ETC.: A Review of General Semantics
S. I. Hayakawa, editor
December 1965, "Special Issue on the Psychedelic Experience"
COMMENTS
HUMPHRY OSMOND
(Commentary on a paper by Richard P. Marsh, "Meaning and
the Mind Drugs.")
THIS IS a lively and intelligent paper and I am glad to see
that Dr. Marsh has taken issue boldly and directly with the
matter of psychedelic and psychotomimetic experiences.
I do not think, however, that even he has emphasized
sufficiently how valuable LSD-25 and mescaline, for instance,
have been as psychotomimetics. Our greater understanding of the
experience of schizophrenic patients, derived from studying the
madness-mimicking effect of these substances, has enabled us to
do things which might have been otherwise impossible. Since many
discussions of psychedelics and psychotomimetics deal largely
with their potentials, it may be as well to familiarize ourselves
with some of their actualities.
1. We have been able to devise much better hospitals for
mentally ill people. Working closely with my friend, Kyo Izumi, a
Canadian architect from Saskatchewan, we developed a new
formulation for mental hospitals in terms of what we have called
socio-architecture. Parts of at least five mental hospitals have
now been built using these ideas. Of the Saskatchewan Hospital,
Yorkton, Saskatchewan, designed by Izumi himself and his
partners, the Joint Information Service of the American
Psychiatric Association wrote:
Kyoshi Izumi, a pioneer in psychiatric architecture,
designed the physical structure, and designed, or in some
cases specified, all the furnishings. The result must
certainly rank among the most attractive and architecturally
advanced buildings ever constructed for psychiatric services
.... as for the physical plant, it was a pleasure to view a
facility that was more than merely new. Creativity and
imagination were evident in scores of details. We felt the
wards and day rooms combined efficiency with comfort and
cheerfulness to a very exceptional degree.1
TO MY KNOWLEDGE, Mr. Izumi himself took LSD-25 on several
occasions so that he could experience and explore the effect of
perceptual anomalies upon his experience of space, time, color,
and texture. While doing this, he took particular notice of
certain kinds of architectural configurations. These experiences
of his, along with my own—combined with perceptual studies
by our colleagues, Drs. Weckowitz and Sommer, and an extensive
reading of the writings of mentally ill people—formed the
basis of our original formulations and so of his splendid
designs. Psychotomimetic experiences have thus been used for the
benefit of the mentally ill and also of the well people who work
in hospitals. In addition to this, some of the principles which
we have discovered are also being used to develop a better kind
of living accommodation, particularly when large numbers of
people have to live in a communal building. It may be argued that
Kyo Izumi, an unusually gifted person, would have done this just
as well without the use of LSD-25. I do not know how this could
be proved or disproved, but I do know that both he and I believe
that it played a crucial part in deepening our understanding of
the problem and so enlarging the communication between us. The
fruits of this collaboration are there to be judged by any who
care to go and look at them. It is not frivolous to say that
here, indeed, are some of those concrete results of the
psychotomimetic experience which critics have been so keen to
discover.
2. Because we came to believe that psychotic people were cut
off by their changes in perception, which they could not readily
describe, and did not necessarily understand, we began to pay
close attention to their umwelts, or experiential worlds.
It became evident that due to a professional preoccupation with
the "meaning" of their experiences, the experiences
themselves were often almost completely neglected. Patients who,
for instance, described that the world looked different were
usually supposed to be saying that it was feeling different. In
other words, their perceptual anomalies were ascribed to some
change of mood or affect. For many years little interest had been
paid to the actual experiences of the ill and the social
consequences which might derive from them. To explore these
experiences more thoroughly we developed the HOD (Hoffer-Osmond
Diagnostic Text),2 which is an exceedingly crude but
unexpectedly effective instrument for exploring the umwelts
of schizophrenic and other patients. This is already showing
considerable usefulness. An ex-schizophrenic patient once
remarked, "I wish you had had this test when I was ill. I
would have known you knew something about my illness."
The HOD combined with our interest in psychotomimetics has
led to new and very exciting developments in the use of hypnosis
by Fogel and Hoffer3 (in Canada) and Aaronson4
(here in Princeton). Because we ourselves had experienced marked
changes in perception and had listened to our patients reporting
these same happenings, it was easy to suppose that however they
were produced they might have many interesting effects. A great
advantage of hypnosis and post hypnotic suggestion is that it can
be used to study in a very detailed way the effects of clear-cut
and circumscribed perceptual anomalies. Much work of this kind is
now in progress, and while it is time consuming and demanding, it
seems that this will be a very potent tool for exploring the
psyche. Aaronson noted with some surprise that he had been unable
to predict what the psychological effects of a particular set of
perceptual changes would be and suggested that substantial
revisions of our theories of personality may become necessary. In
the course of this work, Hoffer and Fogel have found that in some
subjects the LSD experience can be evoked without LSD
and—even more surprising—that the effects of the drug
can be almost totally repressed, by post hypnotic suggestion.
