchanging "Good mornings" at the breakfast table. This should not discourage us, but we should be aware of it.

Hoch: I would like to add that it is very important in all these drug studies to take into consideration the volatility of some of the responses, which is markedly increased when compared with other situations, which, even without drugs, are not static. The volatility impresses you very much. (40-41)

West: … To what extent is the chemically mediated breaking through of defenses in psychoanalytic therapy a contamination of the therapeutic process which may interfere with the solidity of the results, or that may, in the long run, even impair the results which psychoanalytic therapy is basically striving to produce? Overcoming defenses and working through resistances is an inherent part of the psychoanalytic therapy process, involving significantly the analysis of the tranference and the patient's willingness and readiness to give up or modify his defenses. If these are overcome artificially by chemical means, to what extent have we distorted this process and perhaps done the patient a disservice? (46)

Fremont-Smith: … I am going to say something about specificity. It seems to me quite obvious that if the body reacts at all to a chemical introduced into it, there must be some kind of specificity. It does not react everywhere; it reacts in a particular chemical way, in a certain organ or cellular level. This may set in motion other common denominators, which other drugs would also set in motion. But there must be a place where there is some degree of physiological specificity, and, when we say a drug is nonspecific, we mean nonspecific with reference to what we are testing or to the point of view or approach. It is not tenable to assume that a drug with a chemical composition will not have a specific chemical reaction somewhere in the body. That is my first point.

Secondly, it is quite possible that even though there are seventeen ways, some of them drugs and some of them suggestion, by which we can get the same qualitative reaction in a patient, a particular one may still be the most convenient one to use, or may be so under certain circumstances. We should avoid both accepting any drug as the magical one, and, on the other hand, cynically discarding it because the same reactions sometimes occur with a placebo or with something else. (47)

. . .

Abramson: To continue: I have emphasized that the effect of LSD depends upon the dosage and the personality of the individual. I have also mentioned that although ego depression does occur in the normal individual taking up to 25 to 50 μg. by mouth. I believe that one other more important process going on simultaneously is what I call ego enhancement or reinforcement. The ability of the individual under small doses of LSD to face preconscious or unconscious material and to integrate this material into the dynamic forces of the ego structure is not part of a loss of ego, but, rather, that of a reinforced ego which functions more effectively under the drug; and, from my point of view, the psychoanalytic point of view, in the presence of, and with the participation of the therapist himself. . . .

. . .

After an LSD interview, with reconstruction by the participating therapist, the patient is able to use this material for extended periods, for weeks and months, and it gradually becomes part of his own personality structure. This integration usually required very long periods of therapy. (47-48)

West: Dr Abramson, are you saying that what the drug does is to disorganize the patient's defenses, thereby making it possible to reorganize them in a more healthy way afterwards?

Abramson: In certain patients, yes.

Fremont-Smith: Part of our difficulty is that we are so perfectly helpless to define words so they mean anything except to those using them, because we don't understand at all how the personality is built up. We have contradictory theories about how it is constructed, but we obviously don't understand it completely. We are talking about something which we don't sufficiently understand, with words which are quite satisfactory to us and are almost sure to be somewhat unsatisfactory to almost anybody else.

. . .

Hoch: Dr. Abramson, are you using the term [i.e. reconstructive therapy] strictly in the sense that Rado used it, or in a modified form? Do you mean, here, symptom elimination essentially, or do you go beyond that?

Abramson: I go beyond that.

Hoch: In other words, you actually think that the subsequent adaptation of the person to his environment is a better one, a healthier one, and in the framework, of course, symptoms which were produced disappear?

Abramson: I am convinced of that. (49-50)

…

Solomon Katzenelbogen: We hear all the time that LSD produces this and that effect. I do not minimize its effect; I consider it a very excellent aid in psychotherapy, but it is only an aid. Dr. Abramson talks and writes about it as though LSD, by itself, produces all the effects.

I cannot agree with Dr. van Rhijn, who made the statement that in view of the dearth of psychotherapists, the drug may simply be given, and it will produce the effect by itself; the patient himself will continue self-analysis. I may be entirely wrong, but I don't believe that self-analysis is helpful; it becomes rumination about one's problems.

It seems to me that the drug helps the ventilation of emotions, the verbalization of thoughts. It helps to unblock certain elements which the patient, in a so-called "normal" state, cannot bring himself to say.… (50)

. . .

Abramson: … I really feel you have misquoted me. I have just said "The patient's reaction is to LSD plus the therapist, not to the LSD alone. It may be true that this can be stated for all pharmacological therapy, but I believe it is especially important in the case of the LSD interview." I have published this statement.

Katzenelbogen: I didn't quote you. I said it was my general impression.

Abramson: I am giving you the specific impression. "Enthusiasm of the therapist, not the LSD, plays a major role during the therapeutically focused LSD reaction." So I have actually published the contrary of what you say.

Ditman: May I ask you, Dr. Abramson or Dr. Katzenelbogen, have either of you done studies with LSD without intended psychotherapy, and then done a follow-up of the results, and can you refute what some of the others claim, that LSD by itself does do something therapeutic?

Savage: How can you do that? Somebody always has to be there.

Eisner: It has been done.

Peck: We have done it, and so has Dr. Murphy.

Ditman: How do you make the statement if you haven't done it?

Bateson: Who gives the LSD?

Savage: Yes, somebody has to give it.

Ditman: But not in a therapeutic situation.

Savage: How can you say that? It has to be given by someone. Without someone participating, how can you tell?

Ditman: We are not saying that the environment and the conditions under which it is given do not have a profound effect on the experience. What we are saying is that a situation in which there is no therapeutic intent by the people who give it may still produce therapeutic effects.

Klee. It is a question of how therapy is defined.

Fremont-Smith: Exactly. What do you mean? Conscious intent? How much conscious intent, and so forth? This sets up an impossible situation, in the extreme. On the other hand, we all know that experiences which may be unrelated to any therapeutic situation may reveal to any of us something of such significance that for months we keep on using this new information about ourselves or about life or our relationship to another. If this can happen, it would be surprising if events of this kind could not be precipitated by a drug, a hymn, or a sunset. It seems to me, therefore, that this argument ought not to go too far.

West: Is what the therapist intends much more important than what the patient infers? (51-52)

. . .

Whittlesey: … Certainly the magnitude of the results are similar.

Abramson: I believe this is a serious error. If the method is changed, the results cannot be the same.

Cole: Yes, they can.

Abramson: Operationally the result is always determined by the method of the experiment.

van Rhijn: I am not so sure. (52)

Eisner: … I have found that LSD enormously enhances what is called the working-through process. There is a second, extraordinary effect, which may be specific to LSD and related drugs and which has an "integrative" aspect: LSD seems to allow the patient or subject to experience himself in a conflict-free state and in relationship to his environment. We should be very clear about which of these two effects or aspects we are discussing, since differentiation of these two will perhaps clarify some of the apparent arguments. … It is as though everything which bothered them has been transcended. Obviously the language is bad; I am floundering.

Peck: It can't be put into words.

Eisner: No, that is the difficulty.

Hoch: If that is so, how can the patient put it into words?

Eisner: They do, Dr. Hoch. I have subjective reports of it. This is something very real, and just because we don't have scientific words for it, it should not be overlooked.

John Whittlesley: We might find words for it in other scientific disciplines outside of psychiatry. Anthony Wallace, at Pennsylvania, has done some work on rapid personality changes occurring in conversion experiences and situations of that kind. I believe he uses such words as "adaptive resynthesis."

Sidney Malitz: There are some specific ways of defining the LSD effect. They are more in the experimental physiology area, but I was thinking about them when reference was made to the various placebo effects. For instance, with LSD and other hallucinogens, certain subjects will see geometric forms of various colors and shapes, and will develop synesthesia, macropsia, and micropsia. I have never seen this with placebos, and feel that these phenomena are fairly specific for the hallucinogen group. I have seen all kinds of emotional reactions, such as euphoria, suspicion, depression, anxiety, and rage, occurring with both placebos and the active substances, but I have never seen these other responses.

Eisner: I have seen them without any drugs at all.

Fremont-Smith:It seems to me that our efforts at clarity should not be disparaged because we can't make them scientific. As I said before, the subtlety of the human mind and of interpersonal reactions is very far beyond our capacity to grasp; we just barely touch it. Sometimes we sense things which we flounder to put into words meaningful to others. Our floundering does not mean that what we are trying to describe is not of profound significance.

. . .

Most of the forces operating in human behavior are still quite beyond us in terms of grasping them and describing them adequately. Here, we are attempting to do this, and I feel we should be rather humble, in view of the complexity of the problem. These drugs give us new facets and new clues. If we look at it this way, quite tentatively, and with a little less tendency to disparage points of view other than our own, we will, I think, move forward. (53-54)

Abramson: … I don't wish to claim that the following list is complete; it is just a casual listing to indicate why I feel LSD has certain favorable characteristics for use as an adjuvant to psychotherapy.

a) It is pharmacologically safe; very large doses may be given without tissue damage.

b) It is effective in small doses for therapeutic interviews in which the therapist is definitely involved.

c) The patient is conscious, cooperative, and better able to integrate material with psychodynamic significance.

d) The patient undergoes an essentially elated disturbance in ego function, which is also accompanied by integrative forces, so that it may be thought of as "hebesynthesis" rather than narcosynthesis.

e) The drug may be given repeatedly. There is no evidence of addiction. The pharmacological effects usually wear off within 12 hours.

f) Patients usually like the experience of taking LSD in the dose range stated.

Savage: Can the disturbance in ego function also be depressive?

Abramson: Yes. But the usefulness here is in the euphoriant effect, when the patient can face problems rather than avoid them.

Herman Denber: But cannot even this avoidance be brought into sharp focus and become valuable in the analytic sense?

Abramson: Yes, but the effect of the drug is to reinforce the patient's ability to face himself. I think both factors go on simultaneously, as I have emphasized.

Denber: Irrespective of whether it is elation or depression or something else?

Abramson: That's right, I am willing to stand corrected on that point. But I happen to use the hebic function, if I may use the term; the elative function rather than the depressive function.

Denber: Is it because of your own personal feelings?

Abramson: I'm not sure. I am certain that my own personal feelings come into this. I can't imagine not being personally involved.

Savage: The dose range stated is important. Though we may be talking about the drug as though it were a unitary thing, the effects with the doses you are using may be quite different from those with the doses of 400 or 500 μg. which Dr. Hoch is using. At the lower dose level, it has a releasing effect similar to alcohol, whereas in the higher dose level, it has a psychotomimetic effect, in which much unconscious material is brought forth and projected in the form of hallucinatory, and sometimes illusional and religious, experience. We should specify what doses we are using.

…

Fremont-Smith And bear in mind that there is also some evidence that the effect is not clearly related to dose. That complicates matters. Further, tap water works very well sometimes. All these factors have to be brought up again and again.

