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How Stanislav Grof Helped Launch the Dawn of a New Psychedelic Research Era
The world of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with psychedelic
pioneers, whose work was rejected a half-century ago.
April 10, 2010  |


Next week, the brightest lights of the psychedelic cognoscenti will gather in San Jose,
California. Leaving swirls of tracer visions in their wakes, they will converge from
around the world at an incongruously bland Holiday Inn, 50 miles south of the
Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that once served as the pulsing capital of
Psychedelistan. There, several hundred turned-on and tuned-in doctors,
psychologists, artists and laypeople will participate in the annual conference of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). For four days, they will
explore -- through workshops and lectures, nothing more -- the widening gamut of
clinical inquiry into the uses of the psychedelic experience, a global resurgence of
which has led to hopeful talk of a "psychedelic revival."

After decades of psychedelic deep freeze, such talk is finally more than just wishful
thinking. A skim of the conference agenda offers a tantalizing glimpse into the newly
bubbling world of clinical psychedelic research. UCLA Medical professor Charles Grob
will speak about his work using psilocybin to treat anxiety in late-stage cancer
patients. Psychologist Allan Ajaya will share findings from his research in LSD-assisted
myofascial pain therapy. Other speakers will address possible psychedelic-based
cures for alcoholism, addiction, depression, migraines, and post-traumatic stress
disorder. Each will represent a different corner in a promising field newly awakened.
>From North America to the Middle East, recent years have seen a rising interest into
the medicinal possibilities of MDMA, LSD, DMT, and other drugs now shaking off
decades of government-imposed clinical hibernation.

Since 1986, MAPS has been agitating for this overdue renaissance, spearheading and
publicizing efforts to legalize and de-stigmatize research involving schedule-1 drugs
designed to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. As the outfit's slogan has it,
"We put the M.D. back in MDMA." It is a testament to the organization's work that
this year's conference, "Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century," not only features a
multinational cast of active researchers, but also caters to an increasingly interested
public: tickets for many of the workshops sold out a month in advance.

For most Americans, the only familiar name on the MAPS 2010 speakers list is the
Oprah-approved, integrative-health brand name, Dr. Andrew Weil. But Weil hardly
enjoys rock-star status at conferences dedicated to the present state and future of
pioneering psychedelic research. As detailed in Don Lattin's new book, The Harvard
Psychedelic Club, Weil's main historical contribution to the field was negative and
came nearly 50 years ago: As an undergraduate snitch, it was Weil's articles for the
Crimson that got Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) thrown out of
Harvard, thus putting the kibosh on the university's psilocybin project.

One of the most significant figures attending the conference in San Jose is a man
largely unknown to the general public. Years before Leary made headlines for his Ivy
League adventures, and years before Ken Kesey held the first acid parties in the
forests of the Pacific Northwest, a young doctor named Stanislav Grof was conducting
rigorous clinical experiments involving LSD in the most unlikely of places: a
government lab in the capital of communist Czechoslovakia. It was there, at Prague's
Psychiatric Research Institute in the 1950s, that Grof began more than half-a-century
of pioneering research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. While he is
frequently marginalized in, if not completely left out of, popular psychedelic histories,
it is not for any lack of contribution to the field. "If I am the father of LSD," Albert
Hoffman once said, "Stan Grof is the godfather."

With psychedelic research poised for a mainstream resurgence, the time seems right
to begin giving the godfather his due.

* *

Stanislav Grof had just completed his medical studies at Prague's Charles University
when he caught a life-changing break. It was 1956, and one of his professors, a
brain specialist named George Roubicek, had ordered a batch of LSD-25 from the
Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where Albert Hoffman first synthesized the
compound in 1943. Roubicek had read the Zurich psychiatrist Werner Stoll's 1947
account of the LSD experience and was curious to test it out himself and on his
students and patients, largely to study the drug's effects on electric brain waves,
Roubicek's specialty. When he asked for volunteers, Grof raised his hand.

The subsequent experience assured Grof's place in history by making him among the
first handful of people to enjoy what might be called a modern trip, in which the
psychedelic state is matched with electronic effects of the kind that have defined the
experience for generations of recreational acidheads, from Merry Pranksters to
Fillmore hippies to lollipop-sucking ravers.

