TIMOTHY LEARY'S MID-CAREER SHIFT: CLEAN BREAK OR INFLECTION POINT?

Abstract

The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920–1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal from Harvard in 1963, Leary parted company with the field. While there are several good reasons to adopt this view, examination of his entire career as well as his intellectual ancestry reveals unacknowledged continuities, suggesting that a more prominent place be accorded to him in the history of psychology, as well as to the challenges he poses.

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) is a real challenge to historians wishing to fit him into the history of psychology. Foremost among the reasons for this is his polymorphousness: Leary once said that “(s)ince our Harvard experiments, there have been 24 Timothy Learys running around the world, playing parts in the 24 Reality Movies of the period (Leary, 1979a/2007, p. 9)”,1 and certainly he tried on more diverse roles than virtually any modern psychologist. In 1973, the back cover blurb of Leary's story of his prison escape and flight to Algiers and Switzerland, Confessions of a Hope Fiend, advertised him as a “fugitive philosopher– establishment gadfly–tarnished angel of the academic community–noted clinical psychologist–major antiwar spokesman–(and)–creator of the LSD drug culture” (Leary, 1973a). It continued, “Whether you damn him as a scoundrel or praise him as a revolutionary hero, his story has the stirring ring of history in the making” (Leary, 1973a). That all of these descriptions are in some measure true illustrates the difficulty in including Leary in any single category of the history of psychology. Although Leary was one of the most visible psychologists in America between 1960 and 1990, one strategy for dealing with him as a historical figure appears to be to not deal with him at all. He has no American Psychologist obituary: he does not appear in the indices of the current textbooks with the greatest emphasis on recent modern history of psychology (Pickren and Rutherford, 2010; Thorne and Henley, 2004), and lands only brief cameos related to LSD in others (e.g., Hilgard, 1987; O'Boyle, 2006). Nor does he appear in the most recent of specialized subfield histories of personality or humanistic psychology, areas closely related to his activities (e.g., Taylor, 2009). To some extent, this lack of presence can be expected, as Leary is less a historical than a still-contemporary figure as are most psychologists of the 1960–1990 period. Nor is he entirely ignored, as he is mentioned peripherally in some specialized historical accounts, usually memoirs, autobiographies, or reminiscences (e.g., Block, 2003; Cronbach, 1989; Miller, 1989; Millon, 2007). Still, there is an imbalance between the amount that has been written, biographically and otherwise, about Leary by observers of American popular culture (e.g., Greenfield, 2006; Higgs, 2006; Whitmer, 1987) and the notice that has been taken of him by historians of psychology, the field which is, for good or ill, Leary's intellectual home base and one of the proper historical places for him to lodge.

In what follows, I wish to suggest that Leary's relative invisibility in psychological history is tied to his radical change of focus and direction mid-career that resulted in a fundamental change in his public and published persona. This mid-career shift, a pattern that Leary shares with other historical figures in psychology, can represent either a point where Leary separated from psychology, or an inflection point in a continuous career trajectory in the field. Examples of figures in the history of psychology whose careers changed substantially midstream are, at the highest level of influence, Freud, James, and Pavlov. Freud, as is well known, shifted radically from a neurologist's career to invent psychoanalysis; James reconstituted himself several times and successively emerged as a psychologist, as a religious theorist, and as a philosopher; and Pavlov shifted his focus upward toward the brain from the gut. More recent eminent American psychologists show this career shift pattern more or less strongly as well. Among representative examples approximately contemporary with Leary are Ernest Hilgard, who followed a career as a synthesizer of learning theories by becoming a leading figure in the study of hypnosis and dissociation; Leon Festinger, who changed from studies of cognitive dissonance to perception and then to anthropology; and Stanley Milgram, who after achieving worldwide fame (or notoriety) for his study of obedience, shifted his focus and became an ecological and environmental psychologist. And shifts in careers are not limited to major figures but are characteristic of the psychological rank-and-file as well (Dingfelder, 2006). Career shifts may reflect changes of interest within a well-established and stable career, or signal breaches where what follows afterward is different in kind from what went before. At an extreme, after the shift an individual might even leave a field and move into another disciplinary or cultural taxonomic class. In most of the examples above, the shifts are inflection points, markers of a change of direction within a continuous career stream in psychology. Leary's mid-career shift, however, is often interpreted as at least a strong discontinuity if not a complete break, resulting in—at least in some quarters—a perception that Leary absented himself or excluded himself from psychology mid-career, a perception that can then account for his relative invisibility in psychology's history. This perception may, however, also hide underlying psychological continuities in Leary's career.