Malitz: I think it is the other way around. Very low dosages will sometimes cause a marked dissociation in a patient. When this drug is given in an outpatient setting, this has medicolegal and other implications. It is quite different from giving the drug in a hospital setting where subjects are carefully screened in advance, kept overnight if necessary, observed by trained teams, and not released until all psychotic symptoms have abated. (55-56)

Chandler: I do want to say something about this dichotomy which Dr. Savage has mentioned: that the drug is releasing in the lower dosages and what he calls psychotomimetic, in the higher doses. I think it is a continuum; that it is all releasing. At the higher doses, the upsurge of unconscious material is so threatening that it must be greatly disguised; it is not that there are two different effects. (57)

West: There seems no need to call LSD an "addicting drug," as this is usually defined. It is true that it produces a tolerance, a very rapid tolerance, but that is the only thing it has in common with addicting drugs. It has never been shown that people develop a craving for it, an habitual dependence on it, or a withdrawal syndrome when it is discontinued. (58)

Sidney Cohen:… [T]o give LSD without the individual's knowledge [could be a dangerous situation.] The case Dr. Chandler was referring to was one related to us by Stoll. A person had been given the drug, and committed suicide immediately thereafter because she had no awareness of why she was becoming psychotic. This saving knowledge that a drug has been given us is enough to maintain the reality of the situation, to prevent terrible after effects. …

…

Savage: That story changes each time I hear it, and I wish it would finally get into print in the final version. The last time I heard Stoll tell it, he said that this patient knew she had been given LSD; that she was a depressive type and had been in treatment; and that about a week later, after the LSD, she committed suicide. I have heard both versions. Whether there were two such patients or one, I don't know, but I think it was just one.

Fremont-Smith: Perhaps more important is that we are all worried that someone might commit suicide after taking the drug, and it is a good thing to worry about.

Abramson: I am much more concerned, in ambulatory patients, with the effect of cortisone than I am with the effect of LSD. I have patients telephone me at the onset of therapy, and the most direct attempts at suicide occurring with my ambulatory patients were after nembutal and seconal, when patients took one and then took the whole box. In one case, the family physician called me up and said, "Don't you know about her? She always tries suicide after nembutal." (62-63)

Abramson: No one can deny that a very important part of the value of psychotherapy is the interaction between therapist and patient. The motivations of the therapist, therefore are of great significance. … (65)

… [L]et me stress the need for verbatim data in investigations of this type. Elaborate condensations of psychiatric reports without verbatim data are influenced to a great extent by countertransference, editorial policies of journals, and current notions about what kind of reporting of data is in good taste and suitable style. Thus, the reader is often only permitted to see, aside from the history condensation, (a) the attitude of the therapist toward the illness under discussion; (b) the attitude of the therapist toward the patient; (c) the attitude of the therapist toward his therapeutic results; and (d) the attitude of the therapist toward the opinion of his colleagues. In other words, we don't really know what goes on in the therapeutic situation unless we have a method of operation, that is, the verbalizations.

I don't believe we can have all the factors, to begin with. We have to start somewhere in studying the therapeutic interview. It would be ideal to have colored sound movies; it would be ideal to have all sorts of data. But if we are to achieve a total or transactional view of the therapeutic process, I believe it is a necessary condition to start with the verbatim data. … (66)

Denber: … If you furnish the verbatim report, you are really furnishing half of the interaction. The emotional aspects are completely left out, and the reader has no knowledge of the emotional frame of reference, of the context in which these emotional discharges were experienced. …

Abramson: When I first started to do verbatim recording, more than 10 years ago, this argument was brought up: Unless the total picture is there, the data are useless. One of the people who had a certain supervisory position with respect to my research program said, "Unless you have all the unconscious factors, in both the therapist and the patient, your verbatim data are of no value."

Denber: I didn't say that.

Abramson: You used the word total. By using this word, you are asking the impossible.

Fremont-Smith: We don't use it in any other science.

Abramson: Let me continue. Bridgman points out that certain questions are inherently unanswerable. If a research project is set up in such a way that it cannot be attacked, you might as well stop. It becomes nonsense. Using the word total in a psychotherapeutic situation is equivalent to saying "Let's give up; let's not do any research." (68-69)

Hoch: …Dr. Abramson began by saying that this drug is pharmacologically safe. I beg to differ with this statement, or, I should say, I qualify this statement. This drug is safe, I think, if it is given in a properly controlled set-up, by those trained in psychotherapy, on the one hand, and on how to observe and treat people under drugs, on the other. I am rather sure that experienced persons would handle the situation quite differently from the inexperienced. If anyone who is inexperienced in the way just mentioned were to use this compound, many disagreeable situations would be sure to develop, and the medicolegal situation would be a very difficult one for everyone involved. The courts would afford no protection. (74)

Ch. 3: The Nature of the Psychological Response to LSD—Ronald A. Sandison

Sandison: The core of my thesis is that the essential psychological change produced by LSD is the activation of the unconscious, whether or not this area of the mind has been previously made available to the patient. I suspect you might wish to challenge the word unconscious, because it has been mentioned only twice so far in the Conference. I hope, therefore, that we will develop a pool of common information about material obtained from the unconscious under the influence of LSD.

At the risk of going over familiar ground, I would like to mention a few observations which have been made about mescaline in the past. Some of the early investigators, among whom was Havelock Ellis, pointed out two things about mescaline: One was what they called the "divinity of the experience," or the "indescribableness" of it; the other one referred to the highly structured experiences. We know how Klüver refers to mosaics, carpets, floral designs, ornaments, and wood carvings. These visual phenomena experienced by the patients were highly structured, and he called them "form constants." What these things are and where they come from must be a matter of discussion.

I would like to suggest that these experiences tell us something about the structure of the unconscious. … (81)

…

… This brings me to an interesting point, which we might discuss later. I have one patient who had painted before and now has an entirely different style. She had been trained, but she couldn't paint properly. Things didn't have any meaning to her. She could never put down what she wanted. After she had LSD, her style changed completely, and she began to paint in the style she wanted to, which was imaginative, something like John Piper's work.

Fremont-Smith: And the new style persisted?

Sandison: Yes.

Fremont-Smith: It seems to me that this is a very important point, because here is an alteration of the behavior following or subsequent to LSD which persisted, and of which there is a record. It seems to me that this is a far clearer and better evidence of change as the result of LSD than such descriptions as the interaction of this patient with her family, which is a great deal harder to specify.… (82-84)

Sandison: … It appeared from our discussion earlier that no method of treatment should be universal, and that every physician probably has to administer LSD in his own way, as indicated by his own orientation in psychology. We have evidence, which is well summarized in a World Health Organization report, to indicate that the social and physical setting in which any drug is administered (and this does not apply only to LSD) determines the particular response, as well as success or failure in treatment.

Fremont-Smith: Determines or plays a role in determining?

Sandison: It may even determine, I think

…

Sandison: The hospital environment is a very complex thing, but it, as a whole, may determine success or failure.

Fremont-Smith: What about the complex of the past history of the patients?

Sandison: Yes that is important, too. But even where that is favorable to a successful outcome of treatment, it may not be - -

Fremont-Smith: You mean it determines the success or failure of the treatment? I see. I think I misunderstood you. It doesn't determine the whole outcome, but whether or not it will be successful, is that it?

Sandison: Yes.

Eisner: By environment, I understand that you mean the hospital in general. Do you also mean, specifically, the person or persons who are with the individual under treatment; whether music is or is not used; whether art is available or not available; whether or not the therapist has had much experience with LSD; what the expectations of the therapist are? Do you call this environment?

Sandison: I include that in environment.… (84-85)

Sandison:… I have written out a rough classification of a few types of responses to LSD among the almost infinite number of different experiences that the patients have recorded. I have already referred to the structured and somewhat nonspecific responses.

Secondly, we come to the emotional response, which has been referred to earlier. Then there is what I call "associative imagery," relating to personal memories, and this must be distinguished from associative imagery relating to impulse images.… /p>

Another type of experience, about which nothing as been said so far, but which I feel is very important, is the recapturing, the re-experiencing, of lost memories, with their accompanying emotional abreaction. We come now to the next level of experience, the experience of primal events, with appropriate physical and emotional accompaniments. I am thinking here of birth experiences, which a number of our patients have had. This work has also been confirmed by Dr. Lake, Dr. Martin, and by others.

West: Birth experiences? Does that mean a re-experiencing of their own birth?

Sandison: The most common ones are of two kinds: either a reexperiencing of the patient's own birth, or the experience of giving birth.

…

West: The experience of being born, or going through one's own birth experience? You are referring now to a kind of sensation and not to the patient's saying, "I feel reborn."

Sandison: No, the actual sensation.

Fremont-Smith: You think this is an actual recall of the patient's own birth event? I want to be sure that we understand what you mean.

Sandison: No, I'm not saying that. I don't know whether or not it is recall. I don't think there is any evidence on which to base a judgement of that sort.

Fremont-Smith: What are you saying, then?

Sandison: I am only saying that these patients experience something which appears to them to be like being physically born.

Fremont-Smith: And you say this is confirmed by someone?

Eisner: Yes, we have all had it. (93-94)

Eisner: One of the interesting things about it which I have observed and read about in the literature is that is also accompanied by the feeling of being reborn. Whether or not his sheds any light on it, I don't know.

West: But, Dr. Peck, haven't you described it in terms of feeling the amniotic fluid, passing through the birth canal, and all the rest?

Peck: Yes, the California group has had patients who describe it. I mean that people who apparently know nothing medically about childbirth give very vivid descriptions of it, in terms that we physicians who deliver babies recognize. . . .

West: We haven't heard such vivid descriptions of the birth experience since Dianetics died down.

Denber: I would like to confirm what has just been said, from personal experiences under mescaline. I never dared say this publicly before, but since the subject is under discussion, may I say that this feeling was most strange: floating around in the amniotic fluid and suddenly going down through the vaginal canal to be born. This is different from a feeling which came on afterwards, a feeling of being reborn, with all the horrifying experiences which precede it. Then came the feeling: "I have died and now I have been reborn." Of course, this made me think that the death and rebirth fantasy seen in patients may have some basis in fact. My experience was a most extraordinary one. It actually has to have been felt to believe anyone else telling of it. … (95)

West:… One of the key aspects is the nature of the psychological response. This is the subject of this discussion, and it is the only subject to which I feel I have much to contribute. Included in subjective accounts of the psychological response to the LSD experience are: the sense of rebirth; the transcendental mental state; self-realization; a conflict-free state; self-awareness, what Aldous Huxley has called a "sojourn in the Antipodes of the mind," which, I think, applies in certain ways to both mescaline and LSD. But purely from the naturalistic point of view, we can define two features which characterize psychological aspects of the LSD experience:

The first is the realm of perception and involves certain kinds of distortions of perception. Whether they consist of a distortion of relationships in space, of the perceptual awareness of things which aren't there (hallucinations), or alterations of sensation intensity, or just out-and-out distortions, such distortions are a fairly characteristic aspect.