4. Mescaline, LSD-25, etc., have great possibilities for
training psychiatrists, psychologists, and others, who are then
less likely to produce standardized answers for their patients'
distresses. Many psychiatrists suppose that because they have
devised or accepted from others an explanation for their
patients' behavior which makes sense to them, they understand
what has been happening to their patients. This, however, is
often not so and the psychiatrist's too ready assumption of
omniscience, although it may be reassuring to him, simply
prevents him from listening to the patient's halting, but often
quite accurate, explanation. Miss Norma McDonald, herself a
sufferer from schizophrenia, wrote:
One of the most encouraging things which has happened to
me in recent years was the discovery that I could talk to
normal people who had had the experience of taking mescaline
or lysergic acid, and they would accept the things I told
them about my adventures in mind without asking stupid
questions or withdrawing into a safe smug world of disbelief.
Schizophrenia is a lonely illness and friends are of great
importance. I have needed true friends to help me to believe
in myself when I doubted my own mind, to encourage me with
their praise, jolt me out of unrealistic ideas with their
honesty, and teach me by their example how to work and play.
The discovery of LSD-25 by those who work in the field of
psychiatry has widened my circle of friends.5
Schizophrenics are lonely because they cannot let their
fellows know what is happening to them and so lose the social
support, help and encouragement which they need so much yet so
rarely evoke. LSD-25, used as a psychotomimetic, allows us to
study these problems of communication from the inside and learn
how to devise better means of helping the sick. This combined
with the HOD and the hypnosis work allow us to reduce the
alienation of these very ill people. We are no longer forced to
suppose that the experience of the schizophrenic person must
always be harmful; indeed, there is growing evidence that the
psychosocial variability which they endure, although dearly
bought by the individual, may be valuable and even necessary to
society, especially in times of change.
5. Our early work on alcoholism6 was based on the
idea that it might be helpful to produce a condition resembling
delirium tremens and so allow the patient to "hit
bottom" earlier than he might otherwise do. Later, after we
had become aware of the possibilities of the psychedelic
experience and had exchanged ideas with Dr. A. M. Hubbard of
Vancouver, one of the pioneers of psychedelic therapy on this
continent, we changed directions: Nevertheless, the original
impetus came from our interest in the psychosis-mimicking
experience.
THESE FEW illustrations show that these remarkable
substances have already impinged on psychiatry in a positive way,
quite apart from their extensive and very interesting use in
psychotherapy. While I would be the last to discourage
investigators from exploring that huge panorama which sweeps from
the creative to the transcendental experiences, I would urge that
we continue to study carefully and intensively some of the rather
mundane matters which I have noted here. While there may be
marked similarities in the ultimate experiences of birth and
death, and while it is valuable to recognize that we have much in
common, the fact is that our day-to-day experience of the world,
our umwelts, can be surprisingly dissimilar. It is often
these dissimilarities, unrecognized and—until we develop
better means of acquainting ourselves with
them—unrecognizable, that lead to the greatest and often
most tragic failures in communication. Life, like art, is, in
William Blake's words, "a matter of minute
particulars." We must accept, however difficult it may be to
do so, that the "minute particulars" experienced by one
person may be very different from those experienced by other
people, even though they may be very close to him. By patience,
determination, and skill, we can perhaps develop "universal
particulars" in which many more can share and can know that
they are sharing. To do this we must start with very simple
matters and discover the various ways in which each one of us
builds a world comfortable for him, but more or less
incomprehensible and sometimes even grotesquely strange for
others.
References
1. R. M. Glasscote, et al., the Joint Information Service of
the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association
for Mental Health, Washington, D.C., September 1964.
2. A. Hoffer and H. Osmond, "A Card Sorting Test Helpful
in Making Psychiatric Diagnosis," J. Neuropsychiat.,
2:306, 1961.
3. S. Fogel, and A. Hoffer, "Changes in Personality by
Altering Perception in Post Hypnotic States," J. Clin.
Exper. Psychopath., 1962.
4. B. S. Aaronson, Hypnosis, Depth Perception, and
Schizophrenia." Presented at E.P.A. Meetings, 1964.
5. B. Kaplan, ed., The Inner World of Mental Illness
(New York: Harper, 1964).
6. H. Osmond, "A Review of the Clinical Effects of
Psychotomimetic Agents," Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., 1957,
66:418-434.