Reader's Review:

I have to respond to the review, listed below.

This is a training manual for hosting psycho-therapeutic sessions involving close encounters with LSD. Obviously, today this is going to be frankly difficult to pull off. Sandoz quit making it 40 years ago, and they made it out of organic base materials. The underground chemists of the 60's and 70's tended to use a synthetic base, and ended up with a product that was probably not the equivalent of the Sandoz pharmaceutical that was available to Grof.

Remember that Grof was engaged in Research, not practice, at a time when this was truly a new frontier. In the early days most the research was being sponsored by the CIA. Not in Czechoslovakia. This was a period of intense intellectual challenge. Grof had been trained as a confirmed Freudian. He gave the stuff to his experimental research subjects--then observed what happened. Now, this is basic science. His preconceptions were all Freudian. But mapping his observations to Freudian theory left a lot hanging over the edges. He quickly grasped the fact that LSD is a non specific mental amplifier. He also realized that neurotic resistance limited the reaction tot he drug, and that numerous encounters were required to break through this resistance. On other occasions, the full range of effects would manifest themselves in a single session. One of his breakthroughs was the recognition that, experientially speaking, the unconscious tends to categorize together experiences that share a common pattern of elements. For example, someone feeling intense pressure at work might recall, with great affect, a collection of memories from their childhood when they were under intense pressure by teachers, parents, a playground bully choking them, getting tangled in the blankets of their crib, intra-uterine birth contractions. These layers of related memories he called condensed experiences, or Co-ex systems, because, collectively, they tended to organize the personality, and, when remembered, seemed to lose their organizational influence. Grof observed that subjects who recalled the various stages of their birth resolved many of their previous symptoms. But not always. Sometimes it was only as if they had peeled away a layer, exposing a deeper nodal disturbance, as if they had opened a door in the floor of the basement that leads down to catacombs. The act of reliving these apparently repressed conflicts or traumas seemed to deflate their energy and organizing influence within the subjects personality. These layers seemed deeper because they typically emerged later in a series of sessions, after birth related material stopped surfacing. The birth related material he called peri-natal, and he regarded them to be the gateway to a transpersonal, or collective unconscious, as suggested by the writings of C.G. Jung regarding the racial archetypes. Grof discovered that, under the appropriate circumstances, the psyche tends towards equilibrium, and will strive towards a greater integration of the personality--a phenomenon frequently observed among those engaged in surviving a horrendous ordeal, sometimes among schizophrenics, the dying, or mystics. He detailed the mechanics of the process the mind follows to effect self-healing.

The reviewer below, Zosimos, has it ALL wrong. None of Grof's theoretical frameworks began as a set of apriori assumptions, as Zosimos' own prejudice and bias suggest. Instead, they began as attempts to understand, and illuminate, to make sense out of the bizarre transormative phenemena he and his assistants observed emerging in the course of their investigations --and to find practical, therapeutic applications. His insights into the deeper nature of the personality are simply without equal, transcending psycho-analysis, psychiatric theory, and the history of religions.

This material is clearly intended for a technical audience, and encompasses both the history of psychedelic therapeutic models, as well as practical guidance for conducting therapeutic sessions gathered from a lifetime of research into the subject.

Although this manual specifically targets LSD-25, the best practices cited would apply to any psycho-therapeutic approach with any entheogenic compounds.

This is an area that is fraught with controversy, largely because of the political ramifications of a psychiatric procedure which has, as its principle effect, healing and liberation. This is a profound threat to a militaristic, authoritarian society governed by a powerful ruling class and Big Religion. Better to keep the Djinn locked safely inside the lamp.

While the primary importance of the role of set and setting has been mentioned from the earliest days, and it must be remembered that a "therapeutic" model imposes its own potential for suggestibility--with all its self-fullfilling prophetic consequences--yet in spite of this, the notion of a therapeutic outcome is desireable above all others. This is an issue of great complexity and profundity, made all the more so by the mystification and mythifications of popular culture.