The second is an alteration in awareness, or the appearance of dissociative phenomena. Inasmuch as LSD causes perceptual disturbances and dissociative phenomena, we can see certain similarities between the LSD experience and a number of other human experiences. These experiences include: mystical states; reactions to prolonged stress under extreme conditions, including starvation and exposure; hypnosis, autohypnosis, hypnagogic states and dreams; dissociated states in hysteria and schizophrenia; prolonged sleep deprivation; prolonged sensory isolation; and a variety of chemically induced experiences, such as "going under" and "emerging from" general anesthesia, and intoxication with certain kinds of sedatives and stimulants, as well as with LSD.

Just what does LSD do physiologically which parallels these psychological experiences? I feel that we should take a step in the physiological direction for just a moment, since it may be the last chance we will have to do so at this Conference.

Two things about LSD have been more or less clearly defined by Dr. E. V. Evarts and the group who studied LSD physiologically at the National Institutes of Health: First it is a sensory poison. For example, sufficiently large doses of LSD produced in the monkey a state Evarts described as "de-afferentation." Certainly, a loss of kinesthetic awareness and a reversible blindness occurred in the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta). Second, we know that LSD functions as a diencephalic stimulant and produces an increase in autonomic activity and reactivity.

Perhaps we should try to translate into physiological terms what Dr. Sandison has already defined as his concept of what LSD does psychologically; he said he thought it activated the unconscious.

In all the situations I listed, where the syndrome of perceptual distortion and dissociation appears, there are two essential conditions: that there be a withdrawal, distortion, or disturbance of awareness of the outside world; and, at the same time, that there be either a maintained or patent arousal within the brain, permitting the maintenance of awareness. It might be said, then, that the brain remains capable of being aware. If there is sufficient arousal to permit awareness (and this obviously involves the reticular formation in a significant fashion), and sensory input is impaired in some degree, the awareness capacity can focus upon previously recorded sensory traces which are released from within—memories and fantasies and so on—which ordinarily are kept out of awareness in the business of everyday living.

There is a good deal of evidence to show that the ordinary sensory input or the perceptual contact we have with the real world serves some kind of organizing function on the ego. It permits the maintenance of screening and scanning ego processes which enable us to remain in keen contact with external reality and to keep a good deal of internal reality, in the form of previously recorded experience, out of consciousness. A person can't have all his memories and fantasies bubbling into active awareness and still go about the business of adaptation, reaction to emergencies, and all the current reality-oriented maneuvers in everyday life.

If a drug were to be made which would reproduce the conditions of a dream in a waking person, we would have to say that such a drug ought to be a sensory poison, enough to distort, disturb, or cut out a good deal of external reality; at the same time, it ought to function to keep the lights lit up inside (i.e., maintain arousal) enough to assure the presence of awareness of releases from within, from the brain's own storehouse of sensations and information. LSD meets these criteria.

I bring in these physiological speculations because we must include the physiological in our considerations of the effects of a drug like LSD upon ego functions.

Savage: Dr. West, did you include temporal lobe stimulation among all these phenomena? The temporal lobe can be stimulated electrically, and everything we have been talking about can be reproduced, without any cutdown of sensory input.

West: I did not include that because it seems to work only in patients who already have temporal lobe seizures.

Savage: That is true, yes.

West: But it certainly is a condition in which this holds true. Input doesn't have to be cut down in order to get "release" of previously experienced sensations. Instead, they are more or less blasted into awareness with a little extra electricity of one's own; or a temporal lobe seizure can be precipitated by setting off the focus in a susceptible person.

Bateson: Would you comment on the perception of music and such things; the heightening of certain sorts of external perception?

Cole: There is a good deal of evidence that cats under LSD are more sensitive to external stimuli; or at least, those stimuli which do get through on LSD may cause a more intense reaction than they would in non-drug states. These are small doses, of course.

West: That is an extremely important point. With small doses, this is the case; in larger doses, the other phenomenon occurs. This would fit in nicely with Marrazzi's ideas, however. The original definition of LSD as a serotonin antagonist confused the issue about what might be happening at the synapse. If LSD enhances synaptic transmission in the sensory pathways by antagonizing a synaptic inhibitor like serotonin, then small doses would produce heightened awareness, and sensations would appear sharper. With larger doses, the effect would reach the point where the circuits would be jammed. The input would become so great that the resulting phenomenon would be that of input overload. Instead of orderly information reaching the cortex, the net result would be a great deal of static and not very much in the way of ordered perceptions. Some sensations would be hyperacute; others greatly distorted; still others would fail to register altogether.

Malitz: We have had experiences with monkeys under LSD. That is just what happened with the monkeys. In the low dosage range, up to 5, 10, or 12 μg. / kg., but there was an opposite effect later on, with more massive doses.

West: I mentioned these physiological aspects because it is useful to have a physiological parameter to consider along with purely psychological ones. Then, in terms of the use of a drug in therapy, it becomes possible to work along the lines that Dr. Hoch mentioned at the end of the previous discussion. In medicine we hope to be able to talk in terms of specific indications, contraindications, safeguards for the treatment situation, alternative medications in case there are reasons not to use this one, and combinations of other drugs with may produce the same effect. It is important to prevent the development of an almost mystical misuse of a drug which, after all, has its effects on the central nervous system rather than on the soul.

Chandler: I am not opposed to the idea of physiological speculations, they do have value. But we have to be as careful there as in our other speculations. In the therapeutic doses which we use, the patient is usually having this increased fantasy material at the stage where the sensory effect is heightened.

We also have to consider the question of whether the lower centers are being stimulated or whether these are release phenomena. We aren't yet certain about this; either explanation could be valid. (101, 102)

…

Hoch: I would like to say that this would really be very important research, for which we probably don't have even the proper methodology, as yet. Distortions in individuals are not purely on a perceptive level, which comes from the outside. The stimulation to which they respond does come from the outside. But the marked sensory-perceptive disorganization of the person which comes from the inside must be carefully considered. This is very much neglected, obviously because we do not have the tools to investigate it as well as the other; but it is very important.

Let us consider a rather limited problem: the alteration of proprioception under the influence of these compounds, leading to alteration of body image, fantasies in relation to the body, which become magnified in the psyche.

We know how the person now connects the past material and even projects material into the future. But it is certain that this does not depend alone on some of the patient's memories, or on the unconscious; the patient becomes more or less libidinized under the influence of the drug. It depends on his inner integration and organization being as much disrupted as his relationship to the environment.

I would like to emphasize this, because this inner experience of the patient, that he is not a whole, that certain things are coming to the fore which he tries to cope with, that he feels fragmented—and this, of course, is where the relatedness of some of these states to schizophrenia comes in—is of extreme importance. But I would like to point out that on the neurological level, seemingly, something takes place which interrupts the integration of the sensory input coming from different parts of the body via the vegetative nervous system. This registration failure of the patient results in many of the syndromes we see. The response is twofold: He tries to overcome a situation in which he finds himself; and, secondly, he tries to cope with the psychic material which originally may or may not have been connected with some of these experiences that he has had. This is a complex picture.

For obvious reasons, we try to concentrate on the patient's relationship to externals: how, for instance, perceptions are distorted; how the optical apparatus functions; how the auditory apparatus functions., We investigate the equilibrium of some of these patients, and how they respond to sensory stimuli. We do neurological studies, to see how well they respond to pin pricks, how they localize two points, and so forth.

West: Or proprioception.

Hoch: That's right. Interestingly, in may of these patients, waves of distortion occur, and these distortions are picked up by the patient.

The vegetative nervous system, which is integrated in a very flexible way, is also interfered with. The patient is not able to cope with all this vegetative stimulation, and this leads to symptoms. If some of these patients at the height of this disturbance are injected with chlorpromazine, for example, they begin to quiet down; some of the ideation is there, but the patient does not go along fully with it any more. The vegetative manifestations are inhibited, and the person feels that he is again integrated.

The disintegrative effect of this drug is one of its very important features, and it is imperative to study the relationship of the physiology of the person to his psychic performance. I think also, of course, of many of the psychodynamic elements involved. But we should not forget that a great deal goes on in the person himself, exclusive of his relationship with others.

West: This is extremely important, and I agree completely. When I said that the drug is a sensory poison, I was talking about its effect on all the afferent systems, including proprioception, the visceral afferents, and all the rest. The disafferented animals that we are going to hear about later are animals which have lost the capacity to integrate sensory data from their own parts; their body image is grossly disturbed. This aspect has been neglected, yet it obtains in all the states which I mentioned, too. It is prominent in dreams, trances, deliria, distortions of the isolated subject, etc. All of the afferent systems are disturbed, not just the special senses alone.

Malitz: In the film which I will now show, there are two monkeys (Macacus rhesus) who have been receiving daily subcutaneous injections of LSD, starting with 1 μg. /kg. and gradually working up to very high doses. In the first scene, one animal had received 240 μg. /kg. and the other, 140 μg. /kg., which are enormous doses of LSD. (102—104)

…

[photo shows monkeys immobilized (106)]

Cohen: The important point to remember is that these dosages are so far out of line with human LSD levels that they may have no application whatsoever. This is also true of the work cited by Dr. West; so his theory of sensory poisoning based upon toxic doses of LSD in animals seems a bit dubious.

West: I used the word poison to describe the fact that the sensory processes are affected in some distinctive and abnormal way. There is absolutely no question that LSD, even in small doses, has some specific and precise effect upon the sensory synapse in the central nervous system. If you don't want to call it a poison, we can go into its biochemistry, but it has a distinct effect on the synapse. At this point there is no question about it at all.

Eisner: I would like to speak on this question of distortion, to bring the discussion back to Dr. Sandison and the unconscious. While Dr. Hoch was talking about internal disorganization, which certainly does occur, I wanted to speak up and say, "Yes, this is true, but the important thing therapeutically is that the disorganization occurs along meaningful lines with respect to the personality dynamics of the individual who is experiencing it." It does not appear out of nowhere and without any reason at all. For instance, I have repeatedly seen somatic symptoms, terrible pains, tension headaches, and all sorts of different physical sensations disappear immediately and completely when correct interpretations specific to the situation are made. These are often changes in body image, such as one side swelling all out of proportion and the other side shrinking almost out of sight, which subside when the dynamics underlying the phenomena are understood.

Fremont-Smith: Like Dr. Abramson's experience, when he suddenly realized that his symptoms weren't due to encephalitis but to LSD. He interpreted to himself what was happening, and then his anxiety disappeared.