Roubicek's experiment involved placing Grof in a dark room, administering a large
dose of LSD (around 250 millionths of a gram) and turning on a stroboscopic white
light oscillating at various, often frenetic, frequencies. Needless to say, nothing like
the experience was otherwise available in 1950s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else, for
that matter. That first introduction to LSD -- a "divine thunderbolt" -- set the course
for Grof's lifework. He had found, he thought, a majestic shortcut on Freud's "royal
road to the unconscious."

"This combination [of the light and the drug]," Grof later said, "evoked in me a
powerful mystical experience that radically changed my personal and professional
life. Research of the heuristic, therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential
of non-ordinary states of consciousness became my profession, vocation, and
personal passion."

In medical school during the second half of the '50s, Grof underwent dozens of LSD
sessions and became one of a handful of turned-on young people in the communist
world. Upon his graduation in 1960, Grof began full-time clinical work when he was
fortuitously assigned to Prague's Psychiatric Research Institute, which included a
newly launched Psychedelic Research Center. Among his new colleagues was a
young doctor named Milos Vojtechovsky, with whom Grof had conducted his earliest
experiments as a medical student. In 1958, the duo employed Benactyzin, high doses
of which are hallucinogenic, as a way to induce the psychotic state associated with
acute alcohol withdrawal. In 1959, they wrote an LSD-related study of the brain's
serotonergic system, titled, "Serotonin and Its Significance for Psychiatry." As
professional colleagues in the early 1960s, Grof and Vojtechovsky would co-publish
nearly two dozen pioneering papers on clinical experiments employing LSD and other
psychedelics, including a three-part study on LSD's clinical history, biochemistry and
pharmacology.

Until 1961, this research involved Sandoz-supplied LSD. But Grof saw no reason why
Czech scientists shouldn't be producing a native supply. Fatefully situated
approximately 200 miles from Prague at this time was the Czech pharmaceutical
company Spofa, whose chemists were talented synthesizers of various ergot alkaloids.
Grof put in a request for the company begin producing LSD; a request quickly
approved by communist authorities. Soon thereafter began production of the only
pharmaceutically pure LSD in the eastern bloc. (Sandoz was still producing the only
pure LSD in the West.)

The early weeks of Czechoslovak LSD production were not without problems. As
Spofa cranked up its line for the powerful psychedelic, its laboratory employees
would sometimes accidentally absorb the compound through their fingertips, much
as Albert Hoffman did when he inadvertently made his famous discovery. Whenever
this happened, it was standard practice at the time to inject the subject with
Thorazine and throw them into the nearest locked hospital ward. This often made a
bad situation worse, and Spofa frantically turned to Grof for answers. The young
doctor happily lectured them on the importance of "set and setting" in the
psychedelic experience. "I assured them that there was no reason for alarm if
someone was intoxicated by LSD," Grof later wrote. "They were advised to have a
special, quiet room where the intoxicated individual could spend the rest of the day
listening to music in the company of a good friend."

Spofa brass took Grof's advice. When a 19-year-old Spofa lab assistant experienced a
substantial "professional intoxication," she was placed in a comfortable room with a
colleague and music. When the drug wore off, the woman reported having "the time
of her life."

As Grof rose through the ranks at the Psychiatric Institute, his research increasingly
involved using LSD in tandem with traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, in which Grof
earned his Ph.D from the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1965. His dissertation was
titled, "LSD and Its Use in Psychiatric Clinical Practice." When Grof completed his
Freudian training, he had nearly a decade of experience with LSD. At 34, he was also
full of paradigm-shifting ambition, having decided that psychedelics "used
responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is
for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy."

It was a heady time for any young Czech with a head full of big ideas. In 1965,
Czechoslovakia was then in the midst of a political and cultural thaw known as the
Prague Spring. A relaxation of state control and communist mores was encouraging
new forms of artistic and political expression. Filmmakers associated with Czech New
Wave produced exuberant films; the cafes and theaters became hubs of a thriving
youth subculture, which celebrated Allen Ginsburg "King of May" when he visited
Prague in May 1965. Had the trajectory been allowed to continue, it is easy to
imagine a psychedelic Czech youth culture taking form, just as it did in the United
States, with Grof as its leader.

