I Have America Surrounded

Psychologists and psychiatrists took over the role in society once occupied by priests or shamans. It was their job to make sure that everything was all right. America couldn’t train psychologists quickly enough in those days, for it was believed that if only they had enough head doctors, then society could be made perfect. For a bright, ambitious young man like Timothy Leary the field of psychology allowed him to establish himself rapidly, achieve financial comfort and respectability, and settle down to just the sort of idealised life that psychologists and the American Dream were offering. After the war he returned to academia and embarked on the longest period of conformity in his life. He moved to California and, in September 1946, he became a doctoral student in psychology at Berkeley. He would consider himself a Californian, jail and legal status permitting, for the rest of his life.

Tim’s professional rise was quick and seemingly effortless. After finishing his studies he worked as a consultant, an instructor at the University of California’s Medical Center, and in private practice. In 1954 he became director of psychology research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, and published nearly 50 papers in psychology journals. His work culminated in the publication of a book called Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personal Evaluation. A huge work, 518 pages long and stuffed with diagrams and charts, it created a big impression in the world of psychology. The Annual Review of Psychology named it their ‘Best Book on Psychotherapy of the Year’ in 1957 and called it a ‘must read’ for American psychologists. It was followed by a manual of diagnostic tests called Multi Level Measurement of Interpersonal Behaviour, which sold well to institutions such as the prison system. It was these tests that, 14 years later, labelled Tim as a model member of the Californian prison population.

Interpersonal Diagnosis was essentially a method of categorising patients based on their personality types. The system would be used for decades to come and was an important step towards the personality tests commonly used today, such as the Myers-Briggs assessment. It included many ideas that were radical at the time. It argued that the definition of normality in psychological therapies was nothing more than a reflection of the white, middle-class values of the vast majority of psychologists.11 It claimed that the profession was too hung up on symptoms when it should have been analysing the patient’s environment and circumstances. Too often, what was considered abnormal, neurotic or psychotic behaviour was a ‘healthy, pro-survival adaptation’ of an individual to an unhealthy situation. And he argued that ultimately a patient is not a victim, and should not be encouraged to seek a source of blame for their problems, such as bad parents, the system or their background. Instead, they must accept responsibility for their lives and their own reactions to the situations in which they find themselves. This is an idea that is now a familiar concept in the twenty-first century personal development movement. Although many of Tim’s staff contributed to the work that went into the book, the ideas behind it and the overall philosophy were clearly his. It earned him a nickname: Theory Leary.

Interpersonal Diagnosis was the high point of Leary’s psychology career. But despite his success, his dissatisfaction with his profession was slowly becoming visible. For years his research team had been keeping score of the success rate of psychology. The results were sobering. No matter what types of psychotherapy were being used, a third of patients would get better, a third would stay the same, and a third would get worse. Control groups, where the patients did not receive treatment, showed exactly the same scores. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the profession he studied simply didn’t work.

Tim’s personal life flowered during this period. He met Marianne Busch during the diagnosis of his hearing problem in the army and fell in love at first sight. She was intelligent, musical, sophisticated and very sexy, and they were married on 12 April 1944. Once in California, they bought a $40000 house in the Berkeley Hills, at 1230 Queen’s Drive, with a terrific view of San Francisco across the Bay. Their first child, Susan, was born three years later, and their son Jack followed two years afterwards.

Their social life revolved around parties with other professional and academic couples. These were flirtatious, alcohol-fuelled affairs, but they always remained on the right side of respectable. No one really misbehaved, or at least not publicly. Like everyone else, the Learys drank heavily and, despite Tim’s father’s alcoholism, they thought nothing of it. Jugs of martinis were thought to be sophisticated, and those who didn’t drink were considered prudes. Cracks had started to appear in the marriage after the children were born, but alcohol helped to mask them, so they stayed, in true 1950s’ style, hidden and ignored.

In 1953, after months of friendship and flirting, Tim realised that he was in love with his project manager, Mary della-Cioppa, more commonly known as Delsey They started an affair that lasted two years, meeting three or four times a week in a small apartment that Tim rented in Telegraph Avenue. The affair became common knowledge, but although Marianne knew, it was never mentioned. Her drinking increased. She started seeing a psychiatrist.

No one realised how badly Marianne was suffering. She kept up the proper, respectable 1950s’ façade when she could have complained and argued and screamed. She could have escaped through separation or divorce. She could have taken the children and moved back in with her parents. Instead, she got out of bed on the night of 21 October 1955, taking care not wake Tim, and went downstairs to the garage. She closed the heavy redwood garage door, which was always left open because it had swollen in the damp weather. She got in the car and she started the engine.