Eisner: It is as though a bowl will break along the cracks which are already inherent in it. I think this is the important point for us, as therapists who use LSD. (107-108)

…

van Rhijn: The first phase of the LSD reaction is a drug-specific disruption without a personal meaning. After half an hour or so, the hallucinations become loaded with meaning.

…

Fremont-Smith: Is that the way it is with you, Dr. Sandison?

Sandison: Yes, in general, I think so. I am very interested that Dr. West has introduced this topic, because it may at last give us a chance for some common ground between the psychoanalytically oriented people and the neurophysiologists. It is extraordinarily difficult to get people to try to see this thing from these two different viewpoints and reach any common ground at all. As Dr. West mentioned—and I'm sorry that I didn't bring it into the discussion—these reactions do have something in common with the neurotic states, which are certainly conditioned by deprivation or reduction of sensory impulses. If I understood him rightly, what he meant by sensory poison was something which interfered with sensory input; this gives us some common ground for our discussion.

West: My introduction of this topic into the general discussion was in the hope of making the discussion more, not less, monistic. If there is a single area where we can get away from dualistic thinking and work toward a monistic understanding, it should be in the consideration of psychotropic drugs. It is here that alteration ("alteration" rather than "poisoning," if you wish) of central nervous system function and change in psychodynamic happenings can at last be brought together in some kind of one-to-one relationship, and we should take advantage of it. (108-109)

…

West: There are certain things we do know, physiological as well as psychological. We know that the LSD level drops very rapidly, but the psychophysiological changes continue much longer. This is one of the reasons for my choice of the word poison. After the drug has done its work, or damage, or has altered a certain metabolic process, and even after it has gone, time is required for restoring function to its usual level. This is characteristic of some poisons, especially those affecting enzyme systems.

As far as I know, many autonomic phenomena may continue on the same scale as psychological ones. I don't want to get involved in the question of which comes first, the psychological of the autonomic, but I do want to point out that there is a great deal of evidence that the change, whatever it is, is one that affects total brain activity. Both the biological measurements (not chemical assay) of change in brain function, and the psychometric or other psychological measurements of changes in behavior tend to run parallel throughout the LSD experience. This aids rather than hinders us in our monistic orientation. (111-112)

…

Sandison: There is one case reported by Dr. Charles Burns of Birmingham, in which a girl had a full-scale LSD reaction 5 years after taking the drug.

Hoffer: Continuously?

Sandison: Yes.

Eisner: A number of our patients did that.

Sandison: Yes, several of them have.

Fremont-Smith: This patient had been drinking tap water all that time, had she?

West: A great deal depends upon what we mean by "it." If, in a given person, LSD produces an experience which includes certain dissociative phenomena characteristic for the person and psychodynamically determined, htere is no reason why at some future time that person could not have another dissociative reaction which would take the same general form, but without reference to the drug and simply because he is that person, with those dynamics. I wouldn't want to call such an experience an LSD reaction. That 5 years before, the person took LSD, which precipitated a dissociative response, is merely an interesting fact. We have to be careful of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning in analyzing these phenomena.

Peck: Dr. Sandison, we were talking about LSD effect, and, as Dr. van Rhijn and others of us have felt, there are many phases of this effect. This last stage that Dr. van Rhijn, the group in California, Dr. Hoffer and myself, and others refer to, this dissociative response (or, to use Huxley's term, the end-result) which all patients do not attain—all of mine have not attained it, but a large proportion of them do—do you all ascribe that not only to working out therapy going up, but do you prefer them to go all the way, what we call "over," or into this dissociative state?

Sandison: It depends entirely on the nature of the problem. The same rules which apply in psychotherapy must apply here; that, if it is necessary because of the patient's problem to take him right on into this extreme inner experience—do we mean the same thing?

Peck: Yes.

Sandison: It is probably only wise for a few patients to undergo this deeper experience. If the patient has, for example, experienced a straightforward sexual trauma at 5 years of age, and this has been the starting point for an obsessional handwashing neurosis later on, the emotional reliving of that trauma will resolve the obsession; I have seen several such cases. You need not go any further than that.

Peck: Dr. Hoffer, would you explain what happened in your series of alcoholics, in those in whom LSD was successful?

Hoffer: As a general rule, with our small series of alcoholics, those who have not had the transcendental experience are not changed; they continue to drink. However, the large proportion of those who have had it are changed. But this is not an inevitable rule.

Sandison: Could you say what you mean by the transcendental experience in your patients?

Hoffer: It is pretty much the same as yours: the ecstatic experience as described by William James.

Eisner: Why do you say that there are some patients who should not be led to this experience? I feel this is the end-point in therapy, though it can be in major or minor degree. Why do you reserve it only for some patients?

Sandison: I think you're putting it rather differently than I intended. If the patient has the experience as a result of taking LSD, whether or not the therapist really directed it, as I understand Dr. Hoffer's patients—

Hoffer: Except that we directed it.

Sandison: In the sense that you gave them a large dose and deliberately broke down their defenses?

Hoffer: Yes.

Eisner: I start the patient with small doses, increasing the dosage gradually and working through problems to get to that point. That is the point, I think.

Chandler: If it is the end-point of therapy, then why not give them a large dose in one session and get them to that point right away?

Eisner: They don't go to that point.

Chandler: Years ago, it used to be done with a large dose.

Hoffer: Seventy-five percent of patients will go to the point if they are given enough LSD.

Eisner: Something must be wrong with me. I can't do it.

Hartman: I want to point out that the orientation of the therapist is important here. The Jungians, who do not consider this an end-point—and I am one of them—will find that a spectacular result will occur if this transcendental reaction comes, let us say, in the first three or four sessions, before the Freudian therapist has put his ideas into the patient. If the transcendental experience occurs in the fifteenth or seventeenth session, when the patient is aware that the analyst does not believe that this is the end-point, the analyst will not get such a spectacular effect.

Savage: What is the end-point?

Hartman: We don't use the transcendental reaction as an end-point.

Savage: What end-point do you use?

Hartman: A pragmatic test as to whether the patient is better. We can't define how we know a patient is better.

Fremont-Smith: It is judgment.

Hartman: Yes, or something.

Fremont-Smith: It is clinical judgment, which is a criterion in other branches of medicine. We shouldn't be afraid of saying we can't define it. It is the physician's judgment that the patient is ready. (114-116)

…

Eisner: I think that a drug is remarkable which can be used as Dr. Hoffer, Dr. Ditman, and Mr. Whittlesley report, to stop people from drinking or which can be used with the therapy that is used in Canada. It can be used, on the one hand, in a Freudian setting; on the other, the way Dr. Chandler and Dr. Hartman do; or in a different way, the way Dr. Peck, Dr. Sandison, and I use it. In each case, each of us considers that LSD is an enormous potentiator of therapy. This, perhaps, is really the extraordinary specificity or value of LSD. (116)

…

Hartman: … The patient under LSD, from a therapeutic point of view, is quite definitely hypersuggestible. In our group, for instance, which consists of two Freudians and two Jungians, the latter will get the transcendental experiences in the patient much faster than the former. The two Freudians, on the other hand, will evoke the patient's childhood memories much more quickly than the two Jungians in the group. These results are due to the different orientations and different kinds of suggestions on the part of the therapists (132).

. . .

Hoffer: To make it more difficult, I am neither a Jungian nor a Freudian, and I have had one volunteer subject who had both experiences in the same session. (134)

…

Chandler: I would like to say something, also, about the personality of the therapist. It makes a difference, even in a fairly simple framework. For instance, Dr. Hartman gets much more responses of very violent sexual fantasies than I do.

Dr. Eisner has told me that she doesn't get paranoid responses to her therapy, except in the group situations; I get paranoid reactions to me from almost all patients at one time or another. This is partly my personality and partly belief. I believe that the paranoid reaction is a regressive perception of the world which we have all had at one time or another. She feels it is a kind of misperception which only some have. But it is more than that. There is a personality element here, too.

Fremont-Smith: Do you think it is a good thing to get the paranoid reaction; that this is a useful stage in the patient's therapy?

Chandler: Yes. It is something that is in everyone's subconscious.

Fremont-Smith: So that you, in a sense, are looking for it in your patients?

Chandler: Yes.

Fremont-Smith: And you find it?

Chandler:Then you are taking the Kleinian approach? Are you following Melanie Klein?

Chandler: I am following LSD, really. This was not something I believed before I started LSD, but I found it so consistently in regressive experiences with LSD that I have just adopted it as something that seems to be just about universal, with all patients.

Fremont-Smith: But universal with you, you see. When we say "universal," let's say "universal with me," as you did. (135)

…

Denber: It illustrates the cardinal problem we are faced with, which Dr. Abramson stated quite succinctly in a symposium at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Chicago, in 1957: The results we report are in direct relationship to the intensity of the analysis of our countertransference. There will always be a group who says, "This is suggestion. You are merely suggesting." We will also get a group who are going to say that no matter what is given, the patient will improve. Finally, we will have the absolute nihilists, who feel that nothing is going to cure anyone.

In the final analysis, as Dr. Fremont-Smith just said, it is the analysis of the countertransference which should be of primary importance; how we ourselves feel about it; what our expectations are; what our hopes are; and so on. Until this is decided, anything coming from the patient is without value. Very often, patients are merely acting out our unconscious wishes, which we don't see. When they perceive what we want them to, they are happy; and they are happy because we are happy. Yet, basically, nothing is actually happening.

Fremont-Smith: We must find a way of looking at this. I was beginning to have a fantasy of a good, wise therapist watching another good, wise therapist in a therapeutic situation. I don't know whether there would have to be another one watching them, but it might be rather interesting. Or if there could be two observers observing a psychotherapist testing a patient under LSD, and if they were to make their records independently, it might be possible to come closer to an evaluation of, perhaps a first approximation of, which is going on. We certainly cannot judge ourselves. We need someone else to judge our own recordings; perhaps we need at least two others, to see whether they confirm or oppose each other's views. This might begin to give us a picture of what is going on. (136-137)

…

Sandison … Much difficulty arises about the terms in which we are to speak of the mental state induced by LSD. There are various possible lines of approach, but it seems to me that, interpreted psychodynamically, they all add up to the same thing. If we go no further than describing the LSD experience as a delirium, then we must remember that delirious states are common in childhood, and that they therefore tend to occur in conditions when the unconscious is unusually active. If we call the LSD state a model psychosis, we might also consider that Jung regarded schizophrenia as a state in which the ego was overthrown by invasion from the unconscious. Table III, which compares mental function in schizophrenia with that after various drugs, including LSD, suggests that the LSD state has superficial resemblances to the schizophrenic psychosis, but that there are important differences.