Alas, Moscow saw where the Prague Spring was heading, and crushed the flowering
under the treads of Red Army tanks. But by the time the Russians rolled into Prague
in August 1968, the country's most experienced psychedelic researcher was long
gone. The year before, Grof had been offered a professorship at the University of
Maryland. He arrived in America during the Summer of Love in possession of one of
the world's deepest LSD research resumes.

Soon after his arrival in the U.S., Grof was named chief of research at the Maryland
Psychiatric Research Center. Again, it was a fortuitous placement. Among his new
peers, an ordained minister and fellow psychedelic pioneer named Walter Pahnke,
who had conceived of the famous "Good Friday Experiment" with Tim Leary and
Huston Smith while at Harvard in the early 1960s. At the time of Grof's arrival,
Pahnke was engaged in promising research into LSD therapy as a way to mitigate
mortal anxiety among the terminally ill. Before Pahnke's untimely death in 1971, he
had found "dramatic improvement" among a third of his subjects, and "moderate
improvement" in another third.

While the Center was a stimulating environment to continue his research, Grof's
Maryland work constituted the lesser half of his activities during the late 1960s. He
also traveled regularly to Menlo Park, California, where he participated in a working
group led by the founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow. Grof joined a
coterie of Maslow's colleagues and students working to build on the foundation of
humanistic psychology, most famous for its positing of a hierarchy of needs.

Like so many other forward thinkers of the decade, psychedelic experiences had
touched Maslow deeply. He had come to believe that the system he developed in the
'50s and early '60s was formed around a stunted view of the psyche. With his
humanistic psychology, Maslow had managed to go beyond Freud and Skinner (the
father of behaviorism), but he did not go as far enough. The spiritual revolution of
the decade, of which the LSD experience was central, had thrown the limits of
humanistic psychology into sharp relief. It was, Maslow and Grof believed, still too
trapped in Freudian verbal therapy, still too accepting of the idea of an individual
psyche contained in one life, one skull, one personal history, one culture.

"The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical
traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread
psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s," Grof later wrote, "made it
absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to
include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness;
psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and
scientific inspiration."

As Maslow and Grof mapped out this new and expanded understanding of the
psyche, they turned to the insights of Carl Jung, the brilliant Freudian renegade who
posited the existence of non-material archetypal-mythological realms that contain the
entire histories, collective wisdom, and totemic icons of every civilization since the
dawn of time. Along with a belief in these realms, Maslow and Grof were convinced
they were accessible to everyone, especially during non-ordinary states of
consciousness such as those induced by a hefty dose of psychedelics.

"Experiences occurring in psychedelic sessions cannot be described in terms of the
narrow and superficial conceptual model used in academic psychiatry and
psychology, which is limited to biology, postnatal biography, and the Freudian
individual unconscious," Grof wrote of the insight behind transpersonal psychology.
"Deep experiential work requires a vastly extended cartography of the psyche that
includes important domains uncharted by traditional science."

Once the basic elements of this new psychological school were in place, it was time to
name it. Maslow wanted to call the new psychedelically inspired school
"transhumanistic."

Grof demurred, preferring the term "transpersonal psychology." The name stuck.

Figures associated with Maslow and Grof's coterie soon launched the Association of
Transpersonal Psychology and assembled an editorial team for the Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology. Around the same time, Robert Frager began laying the
groundwork for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California,
which remains the leading center of transpersonal training.

* *

Just as transpersonal psychology was being institutionalized, LSD research was being
systematically shut down by the government. At the end of the 1960s, Grof's
laboratory in Maryland housed the last surviving FDA-approved psychedelic clinical
research program in the United States. In 1971, Maryland's research, too, was
ordered closed following the classification of LSD as a Schedule-I drug, defined as
being habit-forming and having "no recognized medicinal value."

With little interest in running a lab without access to LSD, Grof followed the action
and moved west. In 1973, he began a 15-year stretch as scholar-in-residence at the
Esalen Institute in Big Sur. There, overlooking the Pacific ocean and against the
constant rumble of rolling surf, Grof spent the next two years synthesizing his
thoughts on nearly two decades of LSD therapy. The result was Realms Of The
Human Unconscious: Observations From LSD Research, published in 1975.