When Tim woke the next morning, it was his thirty-fifth birthday. He was hung over. He searched the house, looking for his wife. His cries of ‘Marianne!’ woke the children, and they were following him when he went outdoors. The sound of the engine idling could be heard from within the garage. He wrenched the redwood door open and inhaled the sudden rush of exhaust fumes. Marianne’s body was in the front seat.

The note she left was brief. ‘My Darling,’ it said, ‘I cannot live without your love. I have loved life but have lived through you. The children will grow up wondering about their mother. I love them so much and please tell them that. Please be good to them. They are so dear.’12

It’s impossible to say how anyone, whether spouse or child, can recover from an event like this. The Learys found their own ways to cope. Tim dealt with the situation by turning to Delsey for support, and after the funeral they were married. They honeymooned in Mexico with the children, a vacation that Jack Leary would later describe as ‘short and unpleasant’. After returning to California, Tim felt the need to get right away. He took a leave of absence from his job, rented out the house and dragged the family off to Spain. The voyage was miserable and Tim and Delsey separated shortly after they arrived.

This self-imposed European exile would be a period of transition for Tim, and the end of his previous life would prove to be painful. The children were having a horrible time being dragged between various European schools. He had lost his faith in his profession. Marianne’s death hung over him, and he now had two failed marriages to add to his failures at Classical High, Holy Cross, West Point and the University of Alabama. He caught the clap from a Spanish prostitute during the Christmas of 1957. His money supply started to dwindle.

Tim rented an Olivetti typewriter and began work on a manuscript that outlined the changes he felt his profession needed to make in order to achieve results. It was called The Existential Transaction. In it he argued that psychologists shouldn’t stay inside clinics, but needed to venture out into the real world and see patients in real-life situations, as the act of going inside a hospital and seeing a doctor changes the patient’s psyche. He also argued that the psychologist himself should not try to be a neutral observer. He had to become involved with the patient, and be prepared to be changed by the process as much as, or even more than, the patient. This was a radical stance to take in the field of psychology. It recalls the paradigm shift in physics caused by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which stated that the act of observing an event changes the event. This was the ‘transaction’ of the book’s title: the idea that something had to pass between doctor and patient if there were to be any change in the patient’s condition.

In January 1959 Tim became ill. He was staying in an apartment that had been tunnelled out of the rock in Calle San Miguel, in the south of Spain, where water ran down the bare rock walls and the beds were always damp. His scalp began to burn and his face began to swell. Water blisters formed on his cheeks. ‘Tim’s head was almost double in size,’ his son recalled later, ‘completely swollen up, incredible! He couldn’t see; his eyes were completely shut!’13 The Spanish doctors were unable to diagnose exactly what was wrong with him, for they had never seen anything like it before. The swelling and blisters began to spread to his body. Jack and Susan were sent to stay with a nearby American family, and Tim checked into a warm hotel. The mysterious disease spread to his hands and feet. He could barely walk and began to smell of decay.

The hotel did not permit guests to have pets, so he had had to smuggle Jack’s puppy into his room. The dog was also sick, and soon left a river of slimy yellow diarrhoea across the floor. Tim knew that he would be evicted from the hotel if the maid saw it, so he crawled to the bathroom, collected the toilet paper and set about mopping up the mess. It took him the best part of an hour. Then he discovered that the toilet had broken, and he couldn’t flush the evidence away.

The window overlooked the yard at the back of the hotel, so he crawled over to it and threw the paper out. It landed on electrical cables below, fluttering like flags for all to see. The only way to reach it was to head out across the hallway, down the stairs and out into the back yard. Every step was agony. He used his umbrella as a cane but fell more than once. Somehow he climbed on top of a packing crate, where he frantically waved the umbrella, desperately trying to reach the paper that dripped above his head.

When he finally made it back to his room, hours later, he collapsed into his chair. The pain was great and he had no intention of ever moving again. As the hours passed and the day turned to night, Tim basically just gave up. As he would later write, ‘I died. I let go. I surrendered. I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My identity. The guilts. The wants. With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social life were gone.’ 14 And then there came an incredible feeling of liberation.

At some point in the depths of that night Tim felt something new growing in him. When the dawn came he found the swelling had gone from his hands. The disease was leaving him. But it was not just physical healing that occurred, because for the first time in his life Tim believed that he had experienced something spiritual. He felt that he had been reborn, and he suddenly had hope and confidence. He felt that he could move away from the life that he had led, and embrace whatever new life was about to arrive.

This new life was not long in coming. Tim heard that Professor David McClelland, the director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, was taking a sabbatical in Florence. Professor McClelland had read Interpersonal Diagnosis and the pair met for lunch. Leary explained his thoughts in The Existential Transaction. They echoed emerging theories from a number of American psychologists, and McClelland recognised that these radical theories seemed to offer a way forward for the field of psychology. Impressed, he offered Leary a job. Tim would be returning to Massachusetts. He was off to Harvard.