On the other hand, the evidence looked at from the psychodynamic point of view strongly supports an hypothesis that LSD activates the unconscious. The patients dream more during their course of treatment; life appears fuller and more interesting; and they are liable to periods of emotion, fantasy, and even hallucination. Memory is improved, and the patient frequently experiences vivid remembrances, which, by definition (i.e., that memory retention is a function of the unconscious), support an hypothesis that LSD permits freer communication between the unconscious and consciousness. Physiology and pharmacology are, at present, of little help in explaining the LSD phenomenon, although what is known suggests that the observed effects of LSD are quite different from those expected from its metabolism. It is known that the half-life time of LSD in the blood of animals is about 30 minutes, and this is probably approximately true of human beings. …

As there is no present evidence that LSD remains in the body for long, we must explain the prolonged and recurring nature of the LSD mental state as some kind of rearrangement of neuronal circuits of a more or less permanent nature. Translated into the language of Aldous Huxley, "The man who comes back through the door in the wall will never be the same as the man who went out." My thesis is that LSD unlocks the doors to memory, past experience, and the inborn images of the unconscious. As Dr. Eisner has said, "One must not pretend to speak biochemically, but to put it simply, it does seem that all LSD does is to open the doors to the unconscious." On the other hand, we have Sandler's suggestion: "My own feeling is that LSD can teach us little about the unconscious but a great deal about the ego, for its effect is, selectively, to undo certain ego functions."

Unfortunately, when we come to consider what is meant by the ego we find such conflicting views that it is difficult to give meaning to Sandler's statement. Nevertheless, even if we reject Sandler's view, we are bound to accept the fact that the success or failure of LSD treatment depends to a large extent on what the ego makes of the unconscious manifestations presented to it through the medium of LSD. The basic power of the ego to adapt itself and to use the material is, no doubt, the first necessity for successful treatment; but the way in which the therapist handles the material is also significant. This may not be as important as we think, because in our series the proportion of recoveries was almost the same among different therapists of widely differing psychological orientation and training.

I am therefore tempted to discuss the phenomenon of integration of the personality after LSD in two other terminologies. One, using again an "ego" system, refers to the boundaries of the ego, rather than to the qualities of the ego itself. The other terminology is that of existentialism. The former view is propounded by Scott, who says that the relationship between the ego and the self (using the latter term in the Jungian sense) can only be appreciated if we can allow the ego boundaries to dissolve and to let ourselves become identified with the cosmos. The "cosmos," from the extroverted point of view, might be the universe; from the introverted point of view, it is in the inner world of ideas and conceptions. Scott writes: "Thus shuttling to and from between inner and outer, we become aware of what body image means, the boundary which gives form to our ego selves." This, to my mind, is also an accurate description of what happens during repeated administration of LSD. The shuttling to and fro between reality and fantasy defines the borders of both, just as a man traveling by rocket from earth to moon and back would at last begin to understand something about his relation to the physical universe. This is the best way I can account for the growth of mental stature, the insight, and the sense of psychological solidity which the patients experience. (143-145)

…

Symbolysis: Psychotherapy by Symbolic Presentation, C. H. Van Rhijn

In the autoanalytic procedure which I call "symbolysis," we give the patient LSD in a totally dark room, where he is not left alone, to the point where he hallucinates. Everything he says is recorded, and the next day it is read back to him. We then let him work out in writing his ideas and interpretations of the material. The therapist-physician follows this process closely from the copy he gets of everything the patient writes. Only on the patient's request will he be there for assurance, advice, or interpretations of the symbolic material.

Fremont-Smith: It is not the therapist who is with the patient in the dark room, but merely someone who records everything he says. Is that right"

van Rhijn: The material is recorded on tape The man who is with the patient is passive and silent.… He is only there because Dr. Savage reported that when the patient is left alone, he tends to have more anxiety and more paranoiac symptoms. … I call this method of therapy "symbolysis" because the subconscious is released to portray tensions, conflicts, and so on, by symbolization. Part of the discussion, I hope will be on the underlying theory. Later on, we can discuss the methods, the techniques of treatment, and the results. But I will talk about the theory first.

The theoretical conception of neurosis and of therapy by means of symbolization is not yet a complete one. It is still in process, so I will be very grateful for your comments.

When we encounter neurosis, we see that it is a disorder of behavior. This is apparent in the relation between the neurotic patient and his environment, and in his complaints. The cause of this strangely disturbed behavior is generally accepted to be a disturbed relation between the patient's ego and his subconscious. If this is true, and I don't doubt it, then "therapy" must be effective at a causal level. The definition of neurotic is "want of the normal;" what we call normal is a natural, easygoing, harmonious interaction between the ego and conscious activity and between the subconscious and subconscious activity. Because of this harmony, we are not often aware of this relation, but the significance of this subconscious activity in the most simple daily tasks can hardly be overestimated.

From birth on, we perceive and experience the world, and most of this sinks deep into the subconscious; from there, come the higher automatisms, which we rely on, always and everywhere. They assist conscious purposes and actions by their feedback effect; that is, their positive or negative feedback effect. Daily life seems to be more than 90 percent governed by this subconscious help and regulation, in such activities as playing the piano and driving a car, as well as in translating ideas into another language.

We are sometimes aware of this subconscious activity when we have an inspiration. In Dutch, we call it "in-giving," and in English, we say, "it was borne in upon me." From the process of inspiration, we may conclude that the subconscious has obviously acquired data which have, perhaps, unnoticed, passed the ego, or are useless or meaningless. After some time, the subconscious seems to have digested these data, and, when the ego is quiet, a brilliant idea may suddenly strike us; in what we call a "flash of intuition," the problem is solved. In sleep, some complicated problems may be solved for which, the evening before, we could not find the solution in consciousness.

Klee: May I interrupt? Dr. van Rhijn, I wonder whether or not you distinguish between conscious and preconscious, as some people do?

van Rhijn: I like this interruption, because it gives me the opportunity to differentiate between unconscious and subconscious. Everything you aren't thinking of at this moment is "unconscious;" your home, the place you came from, is unconscious as of this moment. When you are going to think about it, you get it into consciousness. But "subconscious" is everything which is not yet conscious, and cannot yet be conscious, because it stays in the subconscious until it can come through the channels into consciousness.

Fremont-Smith: The subconscious is that which is repressed, whereas the unconscious is just the material not consciously thought of at the moment.

van Rhijn: The meaning of the word repressed must be reserved for later on, because it has—

Fremont-Smith: But you spoke of channels, so you mean they are trapped or held down; they are obstructions to material coming through them.

van Rhijn: I mean something between subconscious and consciousness which must be passed before anything can come up from under it.

Fremont-Smith: A trap, a valve, an obstruction, an interference with. What is below this level of interference is the subconscious and above is conscious. Then there is something in between.

van Rhijn: That is indicated in Figure 24.

Figure 24: Mnemotechnical scheme for showing the loading with meaning of the sensory input and the symbolization by significant forms.

1. Sensory input (part of it)
2. Former experience from memory centers
3. Emotional meaning from the libido centers
4. Mixing or loading of the sensory input with meaning
5. "Liking" for significant forms
6. The function of symbolization (three levels)
7. Going through the additional or substitute forms = symptom formation
8. Going through the presentational forms = gestures, art, rite
9. Going through the discursive forms = language, communication by talk

Fremont-Smith: It might be the preconscious.

van Rhijn: Yes, it might be called a preconscious function.

Malitz: Rado uses the terms reporting and non-reporting. The analogy he uses is that of a motion picture projector. The film stored in the reels is "non-reporting," roughly equivalent to the "unconscious." The strip of film projected on to the screen for all to see at any one moment is the "reporting" part, which might be equated with the Freudian "conscious." Is that similar to what you mean?

van Rhijn: That seems to me a very good example. What I am driving at is that sometimes the film has not yet been developed. The pictures are already on it, but the reel has not yet been through the bath.

Fremont-Smith: It is a nice analogy.

van Rhijn: We got some real information about this process in the subconscious from the work of inventors and other highly gifted people, who describe sudden illuminations coming from their creative subconscious at moments when they were least expected. These illuminations have opened hitherto obscured doors into a new world of ideas, have furnished new perspectives for perhaps years of work.

. . .

So much for the normal relation between consciousness and subconscious principles. In the neurotic, this reliable bond, this smoothness and direction, is disturbed. Instead, we find conflicts, tensions, anxiety depression, resistance; and, based on these, conduct insufficiently unclearly motivated.

Up to this point, I have been rather sure of the points I made, because they are not very original. But I come now to a point which has troubled me a great deal; the meaning and function of the word resistance.

We all speak rather facilely about resistance, so it appears that each of us has a clear concept of this word. But when we examine it a little more closely, are we all so sure? When we talk about resistance, it is always as a sort of wall or a dike, such as we have in Holland between the sea and the land. This is really a sort of passive barrier against subconscious energies flowing into consciousness. What we call resistance is obviously localized between the subconscious and the consciousness, not only in neurotics but also in normal people. This is a rather easy place to localize.

Between the subconscious and consciousness, there is a function which lends itself to careful examination: It is the function of symbolization. We encounter this function as soon as we try to symbolize. By "symbolizing," I mean putting into words, figures, forms, gestures or music, and so on, the ideas, notions, and conceptions that are, I should say, felt. There seems to be a stage, a phase, when notions or feelings are not clearly separated from one another. We call this a premonitory feeling, a feeling that something is coming, something wants to be expressed, to be symbolized, to be put into words, so it can be communicated.

Bateson: Where do you place on your map the totally incommunicable processes, the unconscious processes of perception? For example, I get an image of you; in a sense, I can inspect that image, but the process of making that image is a totally unconscious one. It would be good to know where you place this process in relation to what you are speaking of, because this is very close to much that we are going to talk about.

van Rhijn: Indeed. It is a little difficult to put it into into words, but when we are perceiving something, there seems to me reason to believe that the stimuli from sense organs, from, let us say, the retina, go in a two-way channel, one to the personal subconscious regions, where it is loaded with meaning, and the other, direct to the cortex; where these two meet, we get what we call "perception." But it is no longer only perception; it is perception with one's own personality, one's life history loaded into it.

West: Apperception.

Bateson: I am asking for location of the process of image formation.

van Rhijn: The personal meanings and wants lie in the subconscious. Parts of the sensory input comes into the subconscious and passes from there, loaded with significance, to consciousness. This loading-with-significance goes before the symbolizing.

…

When I hear you say something, it passes through my ears, and part of it comes into my subconscious. It rises to conscious levels loaded with my meanings. When I give you my answer, it is really an answer based on the significance I attached to your words.

Fremont-Smith: It may become distorted on the way.

van Rhijn: It always is distorted, of course. I don't think it is ever possible to get something undistorted. It is loaded in the subconsciousness with my own possible meanings. Between the subconscious and consciousness comes the function of symbolization.

