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they had been startled into being themselves. This was extremely
meaningful to us both&
"There isn't much more. As I remember when I went out into
the kitchen with them they were having something to eat and drink,
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and I joined them& I had asked Will to be part of this session; I
think when he refused -- or to come at all -- it was at that point
that I gave way inside and the crying for what he wouldn't do and
what I couldn't have with J. came through& We had to go to a
cocktail party at the Freemans, and I remember the enormous amount
of control I had to exercise to seem entirely normal at the
party& I'm not sure I did seem entirely normal -- in fact I didn't
feel so for several days -- but I did manage well enough so that
no one noticed anything strange&
"It was real and wonderful and did an enormous thing for me -
- as the whole relationship with him did. I am very grateful and
only hope that it helped him, too, in the long run. I know it did
short run, but I mean even now."
Time out from my reports to quote from a letter from Humphry
Osmond about mescaline. His recent letter is dated June 17, 1992:
My dear Betty,
My first mescaline experience was undertaken in London 1951
when I was on the verge of leaving for Canada with Jane and Helen,
then nearly two. John Smythies and I had written but not
published a paper called "Schizophrenia, A New Approach" in which
we hypothesized that schizophrenia might be a consequence of what
Jung had called Toxine X in about 1907. This toxine X was, he
suggested, released by some people under stress. In 1907 or so
Dale and Barger had not yet published their work on adrenalin, but
clearly if the flight or fight hormone turned into a relative of
mescaline, then many of the experiences of schizophrenia would be
easier to understand. In fact, one can imagine adrenalin being
transmethylated into something like mescaline. We called this
hypothetical substance M Substance.
We both decided that we ought to take mescaline and see for
ourselves. I did so early in Septembeer, 1951 in London. I was a
well-trained and, for my age, experienced psychiatrist. Many
others had recognized that the mescaline experience had something
to do with schizophrenia or delirium (Kaarl Menninger once called
it a long delirium, and was much pleased when, a few years before
his death I quoted an amended version to him "a long delirium in
slow motion". My mescaline experience convinced me that most of
our schizophrenic patients do their best to tell us about their
long delirium, but it is disquieting for us to hear about it and
also their own experience with its distortion, even
disintegration, of space-time, thinking and language are anchored
in sensory perception, and if it begins to falter, they, too,
become unreliable and hard for others to understand. Mescaline
also gave me access to visual imagery of a vivid kind unavailable
to me since childhood.
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Indeed, early on in the mescaline session I was looking at a
piece of torn wall paper in John's rather shabby mews flat and
began to see in it a torpedoed US freighter sinking into a foaming
winter sea. I had watched that happen on St. Patrick's Day in
1943 during what has been called the Battle of St. Patrick's Day,
the great submarine-escort battle in the Atlantic.
I realized that I had other things to do with the
experience, and so removed myself from the winter sea, the
drowning sailors, and the smell of oil smoke swept across our
bridge by a stern wind& It would be exaggerating to suggest that
one mescaline experience made all the texts on schizophrenia
totally irrelevant, but I felt for the first time that I
understood how much greater patient's difficulties were than I had
supposed. Very few people without the benefit of psychedelics
have a clue as to the experiences which bemused and sometimes
terrify our patients. The enormous literature of writings by
schizophrenics is seldom consulted by either psychiatrists or
psychologists. Even when it is, most of us shrug off the strange
reports as being fantasies. We do not consider them as frontline
stories from an alien world, our own world with its space-time
changed. In that first experience I noticed, although I didn't
grasp its significance or even know much about it, that constancy
of perception was disturbed& It isn't easy to maintain even simple
social relationships if you are unclear who you are and who the
other person is.
Psychedelic experiences have provided me with many chances
to see the world in a different way&
Love to y'all. Ever, Humphry
(My next session was May 29, 1961 -- Will had 50 gamma and I 25.
I wrote the report the next day, May 30, 1961)
(From a letter to Humphry dated June 20, 1961)
"I am enclosing a few notes taken from my last LSD session,
which came on me without warning (I started going into it on the
way to pick up children in the car pool. Fortunately Will was
with me and driving, and L.A. was at the house.) We went out for
lunch and I had such contractions that I had to go out into the
car; when we got back I took 50 gamma of LSD and Will 25. I have
not sent you the 7-page report out of deference for your shortness
of time and unwillingness to plop you right into the middle of all
of my inner dynamics. However, it was fascinating, and I had a
'geological fault' burned out of my skeleton (mostly head and
skull structure and lower body); I found that I had been mothered
by an 'abstraction'& I was raised on the book of schedule, for
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which mother later apologized; fortunately there was a lot of love
around as well as mixed-upness&
& Can't remember just how it started, think there was some
blue and green -- of darker color than I have seen before, very
quickly in abstractions. Then the greyish-white scene with the
arches of time -- that I must endure...This all had to do with the
fact that I had to endure; that I had been banished from the
family and from God and just had to endure it. The only way it
not absolutely unendurable was to help people, but when I hurt
them, their pain became mine and it was terrible& also a crack in
the earth -- 'geological fault' which is something that I have in
my structure which must be corrected& then I saw stylized feathers
as would be in helmet of Apollo, as though if one puts helmet on
to protect head, then must use stylized means of femininity to
decorate&
"It came, and I contracted and must have held it for an
incredible time. It just didn't seem possible to me that it could
be done. After a point I wasn't holding it, it was being held for
me& Then the heat or fire or light came right up through me and --
no, it was more as though the contraction or light came right up
through me and met the light coming down from above which (was a)
combination of light and fire and which burned (with light) the
top of my skull. While this was the strongest, there was burning
in all of skeleton. The next contraction it was as though my
uterus burned with light-fire and the whole lower part of my body
was 'burned'& away, and I was two arms and top torso with nothing
below& However, the images became unimportant; it was the
experience of the contractions and the correction of the
'geological fault' through the burning. It also burned out all of
my skull -- around the eyes, through the sinuses, and especially
the top of the head and later the whole skull. As though the
whole skeleton was purged or purified and something burned away in
the uterus, gut, lower body. The geological fault was being
corrected. I think that it was too great susceptibility to
rejection so that I unable to reject anyone because I had been so
rejected; also too sensitive to it myself& I realized& that this was
an archetypal kind of experience. The prior one where I had
'forced integration' was somehow necessary for my experience with
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