CHAPTER 3 But Don’t You Think He’s Just a Little Bit Square?

Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard at the tail end of 1959. It was a good time to draw a line under the past and focus on the future. The 1960s were about to begin.

His new position called for a new outfit, so he visited a Harvard Square tailor and emerged wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a button-down shirt. With his greying hair, horn-rimmed glasses and hearing aid, he looked every inch a stereotypical East Coast academic. The only clue to his rebellious instincts were the white tennis shoes that he wore everywhere. He moved into a nearby hotel and enrolled the children in yet another school.

He soon settled into life at the Harvard Center for Personality Research, and his classes made an immediate impact on the students. There was some suspicion among the more conservative members of the faculty about his ideas, but he was undeniably interesting and it was possible that he was on to something important. He made friends quickly and was soon part of a drinking group called the White Hand Drinking Society. Evenings were spent hanging out in Harvard Square bars, discussing work and generally putting the world to rights. The return to Massachusetts also brought him near to his childhood home, so he was able to spend more time rebuilding his relationship with his mother. She was horrified when she discovered that her grandchildren had never once attended mass, but at least Tim’s current position gave her cause for pride.

Tim got into the habit of returning to his small office on Divinity Avenue to read and drink wine late at night, after his children were asleep. In this relaxed atmosphere he began to attract visits from eager and curious graduate students. Tim was always welcoming and willing to give time to their questions and concerns. It was during this time that he met Assistant Professor Richard Alpert, a man also prone to late-night hours. Alpert was 10 years younger than Leary, and was shorter with a fuller build and a round, friendly face. Like Leary, he was ambitious, a trait inherited from his extremely wealthy family. His father was a noted Massachusetts lawyer who had previously been president of the New Haven Railroad, and Richard had grown up in an atmosphere of money and success. He was a warm, fast-talking, eminently likeable psychologist who was a big hit with Tim’s children. When Tim decided to spend the summer vacation in Mexico, Richard agreed to join him. Their respective methods of journeying south said much about their different personalities. Tim was planning to make the journey in an old Ford that he had just bought, a plan that struck those who had seen the car as being both dangerous and extraordinarily optimistic. Richard tackled the journey with a little more style. He bought a small aeroplane and flew himself there.

That holiday took place in a Spanish-style villa at Cuernavaca. It was an idyllic environment, with a long veranda, terrace, swimming pool and a lush green lawn surrounded by ahuehuete trees and colourful flowering vines. Tim’s daughter Susan spent the summer with friends in Berkeley, but Tim and his son Jack were visited by many friends and colleagues, including Professor McClelland, Richard Alpert and an old friend and drinking buddy from graduate school in Berkeley, Frank Barron. Frank had been instrumental in setting up Tim’s meeting with Professor McClelland in Florence, which led to the offer of work at Harvard. Tim had returned the favour by recommending him for a similar position at Harvard soon after he had arrived.

When he visited Tim in Italy in 1959, Frank had been talking enthusiastically about some ‘magic mushrooms’ that he had obtained from a Mexican psychiatrist. Tim’s response to this was fairly standard for a psychologist in the 1950s. He was disconcerted and a little embarrassed when his previously rational friend suddenly began raving about mystical states and visions, and he warned him that he was in danger of losing his scientific credibility if he ‘babbled this way’ publicly.1

The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, the leading investment bank, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society. Together with his wife Valentina, he had travelled the world investigating the importance of toadstools in tribal society. He had spent two years in Mexico investigating an intriguing report by anthropologists who, in 1936, witnessed a ‘sacred mushroom’ ceremony in a remote Mexican village. This report seemed to provide evidence that a mushroom cult, believed to date back 4000 years, was still in existence. This cult was centred on the ingestion of a mushroom called teonanacatl, or ‘God’s flesh’. These ceremonies had been driven underground following the arrival of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The cult had been dismissed as myth, and botanists had claimed that these fungi simply didn’t exist.