…

Some notions go through the channels easily; they don't have any resistance at all. Some can't come through just because the person is not ready for them. It is like the blood-brain barrier: 5-hydroxytryptamine doesn't go through, whereas 5-hydroxytryptophane does.

Peck: Dr. van Rhijn, one clarification please: If I say something to you, and you give me a spontaneous answer, as against an answer given consideration, what difference do you attach to that? It is going to be different.

van Rhijn: In the spontaneous, unguarded answer, there is sometimes the feeling that in some way there are channels more wide open that the rest, and things come through which would not have been said when there was not an emotional—

Peck: Perhaps that one was uncontaminated, then.

Fremont-Smith: No, you would only say it always goes through the unconscious.

van Rhijn; Yes, everything does.

Peck: It still couldn't be a straight shoot-through, though.

van Rhijn: Everything goes easily enough through the unconscious, I think.

Fremont-Smith: It is always modified by several milliseconds.

van Rhijn: There are some possibilities that in the center of this function there are some channels more easily passed than others.

Fremont-Smith: May I just make some general comments? The great courage and challenge of Dr. van Rhijn and the great difficulty we are all up against here are quite evident, because we are discussing about five different conceptual levels simultaneously. We are mixing physiology and biochemisty and channels which are nonexistent in any concrete sense. We are in a mixture of symbolic representations of a symbolic process and a neurophysiological process. Only with profound difficulty ccan we get perfect communication on this. So we mustn't mind too much if the words have somewhat different meanings, if we can get the sense and flow of your theoretical concept.

van Rhijn: Of course, it is possible that these things will eventually be understood electrophysiologically.

Fremont-Smith: Yes; and it also may very well mean that when they are clear, any conceptual frame of reference we now have will be greatly modified. But we have to deal with what we have. (157)

. . .

van Rhijn:…

We all know that sometimes we have to wait a long time for an idea to be formulated. Sometimes it is tedious and makes us restless and uneasy. Before the idea shapes itself through the function of symbolization, it is sometimes even painful. Then, suddenly, something seems to click, and the ideas, conceptualized, tangible, manageable, appear in consciousness. Symbolization is the essence of all creative endeavor.

And now comes a definite step. I would like to propose to you that resistance is identifieable with this process of symbolization. Then we can say, if there is no objection, that in neurosis, where resistance is much more severe than in normal states, resistance is disturbance in the creative function.

Bateson: I didn't quite understand you. Did you say what I thought you said?

van Rhijn: My hypothesis is that the function of symbolization is identical with what we call resistance. If we should all agree on this, as well as on the view that in neurosis, resistance is much more severe—

Bateson: That is, in neurosis symbolization does not take place?

van Rhijn: I would say that the function of symbolization is severely disturbed in neurosis.

Klee: Before you proceed, I wish you would clarify a little more what you mean by resistance, in the more general sense. I am rather puzzled by the statement that resistance is more severe in neurosis. Are you thinking, for example, of resistance in the psychoanalytic sense; that the patient is resistant to the therapeutic efforts of the therapist?

No, I think you are hinting at another word, which is repression.

Klee: No, no!

van Rhijn: I mean resistance as a way of functioning of the channels. The symbolizing of ideas, concepts, and feelings going from the subconscious to consciousness seems ofen to require considerable effort.

Klee: You mean that it is analogous to what goes on in electrical circuits, then?

van Rhijn: Analogous to what goes in the blood-brain barrier. Some molecules go in and out very easily, while others can't.

Fremont-Smith: You said that these channels have perhaps become narrowed in neurosis. Would this be an analogy: that these channels have become narrowed in neurosis, and thus it is more difficult for things to go through them?

van Rhijn: Yes, but some channels are closed.

Fremont-Smith: They may be closed altogether. But, in any case, they are closed or narrower.

van Rhijn: There seem to be some channels which are perhaps temporarily closed, so that some ideas can't come through at all, despite lengthy therapy.

Eisner: Isn't it a question of selective permeability? In neurosis, some things come through much more easily; for example, a phobia or a ritual or something like that.

van Rhijn: No, I don't think that is correct, because phobias and the other symptom formations do not come via the good, well known central cognitive system, consisting largely of word-symbols, but come from the borderlines of symbolization, where the meaning is not so clear (but the therapist can "read" the symptoms for what they represent). There are substitute channels for conflicting tensions and conflicting ideas to go through, if the more central ones are narrowed or closed. This is a more vague, more indirect substitute, but still a real way for the subconscious to explain itself.

Eisner: But it still has to come through the symbolic level or layer or whatever you call it.

van Rhijn Yes. Even hypertension can be symbolic for aggression or depression or phobia.

Fremont-Smith: Then another mechanism is needed to determine whether or not these thoughts and ideas are allowed through the normal channel or are diverted to unusual channels, as you call them.

van Rhijn: Yes, indeed; and here this problem arises: What is the influence of ego on the symbolizing process? Can a person manage this function so that he can say, "I shut off these particular canals; I shut them off temporarily or even permanently"? This is where the concept of "repression" comes into the picture. The ego seems able to forbid the use of some channels. The person shuts them off, ostensibly because he doesn't like the forms they give to the oncoming energies. But that is a function of the ego which is not in itself inherent in the function of symbolization. The latter is more easily identified with resistance.

West: Do you feel that LSD widens the holes and "greases the skids"?

van Rhijn: No, LSD gives the energies or notions a chance to pass through to symbolizing function via the area of the presentational forms.

Editor's Note: Dr. van Rhijn would like to add the following "afterthought" to his remarks at the Conference:

I would like to add here a very concise theory of symbol organization. In the "center" of this function lie the discursive forms by which emotional ideas are expressed in words. "Around" this "center function" lie the presentational forms by which ideas and emotions are expressed in pictures, gestures, music, dance, dramatic arts, etc. In the third "region," "the outskirts," if you please, lie the additional, the substitute forms, used only if the discursive and the presentational forms cannot symbolize the complex problems presented to them by the subconscious. Fears, phobias, compulsions, depression, hypertension, ulcers, asthma, etc., are substitute symbolizations. LSD facilitates the use of the presentational forms instead of the substitute. So it is related to art therapy and psychodrama but is shrewder and more constructive than these.

Malitz: Dr. van Rhijn, I am a little troubled by one thing: Most people today recognize the Freudian concept of ego, super-ego, and id as a metapsychological theoretical framework rather than actual anatomic areas. Are you referring to an anatomic area in the brain which will some day be discovered by new techniques, or is this purely an intellectual concqptualization, to help explain such matters as thought and behavior? I am not clear about what you mean, since you use mechanistic and anatomic terms, such as blood-brain barrier, in the same frame of reference as symbolization.

van Rhijn: I have conceptualized this by thinking and feeling myself into the problem, groping my way with the help of physiology, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other.

Dr. Fremont-Smith, didn't we speak about the significant possibility that the process of giving significance to sensory input is localized in diencephalic centers, and symbolization, in temporal areas? I feel quite sure that the subconscious, consciousness, the loading-with-meaning, symbolization, and others will some day be proved to be brain functions.

Fremont-Smith: May I just make a general comment again, picking up on what I said before? It is rather important, in order to help us. We are all distressed to some extent. Part of our distress is the nature of the problem. Today, it is quite impossible to talk sensibly about neurosis in terms of known brain function; we just haven't the knowledge. We don't know enough electrophysiology; we don't know enough electrochemistry or enzyme chemistry. We don't know enough to make sense about neurosis in these terms alone, Dr. West. We have to talk about the behavior of human beings; we have to talk about symbolization; we have to talk about an entirely different level.

Since it is my assumption that this is the case, one alternative is to talk entirely on the level of schematic thinking, with no relation whatsoever to brain structure and brain physiology, and then we may find ourselves lost and floating. This, in a sense, is what we do at present. For instance: Most of our psychoanalytic theories do not rest on any structure of brain function whatsoever; they are entirely at the conceptual level.

Anyone can devise a schematic system to his liking and assert that it is so. Someone else may disagree with it and make up another one. Others say they are only interested in what can be described, in neurophysiological terms, and that anything beyond that is futile, becayse nothing is known about it. Such people find themselves really quite unable to deal with the actual clinical problems patients present.

Dr. van Rhijn is doing something in between. He is trying to base some part of what he is discussing on some selected areas of neurophysiology and biochemistry. Then he leaves these, but with some strands attached, hopefully—I may not be interpreting him correctly—and brings in a conceptual frame of reference, with a resting point or several resting points related to neurophysiology, or at least analogous to neurophysiological problems.

He selects the ones meaningful to him and which give hima creative development he finds helpful. In this selection, he is bound to choose places that we would not choose for our attachments to neurophysiology. We can be most constructive if we give him a good chance to develop his thesis and ask for clarification only when necessary. But if we challenge each step, he will never get a chance to really bring out his thesis. (159-162)

…

van Rhijn: I believe when this function of symbolization is disturbed—I will come to the nature of this disturbance a little later—the subconscious will be crowded, crowded with ideas, conceptions, notions, feelings, impulses, conflicts, and so on, which can't come through to consciousness, since they are not conceptualized because of this disturbed function.

Thus, rather than talking about what is called "resistance," I would rather talk about "the disturbed function of symbolization." Jung has proved that when what is called resistance is relieved in neurotics, some neuroses are relieved and others are not. What is it, then, if it isn't only "resistance" or the disturbed function of the symbolization which causes neurosis?

I have indicated that there are three regions: consciousness, the subconscious, and the function of symbolization, which is in between. When we ask what the cause of the dysfunctioning is, we must ask where it is: in the ego, in consciousness or in the subconscious; or in the relation between the two, which we called the function of symbolization.

We must come to the other two possible causes of neurosis. The first is that there is apparently a disturbance of ego functioning in neurosis. (However, I don't want to say too much about what I see as ego.) We see it centered in self-consciousness, in self-pity, and in self-dramatization. Sometimes it seems unable, sometimes unwilling, to integrate concepts trying to come through from the subconscious: concepts of the father and more; of self; of conflicting tendencies, more or less punitive; of prohibitions; penalties; and so on.

Bateson: Is the ego also semipermeable?

van Rhijn: The ego, as I see it, is a rather fluid conception of self.

Murphy: Made up of fragments of identifications?

van Rhijn: Made up of body image and image of the personality.

Bateson: It is a corpus of symbolization?

van Rhijn: Yes, it is. Perhaps we see the ego too much as a rigid structure. It is a rather fluid structure of combinations of images coming from the body and from the personality in relation to others.

We often find in neurosis that the ego has identified itself with what Jung calls the "persona." This identification is quite important as a cause of neurosis. But I don't want to say too much about this because talking about things on the conscious level lands one right in the middle of ordinary psychotherapy.