By this time, officially sanctioned psychedelic research already seemed like a distant
memory. For a new generation that graduated college after the door had been
slammed shut on clinical psychedelic studies, Grof's book was a window into a world
that might have been. Among those who found inspiration in the book was a young
college student named Rick Doblin, who would later found the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the possibility of a return to a rational
discussion of drug policy and psychedelic research became more remote than ever.
Grof was among those who kept the flame alive. Around the time of Reagan's first
Inauguration, Grof published LSD Psychotherapy, in which he expanded on the now
codified transpersonal understanding of the psyche. Grof stressed the importance of
two previously neglected realms of experience that psychedelic experiences can tap
into where traditional therapy cannot: the "perinatal" (birth moment) and
"transpersonal" (archetypical). Coming to terms with these aspects of the psyche,
believed Grof, is the key to psycho-spiritual health.

"When the content of the perinatal level of the unconscious surfaces into
consciousness and is adequately processed and integrated," Grof wrote, "it results in
a radical personality change. The individual experiences a considerable decrease of
aggressive tendencies and becomes more tolerant and compassionate toward others.
[They also experience an increase in] the ability to enjoy life and draw satisfaction
from simple situations such as everyday activity, eating, love-making, nature, and
music."

Happy, well-adjusted people, Grof believed, also lead to happy, well-adjusted
societies.

"One of the most remarkable consequences of various forms of transpersonal
experiences is spontaneous emergence and development of genuine humanitarian
and ecological interests and need to take part in activities aimed at peaceful
coexistence and well-being of humanity," Grof wrote. "This is based on an almost
cellular understanding that any boundaries in the Cosmos are relative and arbitrary
and that each of us is, in the last analysis, identical and commeasurable with the
entire fabric of existence. As a result of these experiences, individuals tend to develop
feelings that they are planetary citizens and members of the human family before
belonging to a particular country or a specific racial, social, ideological, political, or
religious group."

Such sentiments were never so far removed from mainstream culture as during the
first few years of the age of Reagan. Buffered from the harder edges of the 1980s in
Big Sur, Grof kept working, increasingly with his wife and creative partner, Christina.
In 1985, he published Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence, in which
he expanded on the promise and power of transpersonal psychotherapy employing
psychedelic drugs.

By the time the book's second edition was published in 1994, a mini-psychedelic
revival was underway on the West Coast. Grof had earned enough stripes to be an
acid elder statesman to a generation of kids dancing to techno on ecstasy and acid.
But he did not embrace the role. While Tim Leary rolled around in mutual embrace
with the San Francisco rave and cyberculture scenes, Grof maintained his distance,
playing the role of austere friend of psychedelics from the old school. "The hectic
atmosphere of…crowded rock concerts or discos, and noisy social gatherings are
certainly not settings conducive to productive self-exploration and safe confrontation
with the difficult aspects of one's unconscious," Grof stiffly wrote in a 1994 update of
his essay "Crisis Intervention in Situations Related to Unsupervised Use of
Psychedelics."

Grof had in any case by then found a way to continue his research without banned
substances. Throughout the 1980s, he had been coming to the conclusion that
perinatal and transpersonal experiences were not dependent on the use of
psychedelics. LSD may have launched Grof's mind into cosmic orbit. But once there,
like so many who passed through the psychedelic crucible, he had come to believe
they were no longer needed. He even developed a system to prove it: Holotropic
Breathing.

Grof's lifework treats individual and social neuroses through the exploration of non-
ordinary states of consciousness. Whether these states are achieved through the
structured hyperventilation of Holotropic Breathing, or through psychedelic drugs, for
Grof the stakes remain the same.

"If we continue using the old strategies that have caused the current global crisis and
which are in their consequences destructive and self-destructive," Grof recently
wrote, "it might lead to annihilation of modern civilization and possibly even the
human species. However, if a sufficient number of people undergo a process of inner
psychospiritual transformation and attain a higher level of awareness, we might in
the future reach a situation when we will deserve the name, which we have so
proudly given to our species: Homo sapiens."

This, in a nutshell, is the same cosmically ambitious hope expressed by the
psychedelic pioneers of a half-century ago. Most of those men and women have long
since given up the dream, moved on to other things, or died. Stanislav Grof is among
the very few still here. Judging by the hopeful tone of next week's MAPS conference,
the world of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with him.
Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing
writer. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, will
be published by Wiley in May.

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