The metaphor of blind men touching an elephant and describing what they feel seems somehow appropo of the various schools of psychotherapy. Now that we know the rest of the story, each school was modelling only a tiny aspect of the elephant. Grof, apparently has made an honest attempt to model the whole beast in its entirety, using electro-magnetic imaging. LSD produces a situation of unique opportunity for observing the dynamics of mental processes in their extremity. If LSD acts as a general amplifier of mental processes, then the dynamics of the personality, following such amplification, should be the same regardless of the stimulus. Grof has established that this is, indeed, the case, through research with holotropic breathwork. Yet, LSD is the substance, sine qua non, for inducing the highest degree of psychic amplification quickly and beyond question. The amplification of mental processes CAN be achieved using other methods that do not involve drugs, and may be more manageable.

The therapeutic goals desribed by Grof are valuable, but at a certain point the therapeutic process becomes something else entirely--self integration turns into the quest for self realization. LSD is a powerful substance, undeniable potential as a useful therapeutic tool, yet extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. All in all, it seems that the biggest problem with close encounters with entheogens is living with the fact, that, when the jello cools and the personality re-solidifies, the individual is left with the challenge of self actualization within the reality of the socio-cultural matrix into which they have been born. LSD may reveal the mysteries of the galactic core and show you the winding way of the Magician at midnite, but in the end you must walk the Earth with your feet on the ground, and your head out of the clouds.

Reader's Review:

LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY: THE HEALING POTENTIAL OF PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE, by Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a comprehensive guidebook for psychedelic therapists, based on the author's seventeen years as an LSD psychotherapist. The author has found that internalization of psychedelic therapy sessions--by lying down, wearing eyeshades, and listening to music throughout the session--is essential in order to gain the therapeutic benefit that comes from fully experiencing whatever emotions, fantasies, and psychosomatic symptoms the unconscious mind presents.

If low doses are used, the first few therapy sessions are usually a reliving of childhood traumas. Later sessons are a dramatic reliving of one's birth, and a shattering confrontation with death. After many such death-rebirth sessions, one typically experiences the final ego death, a profound psychospiritual annihilation, followed by visions of blinding white supernatural light with feelings of ecstasy and rebirth. All subsequent sessions are transpersonal, such as reliving fetal traumas, episodes of contact with deceased loved ones, and mystical/peak experiences of the divine.

Although the bulk of the book deals with emotionally troubled persons, there is still a significant amount of information on using LSD therapy with normal, healthy people for personal growth, as well as a section about helping the terminally ill with ppsychedelic therapy.

The several dozen color illustrations, including some new to this edition, are mostly of scenes from people's LSD therapy sessions, and help bring the book to life.

(Incidentally, it seems fitting that the new publisher of LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY is MAPS, since it is from their bulletin that I learned of a meditation-enhancing herb (legal, relatively safe) which may be also useful for psychotherapy, following Grof's guidelines.)

Please note that the small size of the type and the sometimes long convoluted sentence structure may require strong motivation for a reader to plow through the entire book.

Other books I recommend: BEYOND THE BRAIN: BIRTH, DEATH, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, Grof's masterpiece distilling what he has learned about the human psyche from his years as an LSD psychotherapist; REALMS OF THE HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS: OBSERVATIONS FROM LSD RESEARCH, telling of his early low-dose LSD method, may be of interest to psychoanalytically-inclined readers of the Freudian persuasion; THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY describes the group hyperventilation therapy Grof developed with his wife Christina, which has therapeutic results similar to LSD therapy, and may be used by itself, or as a complement to psychedelic therapy; BEYOND DEATH, a visual feast of world artwork on the theme of biological death and the soul's afterlife, as well as psychospiritual death-rebirth such as occurs in psychedelic therapy; Meduna's CARBON-DIOXIDE THERAPY (revised edition) describes a method possibly of interest to the adventurous psychiatrist, which may have results comparable to LSD therapy; and Sandra Ingerman's SOULD RETRIEVAL: MENDING THE FRAGMENTED SELF, about welcoming home the "inner-child" self which many of us lost early in life due to trauma, and may now return as we each grow and heal towards wholeness.