I turn, then, to the subconscious. We cannot gain access to it, our own or that of the neurotic or psychotic. I tried to feel or grope my way there. Perhaps I could use a metaphor to illustrate my thinking about it:

In Holland, I once saw a movie about logging in Canada and the United States. In the spring, the logs are thrown into the river, where they sometimes jam. To get them going again, they must be dynamited. I feel that the situation in the subconscious of neurotics is similar; it has been jammed by ideas and has to be dynaited to get going again. We could say, then, that the subconscious of the neurotic is clogged or jammed, and the stream of energy does not reach consciousness in a normal way, but flows over its borders and gives rise to the neurotic symptoms. These are, in a way, also symbolizations of the energies, notions, ideas of the subconscious, but are borderline symbolizations.

Fremont-Smith: Then the overflow means they come around through other pathways?

van Rhijn: They look for pathways in the borderline area, and symptoms symbolic for the repressed energies appear.

My supposition is that all these "logs" in the subconscious are useful. But there is another possibility, namely, that the things hamming the stream in the subconscious of borderline schizophrenics may not be useful. Tehre is also the possiblity that the stream of energy is jammed by disorganized material, by refuse. Thus, in the subconscious of schizophrenics, there is sometimes disorganization and overflowing resulting from the jamming, which also results in neurotic symptoms. These last are a sign that the patient is relieving himself of tensions resulting from the psychotic process. In analysis of these borderline schizophrenics, it is necessary to deal with much disorganized material, which can pour forth when the situation is relieved. (163-164)

. . .

West: Dr. Fremont-Smith's lengthy apology for Dr. van Rhijn's presentation almost forced me to speak, but I didn't want to say anything at the time. Dr. van Rhijn's theory, as I understand it, is not what Dr. Fremont-Smith's explanation implies. Dr. van Rhijn's theory is not in between the physiological and the topographical. Rather, it is a purely topographical theory, very far removed from any actual physiological process.

Peck: I disagree.

West: It is very reminiscent of some quite early Freudian conceptualizations, with notions of a sort of congestion of the subconscious and relief provided by discharge. That, in therapy, used to be called "the cathartic method" Since Dr. van Rhijn's subject is "Psychotherapy by Symbolic Presentation of Repressed Energies," I have the feeling that, although he has notyet come to it, Dr. van Rhijn is driving at the idea that congested or stored-up things are unable to get through the holes in his rather rigid prototype, but that through the mediation of LSD they will be allowed through and will be given some kind of symbolic form, with subsequent relief of congestion and improvement in symptoms. We should let Dr. van Rhijn go ahead and tell us how he thinks LSD accomplishes this. (165-166)

malitz: I would like to clarify one thing one thing in your log analogy, which was very clear, at least to me. You mentioned that in the neurotic the logs are jammed up and have to be dynamited before they can go through. You also mentioned that in the schizophrenic the logs are either rotten, defective, or are refuse. Do you feel that the schizohrenic's waste should be dynamited to let it through, or that it should be let alone?

van Rhijn: I'm glad you asked that, because I am rather anxious to start analysis or to give LSD to a patient whose neurotic symptoms, I feel, are really holding back the schizophrenic process.

Fremont-Smith: You mean that you are hesitant to do this?

van Rhijn: Yes, I am hesitant

. . .

West: I would say that your hesitation is very wise. You should continue to hesitate.

van Rhijn: If my metaphor is correct, that the subconscious of the schizophrenic is crowded with partly or completely tattered ideas and notions, then the patient will not become better when these things are permitted to flow through to consciousness.

Fremont-Smith: They all depends upon certain assumptions. If it is assumed that they can be washed out through the consciousness into some air space above and can be replaced by good ideas, then it would be a very good thing to let htem come out. But it may not be, if they are in a self-replicating system, in which only more and more of the same kind are going to be released by releasing the tension.

The difficulty in coming to grips with any conceptual frame of reference of this sort is that underlying each piece of it there is, inevitably, a series of assumptions. Your assumptions are going to be different from the assumptions that Mr. Bateson, for example, has. It is very evident that Mr. Bateson's interpretation of what he thought you were saying didn't make any sense to you. It just didn't "click." You were working on a series of unexpressed assumptions different from his and from those of others areound the room. This is part of a very real semantic difficulty, of communicating about a concptual frame of reference which is related very tenuously to anything we can touch and measure.

van Rhijn: I haven't worked as yet with borderline or clearly schizophrenic patients, and I would like to hear from someone who has had some experience with them.

Hewitt: We did. The first experiment we did was with four schizophrenic patients. Three of them were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics, but were really borderline cases, although they had been in the hospital for some time and all of them had had shock treatment. There is apparently no record of shock treatments for the fourth patient, a hebephrenic, but I don't know any more than that. The hospital record was very inadequate.

In three cases, I, of course, had the same feeling you did. I was under some apprehension about how much to stir up. But, on the other hand, in the placebo session, it seemed that we weren't going to be able to get any further than the hospital had with other types of treatment. So it seemed worth trying 50 or 70 μg. of LSD, to stir up enough coded material, or whatever you want to call it, so that I could perhaps find some method of approaching the problem. After that, we saw the patient again in a placebo session, which was not very fruitful. We then started on a tolerance series of MLD or LSD, which, each time, would be an increase of, possibly 10 μg.; at least this is the way it seemed. The dosages were given two or three times a day, and the increase, although it was actually started at 5 or 10 μg., rose to 25 μg. However, the difference did not seem that great to us, since tolerance was being built up. Each time, these patients became much more coherent. They seemed to develop more insight and were able to discuss the problems they had brought forth in the LSD session. (165-168)

…

Lennard: I believe that one of the difficulties here is that the concepts with which we are dealing are on too high a level of abstraction. I have data here from four patients given LSD over a period of time. The puszzling thing is that after taking LSD for some time, patients can discuss the kind of thing Mr. Bateson has called the "double bind." They can deal with contradictory messages which they have received as children; they can report on these contradictions, on being caught up in them.

How does this happen? How does LSD do it? I don't know. But, if anyone has data of this kind, he will see that there are certain changes in the way that the patient deals with his experiences. I would like to ask how this is possible. What does this mean.

Abramson: Dr. Lennard, did you mention also that these were psychotic patients?

Lennard: Yes.

Fremont-Smith: Mrs Hewitt's patients?

Lennard: Yes, these were Mrs. Hewitt's patients.

Fremont-Smith: It seems to me that the kind of information you have presented is important and cannot be neglected. This means, at least as seen from this frame of reference, that the patient is able to deal effectively, or more effectively, with material he could not deal with before. What this means for the final prognosis is something we don't yet know anything about, as far as I know. We must recognize that there can be temporary phases of apparent reintegration of capacity to function intellectually; this doesn't necessarily indicate a more favorable prognosis, because it may not last. It hink most of us would feel that this is a step in the right direction. Why? Because the patient is now behaving in a way we look upon as more normal. Perhaps this is the only criterion we have for acting on it.

I don't believe we can use or make any generalized statements about what this really means in therapy until a large number of patients have been treated over a long periof of time. This will take many, many years. One of the greatest difficulties facing us is that therapy itself changes so rapidly that we rarely have any comparable results over any period of time. By the time a patient is followed up, the whole approach to therapy has changed.

We are in a very difficult period of development in this field. Though we should not hesitate to express our strong feelings, we should also recognize that, however stronly we feel and whatever data we have, our data are, of necissity, incomplete, and further, that out position is based on a series of assumptions which may not be satisfactory to any others in the group.

van Rhijn: To continue: I have discussed the three cause of neurosis, and we will now see what LSD can do. As we all know, LSD in suitable doses (100 to 400 μg.) produces hallucinations; that is clear. These hallucinations cause less anxiety when, unlike the early experiments, the patient is in a dark room. That is why I put my patients in a totally dark room, so that they would have no trouble with the double orientation. They do not see the changes in their environment, but experience only the things that come up.

Fremont-Smith: They don't have to test against reality, because there is no reality there to test?

van Rhijn: That's right. There is no reality, or practically none. My central theory is that the personal content of hallucinations experienced under LSD or mescaline are the pictural symbolizations of repressed energies, tensions, self-conceptions, feelings, conflicts, and so on. These are more normal symbolizations, because the neurotic symptoms, too, are symbolizations in a way. However, the difference between symptom formation in neurosis and the content of the hallucinations is that the former is not a cognitive process and the latter is. By using the presentational forms instead of the additional or substitute forms, the necessity for using these substitute channels (i.e., the symptom formation) disappears, and the symptoms therefore disappear.

Three aims are reached with this one method of therapy: (a) The subconscious is relieved of its tensions, of the concepts of self and others which could not come through: the "log jam" in the subconscious. (b) The ego gets quite another notion of itself, which is very useful. (c) The function of symbolization, which regulates the energies coming from the subconscious and going to consciousness, is stimulated, and we see this, in practice, becoming harmonized.

I am a little troubled about using the word harmonizing in this connection. But when patients who have had aonly two or three experiences of this kind are seen years later, then it must be concluded that this functional barrier between the subconscious and consciousness does have something of a harmonizing function.

Fremont-Smith: Would you say that the log jam obstructing the free flow through the channels has been broken by getting the material out through other pathways, and that now the original channels are open again as normal passageways?

van Rhijn: Yes. The original channels are not only open: they are more widely open. They are becoming more or less free, freer than they were before. This process will go on for a long time after the LSD sessions.

Fremont-Smith: There is progressive improvement?

van Rhijn: Yes, progressive improvement after the LSD sessions. Once the defenses have been broken down. For example, by symbolizing the fear of using the normal channels, these normal (presentational and discursive) form-giving channels will be used again, and will be better and better able in the future to concptualize what is in the subconscious.

Seen from my view of what neurosis is, all three aims which could be realized are reached by one therapeutic procedure. If ound out that I need not interfere with this process; that is the reason why I withdraw. I give the patient his LSD at eight o'clock in the morning, on an empty stomach, wich him a good journey, and go away. But he knows he can call me, because there is a person in the room, a very quiet person, who doesn't say anything but with whom he can discuss the things he sees. He almost never does. (170-172)

…

Hoffer: The subject of the Conference is "The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy," which I interpret as "The Use of the LSD Experience in Psychotherapy." This interpretation is very important, because no matter how the experience is induced, I think the results will be the same. LSD is only one of the agents, as is the psychotherapist.

Regarding the experience, Dr. Fremont-Smith made a very interesting slip of the tongue when he referred to "a therapy built around LSD." He corrected himself later, for he actually meant "a theory of therapy built around LSD." I would to accept his subconscious idea s the theme of my discussion.

So far, as Dr. Abramson clearly outlined, we have used frames of reference in which LSD is used as an aid to psychotherapy. However, within our frame of reference, in Saskatchewan (and, I think, in Dr van Rhijn's, also), psychotherapy is used as an aid to the LSD experience. Our objective is to give each patient a particular LSD experience. To this end, we use psychological and environmental tricks: sound and music; visual stimuli, such as paintings by Van Gogh; tactile stimuli, such as various smooth or rough objects for the patients to handle. WE also take advantage of the heightened suggestibility of the subjects by using persuasion, suggestion, and reiterated demand, with the theme of hope and possibility of change.

