Category: Remembering

Neurotribes has a fantastic interview with the author of a new book on the relationship between Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and their role in the LSD counter-culture that is still echoing through science and culture.

The interview is with Peter Conners, author of White Hand Society, a book that examines the relationship between the two men through their correspondence and looks at how it shaped each as individuals and the place of psychedelics in society.

Despite both men being major figures in the promotion of LSD, they ending up taking very different paths.

Leary, originally a Harvard professor who started out doing respected scientific research into mind altering drugs, ended up being thought of us a bit of a cartoon cut-out by both the establishment and by the counter-culture of the time.

Ginsberg took a less sensationalist route and used the experience as a springboard to spiritual exploration.

Despite the fact that neither ended up boosting serious research in psychedelics both had a massive influence on the scientific study of mind altering drugs.

Silberman: Do you think that if things had unfolded differently for Leary, psychedelics could have been successfully incorporated into mainstream medicine or psychology?

Conners: I actually think they are now more than they’ve ever been. My wife is a clinical psychologist. I recently read an article in The Monitor on tests they’re doing now with psilocybin and MDMA. One potential application is for post-traumatic stress disorder that all these soldiers are coming back with from the Middle East. Another is to help terminal patients prepare for death. The Monitor is a very mainstream venue — it’s the trade journal for psychologists. So after 40 years of a virtual blackout on psychedelic research, you can do it again now, thanks to the efforts of people like Rick Doblin at MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Silberman: I think Leary actually helped hasten the blackout, simply by going on and on with his inflammatory and hyperbolic claims about psychedelics. In a Playboy interview in 1966, he said in a properly conducted LSD session, a woman could expect to have hundreds of orgasms. He also insisted that LSD had “cured” Allen Ginsberg of homosexuality. Let’s just say that by the time I met Allen, when he was in his 50s, he must have been having a major relapse!

I have to say, the interview is a little hard on Leary, who, like Ginsberg, had a continuing cultural impact way after he abandoned the championing of LSD, but it is a fascinating look at the relationship between the two men.
 

Link to Neurotribes interview with Peter Connors.

The remains of Alfred Adler, the co-founder of psychoanalysis, have been found 70 years after they were lost in Edinburgh reports The Guardian.

Adler, a core figure with Sigmund Freud in the group that founded the psychoanalytic movement before the pair split in 1911, collapsed after a suspected heart attack in May 1937 while he was in Aberdeen for a three-week-long series of lectures and seminars at the university…

Later this month, however, his ashes will be returned to Vienna for a civic ceremony following a remarkable discovery by the honorary Austrian consul to Scotland, John Clifford.

Asked to trace Adler’s remains by the institute he founded in Vienna, Clifford traced the casket to a crematorium only a few hundred metres behind the consulate in Edinburgh. They had been stored there in a quiet, wood-panelled gallery rarely visited by the public, alongside dozens of other caskets and urns.

Somewhat ironically for someone whose remains were forgotten almost immediately after his death, Adler’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis was the concept of the inferioty complex.
 

Link to Guardian piece on finding Adler’s ashes (via @PsychNews).

The mythical connection between phases of the moon, madness and epilepsy are discussed in an engrossing but sadly locked article from the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

However, it does have this wonderful section where some of the more whimsical portrayals of ‘lunacy’ are discussed:

In the epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto, “Orlando Furioso” (1532/1992), when the paladin Orlando learns that his lover Angelica is married, he becomes mad and goes through Europe and Africa destroying everything in his path. The English knight Astolfo flies up to moon where all human intellects lost on Earth are collected and finds Orlando’s in a bottle, thus restoring him to sanity (Ariosto, 1532/1992).

In the seventeenth century, the term “lunatic,” especially in its more specific acceptation of “insane” as a result of some mental obsession, began to be substituted by the term “moonstruck.” Reflecting the popular association between the moon and the irrational, primitive, and dark side of the human mind, the adjective “moonstruck” makes its first appearance in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Link to summary and DOI entry for ‘lunacy’ article.