The Life article, a 17-page feature in the magazine’s ‘Great Adventure’ series, detailed how the Wassons had travelled to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they eventually met a curandera, or medicine woman, from the teonanacatl cult. Being included in a ceremony wasn’t easy, for it was only permitted to enquire about the mushrooms ‘when evening and darkness come and you are alone with a wise old man or woman whose confidence you have won, by the light of a candle held in the hand and talking in a whisper’. The mushrooms themselves had to be picked by virgins before sunrise at the time of the new moon.2 But eventually the Wassons’ perseverance paid off, and they became the first white people in recorded history to sample God’s flesh. Wasson’s sense of detached scientific observation ‘soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms’, he later wrote, and following a night spent on the dirt floor of a remote hut, with his mind flying over incredible landscapes observing wondrous visions, ‘the word “ecstasy” took on real meaning’.3

The mushrooms grew on a line of volcanic peaks just north of the villa where Tim and his friends spent the days lounging in the sunshine by the pool. A frequent visitor to the villa, Gerhart Braun from the University of Mexico, thought that he could obtain some of these fabled mushrooms. Did Tim want to try them? The stories about the mushrooms were undeniably intriguing, but the idea of taking them was a little frightening. Tim’s life had turned a corner and seemed to be on the right track, and there was no reason to jeopardise what he now had with the risk of madness. Yet there was also a professional curiosity involved. Frank had claimed that these strange fungi might play a role in their search for meaningful behaviour change, and this fitted with Leary’s suspicion that the ‘transactional element’ between doctor and patient that he had been searching for might only be possible with a chemical key—a drug.

And he was on vacation. He agreed to try them.

Braun and several friends headed off to the old Indian town of San Pedro, near the volcano Toluca. Here he met a curandera known as Crazy Juana, and by the side of a church away from the market she sold him a bag of the mushrooms. They ate them the following Saturday.

They were black and mouldy. They smelt rotten and damp and tasted bitter and stringy. Sitting in swimming costumes by the side of the pool, all but two of the party joined in. They ate six or seven each, and sat back to see what would happen. One abstainer, a friend of a friend named Bruce, was appointed as the official observer and was given the job of recording the reactions of the rest. After half an hour the effects of the drug started, and the world just came alive. Tim looked at Bruce, who was diligently writing down his observations, and was struck by the realisation that Bruce had no idea at all what he was observing. He found this realisation incredibly funny, and the earnestness and detachment of the scientific community suddenly appeared to him as ludicrous ignorance. How could they even begin to understand something that they were so separated from? The giggles kept coming and soon Tim was engulfed in uncontrollable laughter. Gathering his wits together, he saw to it that the children went into town to catch a movie, and headed indoors for a lie down. Then the visions really started, his mind gently split open and he was away.

When normality returned, Tim was a changed man. The slight change to the chemistry of his brain had altered the entire world. Time and space had been different, and he had understood the world with a clarity that he had never previously believed possible. ‘In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen as a diligent psychologist,’ he later wrote.4 Could this be the key to making genuine changes to the mind? And had he stumbled on a method to explore the methodologies he argued for in The Existential Transaction? If a psychologist took the drug with a patient he would no longer be an uninvolved observer in therapy. The role of the doctor would become that of a guide, reassuring the patient and steering them towards understanding the causes of their destructive behaviour.

But he had experienced something else as well, something inexplicable. He had felt himself slipping back down what can only be described as his genetic history. He had been able to stop and feel each life on his evolutionary ladder. He had mentally travelled back through the aeons, from the time of the simplest land animals to that of life in the oceans, from times of jungles and great ferns back to the start of life on earth. It was a powerful, vivid experience, and it differed from a dream in one important respect. Dreams are imaginative jumbles of experience based on past events and memories. But where had his mushroom visions come from? He had no previous experience to account for the things he saw and felt. The brain had done something that, according to all the literature, was simply impossible.

How should he respond to the experience? Tim could still remember his own reactions to Frank’s admission of his mushroom use, and he knew that he would receive the same uncomfortable reaction when he talked about what had happened. But now he knew that the effect was real, and if all existing theories of the mind were unable to explain it, surely it was the duty of a scientist to investigate further? Surely any scientific model of the mind had to include these inexplicable experiences if it was to be comprehensive and accurate?

It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the pivotal moment in Timothy Leary’s life. He had a new sense of purpose, as if his life’s work had just begun. From that day on he dedicated himself to understanding the psychedelic experience, never doubting the intrinsic value of the experience or the importance of chemicals in exploring the mind. But somehow he had to convince the rest of the world. And the only way he could do that, it was clear, was to persuade other people to try them.

The return to Harvard was an adventure. Tim and Jack accepted Richard’s offer of a flight back in his Cessna. ‘I didn’t tell him I didn’t have a licence yet,’ recalled Alpert later;5 ‘that would have scared him, I thought.’ Some fundamental flying errors led to the threat of arrest at a Mexican airport, a situation that could have become more serious if it had been discovered that Jack was smuggling an iguana into America, and Richard was smuggling two pounds of grass. Leary’s response was calm and unconcerned. ‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ he suggested, before smoothing things over with a bribe of $20. This was the start of a pattern that would emerge over the next few years. Whenever Tim and Richard were together, something unlikely would invariably happen and they would always end up having an adventure.