Our results with alcoholics, as of October, 1958, were as follows: Out of forty, followed for a period of 6 months to 6 years, seventeen were not drinking; eleven were much improved, that is, their drinking habits were moderate; and twelve were not changed at all. Thus, a total of 70 percent were improved. By March, 1959, our series had increased to sixty, and the same ratio held. This group included patients with character disorders, who showed the best response, and psychopaths and psychotics, who responded least well.

I think that what Dr. van Rhijn is talking about here is the use of the experience as the therapeutic agent and not as an adjunct to psychotherapy. I believe that others here are using it in a rather similar way. (173-174)

. . .

Fremont-Smith: … [W]hat do you do if the patient has all the time in the world? What criteria do you use? Do you then tell the patient that you think he needs three more treatments?

van Rhijn: No, he himself always says, "I am cured," or "I am changed." Or the family of the patient comes to me and says, "What did you do with this man, that he has changed so much?" (176)

…

Klee: Perhaps you would like to postpone the answer to the question about the criteria for improvement in the patients, Dr. van Rhijn, but I think it is a very vital one to our Conference. I am sure you don't just settle for the patient telling you that he feels better. You must collect a great deal of further subjective and objective data as well.

van Rhijn: I can answer this immediately. I have four criteria. The first criterion, of course, is the patient himself telling us, "I have changed in my outlook on life." I think these experiences which change the subject's outlook on life are what you called transcendental experiences.

The second criterion is the reactions of the patient's wife, who knows him best, his children, his mother, his sister, his brother, or his employer. He is working regularly. He can see and feel that something has changed in his outlook, his conduct, his face. Then there is the reaction of the group he is in. . . . I give five treatments a week, in 2-week intervals, so I have ten patients continuously. The group responds immediately when there has been a change, a deep alteration, in one of their companion's conscious or subconscious.

…

The fourth criterion is what I feel in the contact with the patient when he asks for it (and he asks for it when he has what he calls his "great experience"), and also what he dreams between treatments. We often see that patients begin to dream, and that is an essential part of the whole setup. I ask that he write down his dreams, not only in the hospital but also after he leaves. That is really an essential part of the treatment: that I stay in contact with him, by his writing down all the dreams he produces.

…

… The follow-up now is 3 years. I see in these dreams, in the subconscious, a very interesting harmonizing process, or digging process, or whatever the process might be called by which deeper and deeper layers are reached.

Eisner: An uncovering?

van Rhijn: No. It is—

Malitz: Penetration?

van Rhijn: No. Deeper and deeper layers begin to cooperate.

Fremont-Smith: It is the release of deeper and deeper layers.

van Rhijn: Yes. The energies come flowing to the surface, to a certain usefulness and are used to a certain extent. It is very interesting to see how this process will go on and on for a number of years. (178-179)

…

Fremont-Smith: [Peck] mentioned a whole variety of different kinds of conditions, including skin diseases and arthritides.

Peck: Migraine was one, and it came into this series in this way: In treating patients for various and sundry psychological complaints we found that some would come back a week or two later and say, "The headache is gone." We asked, "What headache?" They replied, "Oh, the headache I've had for 10 or 15 years."

Whittlesley: We found like to report that we have seen the same phenomenon. A number of "physiological" complaints have finally disappeared. We report the details of this in our follow-up study of the LSD experience.

Peck: Can any of you explain that? I have no explanation for it, other than what we have been saying, namely, self-therapy, which I know happens. I have had it happen, and so have the patients. All of you who have taken this drug, I am sure, have had your own interpretations, and if you feel it is right for you, it is right in my opinion—

West: I would like to exercise the prerogative of interruption and, at the risk of being branded forever as an incurable skeptic, to say that it is absolutely incredible to me that in this particular list of diagnostic categories, we can look down the table of results and see, in every single instance, more in the "excellent" group than in any other group. Either LSD is the most phenomenal drug ever introduced into treatment in psychiatry, or else the results were evaluated by criteria imposed by enthusiastic, if not positively prejudiced, people.

…

Hoffer: I think I should speak on this point. There are two sorts of critics: those willing to examine the evidence before passing an opinion, and the cynic, who doesn't believe anything. Here we should be skeptical, not cynical. In the small series of cases I have seen, the results seem unbelievable, too. But the fact is that everyone who sees these people in action does believe the results. We should look at Dr. Peck's evidence and examine it very carefully, rather than scoff at it as something nonexistent. (185-186)

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Appendix 2: Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices

Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix One

Related Psychopathological Syndromes

schizophrenic psychoses (paranoid symptomatology, feelings of mystical union, encounter with metaphysical evil forces, karmic experiences); hypochondriasis (based on strange and bizarre physical sensations); hysterical hallucinosis and confusing daydreams with reality

Corresponding Activities in Freudian Erotogenic Zones

libidinal satisfaction in all erogenic zones; libidinal feelings during rocking and bathing; partial approximation to this condition after oral, anal, urethral, or genital satisfaction and after delivery of a child

Associated Memories from Postnatal Life

situations from later life where important needs are satisfied, such as happy moments from infancy and childhood (good mothering, play with peers, harmonious periods in the family, etc.), fulfilling love, romances; trips or vacations in beautiful natural settings; exposure to artistic creations of high aesthetic value; swimming in the ocean and clear lakes, etc.

Phenomenology in LSD Sessions

undisturbed intrauterine life: realistic recollections of "good womb" experiences; "oceanic" type of ecstasy; experience of cosmic unity; visions of Paradise; disturbances of intrauterine life: realistic recollections of "bad womb experiences" (fetal crises, diseases and emotional upheavals of the mother, twin situation, attempted abortions), cosmic engulfment; paranoid ideation; unpleasant physical sensations ("hangover," chills and fine spasms, unpleasant tastes, disgust, feelings of being poisoned); association with various transpersonal experiences (archetypal elements, racial and evolutionary memories, encounter with metaphysical forces, past-incarnation experiences, etc.)

Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix Two

Related Psychopathological Syndromes

schizophrenic psychoses (elements of hellish tortures, experience of meaningless "cardboard" world); severe, inhibited "endogenous" depressions; irrational inferiority and guilt feelings; hypochondriasis (based on painful physical sensations); alcoholism and drug addiction

Corresponding Activities in Freudian Erotogenic Zones

oral frustration (thirst, hunger, painful stimuli): retention of feces and/or urine; sexual frustration; experiences of cold, pain and other unpleasant sensations

Associated Memories from Postnatal Life

situations endangering survival and bodily integrity (war experiences, accidents, injuries, operations, painful diseases, near-drowning, episodes of suffocation, imprisonment, brainwashing and illegal interrogation, physical abuse, etc.); severe psychological traumatizations (emotional deprivation, rejection, threatening situations, oppressing family atmosphere, ridicule and humiliation, etc.)

Phenomenology in LSD Sessions

immense physical and psychological suffering; unbearable and inescapable situation that will never end; various images of hell; feelings of entrapment and encasement (no exit); agonizing guilt and inferiority feelings; apocalyptic view of the world (horrors of wars and concentration camps, terror of the Inquisition; dangerous epidemics; diseases; decrepitude and death, etc.); meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence; "cardboard world" or the atmosphere of artificiality and gadgets; ominous dark colors and unpleasant physical symptoms (feelings of oppression and compression, cardiac distress, flushes and chills, sweating, difficult breathing)

Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix Three

Related Psychopathological Syndromes

schizophrenic psychoses (sadomasochistic and scatological elements, automutilation, abnormal sexual behavior); agitated depression, sexual deviations (sadomasochism, male homosexuality, drinking of urine, eating of feces); obsessive-compulsive neuroses; psychogenic asthma, tics, stammering; conversion and anxiety hysteria; frigidity and impotence; neurasthenia; traumatic neuroses; organ neuroses; migraine headache; enuresis and encopressis; psoriasis; peptic ulcer

Corresponding Activities in Freudian Erotogenic Zones

chewing and swallowing of food; oral aggression and destruction of an object; process of defecation and urination; anal and urethral aggression; sexual orgasm; phallic aggression; delivering of a child, statoacoustic eroticism (jolting, gymnastics, fancv diving, parachuting)

Associated Memories from Postnatal Life

struggles, fights and adventurous activities (active attacks in battles and revolutions, experiences in military service, rough airplane flights, cruises on stormy oceans, hazardous car-driving, boxing); highly sensual memories (carnivals, amusement parks and nightclubs, wild parties, sexual orgies, etc.); childhood observations of adult sexual activities; experiences of seduction and rape; in females, deliverv of their own children

Phenomenology in LSD Sessions

intensification of suffering to cosmic dimensions; borderline between pain and pleasure; "volcanic" type of ecstasy; brilliant colors; explosions and fireworks; sadomasochistic orgies; murders and bloody sacrifice, active engagement in fierce battles; atmosphere of wild adventure and dangerous explorations; intense sexual orgiastic feelings and scenes of harems and carnivals; experiences of dying and being reborn; religions involving bloody sacrifice (Aztecs, Christ's suffering and death on the cross, Dionysus, etc.); intense phvsical manifestations (pressures and pains, suffocation, muscular tension and discharge in tremors and twitches, nausea and vomiting, hot flushes and chills, sweating, cardiac distress, problems of sphincter control, ringing in the ears)

Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix Four

Related Psychopathological Syndromes

schizophrenic psychoses (death-rebirth experiences, messianic delusions, elements of destruction and recreation of the world, salvation and redemption, identification with Christ); manic symptomatology; female homosexuality; exhibitionism

Corresponding Activities in Freudian Erotogenic Zones

satiation of thirst and hunger; pleasure of sucking; libidinal feelings after defecation, urination, sexual orgasm, or delivery of a child

Associated Memories from Postnatal Life

fortuitous escape from dangerous situations (end of war or revolution, survival of an accident or operation); overcoming of severe obstacles by active effort; episodes of strain and hard struggle resulting in a marked success; natural scenes (beginning of spring, end of an ocean storm, sunrise, etc.)

Phenomenology in LSD Sessions

enormous decompression, expansion of space, visions of gigantic halls; radiant light and beautiful colors (heavenly blue, golden, rainbow, peacock feathers); feelings of rebirth and redemption; appreciation of simple way of life; sensory enhancement; brotherly feelings; humanitarian and charitable tendencies; occasional manic activity and grandiose feeling; transition to elements of BPM 1; pleasant feelings may be interrupted by umbilical crisis: sharp pain in the navel; loss of breath, fear of death and castration, shifts in the body, but no external pressures

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