History of Psychology has just published a brief article I wrote about my trip to Hospital San Lázaro in Quito, Ecuador, one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in Latin America and still a working mental health facility.

…

In the strong morning light, the whitewashed walls of the Hospital Psiquiátrico San Lázaro come alive with lucid sunshine. The beautiful but commanding building looks out over Quito’s old town, set back from the historic centre, where it retains its ambivalent mixture of the modern and medieval. It’s not a welcoming structure and, externally, seems more castle than care facility. Visitors need to enter large metal gates, before climbing an external ramp, and then must announce themselves to reception in the imposing stone gatehouse. I had come, I explained, to visit the hospital, but so far had no luck getting in touch with anyone to organise an appointment.

I had heard of ‘El Hospicio de Quito’ from colleagues in Colombia who had informed me that it was one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in Latin America, but yet it merits barely a mention in the English language literature and surprisingly little in the Spanish. Determined to discover more, I visited the hospital and, after arranging to return with a letter officially requesting my visit, I was shown round by one of the staff psychologists.

You can see virtually nothing of the hospital from the gatehouse, but after stepping through the iron doors you find yourself in a courtyard of surprisingly gentle beauty, filled with trees and fountains, and surrounded on all sides by the building’s open internal arches. Although built at the dawn of the Renaissance, the hospital feels more like a medieval fantasy and is made up of a collection of multi-level walkways and clinical areas in cobbled courtyards that seem to have been ‘added on’ rather than designed.

The consulting rooms are sparse with high ceilings, while the patient wards, both male and female, consist of large dormitories and both indoor and outdoor communal areas around which patients meander until therapy, mealtime or visits take priority. But despite the antique façade there was determined modernisation programme in progress, with both the historic chapel being restored and the clinical facilities being renovated.

As I discovered at the time, the hospital itself is not the best place to go to research its history and I have learnt in retrospect that there are much better sources for the serious investigator – albeit ones which necessitate a visit to the city. Nevertheless, I managed to find some background in Luciano Andrade Marín’s (2003) La Lagartija que Abrió la Calle Mejía; Historietas de Quito thanks to the assistance of the staff at the Biblioteca Municipal. The hospital lies on the site of a Jesuit seminary originally founded in 1587 as a place of training and spiritual retreat.

Although damaged in the volcano eruption of 1698 and the earthquake of 1755, the building retains many of its Jesuit features including an impressive baroque entrance arch. The building lay empty for some years after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 although by 1785 the Royal Order of Spain (a plaque in the hospital names them the Mercedarians) had converted the seminary into a hospice for the poor, disabled, mad and leprous. By the time of Ecuador’s independence, the hospice was notorious for the brutal treatment handed out to its mentally disturbed residents.

The hospice was taken over by The Sisters of Charity in 1870 who dedicated the institution to the mentally ill and began altering the building to better accommodate its more singular purpose. Patient care was not so forward thinking, however, and a doctor who visited the hospital in 1903, quoted in Andrade Marín (2003), minced no words in describing the conditions: the patients “were treated like animals… writhing in unclean yards, enclosed in dirt and gloomy dungeons, fed like wild beasts… naked and maltreated”.

Sadly, I found out little about the 20th Century history of the institution, but now considerably more humane and caring, the institution is one of the most important psychiatric hospital in Ecuador. Those wishing to investigate further may want to obtain Mariana Landázuri Camacho’s (2008) book Salir del encierro. Medio siglo del Hospital Psiquiátrico San Lázaro, which apparently contains a more complete history, although seems only available from select shops in Quito. The city libraries I visited could only provided limited help but apparently archives relating to the hospital are held in Quito’s Museo Nacional de Medicina.

The building is not open to the public, but the staff were friendly and welcoming, and, at the very least, the exterior is worth a visit for its architectural beauty and evocative location. There are no histories of this important institution in the English academic literature, and Landázuri Camacho’s book is apparently the only serious attempt at historical scholarship anywhere. Clearly, there is still much to be investigated about the history of this important institution.
 

Link to article entry at History of Psychology.