Early Success, Early Sorrow: Leary 1940–1963

A brief review of Leary's career is requisite in order to establish the presence, context, and nature of the change.2 Leary was born in 1920 and spent his early years in Springfield, Massachusetts in a strongly Irish Catholic environment. His academic career began at Worcester at the College of the Holy Cross, but family pressure toward more ambitious goals led him to an offer from West Point that he accepted in 1940. He lasted there for less than one year, eventually “silenced” due to a conflict over principles and separating from the Academy with an official apology from the Army. He entered the University of Alabama in the fall of 1941 and began studying psychology under the direction of Donald Ramsdell, a recent Harvard University graduate. There, Leary again became embroiled in a conflict, this time about parietal rules, and lost his draft deferment at the beginning of 1943. Ramsdell, now posted to the Deshon Military Hospital at Butler, Pennsylvania, intervened on Leary's behalf and arranged Leary's transfer there, where he lasted out the war, married his first wife Marianne in 1944, and finished his Psychology BA in 1945. Then Leary moved for a year to Washington State University, where he worked under Lee Cronbach, completing a Master's degree he had started with Ramsdell on intelligence testing in a clinical context. Leary entered the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Berkeley in 1946, completed his dissertation on change in a group therapy context in 1950, and moved into several areas of psychological activity in the Berkeley area. He was affiliated with Berkeley as an instructor, and after 1953, when that connection ended, succeeded his graduate advisor Hubert Coffey as director of clinical research with the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland.

There he continued, with many colleagues and assistants, a long-term project directed at establishing the relation between individual personality characteristics and social interaction. This resulted in the publication, under Leary's sole authorship in 1957, of The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (Leary, 1957), considered a founding document of interpersonal personality assessment and psychotherapy. While this publication and its favorable reviews assured Leary of a continuing professional career both in academic and clinical psychology, other events occurred, the cumulative effects of which resulted in a major life change and career shift. In 1955, his wife committed suicide and left Leary to raise their two children. Leary, after a brief second marriage, remained in the Berkeley area, continuing to work with Kaiser and to publish in the areas of interpersonal theory and clinical technique. However, he had no permanent academic affiliation, and in 1958 left his Berkeley connections and began to travel overseas, where he experienced a great episode of melancholy. After this particularly low point Leary met David McClelland in Italy in 1959, who saw potential in Leary's new vision of personality and clinical psychology based on interpersonal transactions, and who offered Leary a teaching position at Harvard beginning in January 1960. Around this time, Leary became involved with the growing interest among intellectuals at various levels of culture investigating the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on consciousness. He had his first personal experience with hallucinogenic substances—in this case psilocybin derived directly from ingesting mushrooms—in the summer of 1960 in Mexico. Between the fall of 1960 and the spring of 1962, Leary's growing fascination with the potentials of hallucinogens to open what Aldous Huxley termed, after William Blake, “doors of perception” fused with Leary's teaching and his interaction with several colleagues at Harvard who with him formed a “psychedelic club” (Lattin, 2010). He also made connections with the literary and artistic avant-garde of the time, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In this period, Leary and his colleagues began to construct research situations in which the effects of hallucinogens on behavior could be contextualized and measured, including a study conducted at Concord State Prison in Massachusetts where hallucinogenic drugs were given to prisoners in conjunction with counseling with the aim of reducing recidivism. This period culminated in what has become known as the “Good Friday Experiment,” a project of one of Leary's graduate students, Walter Pahnke. Undertaken collectively with Leary and his students along with members of the Harvard Divinity School connected with Huston Smith, the Good Friday Experiment involved an attempt at a triple-blind, comparable independent groups study of the effect of hallucinogens on naturally contextualized religious experience. Leary and his colleagues reported that the presence of hallucinogens resulted in the heightening of religious experience—and indeed all sensory and perceptual experience—in comparison to their drug-free controls. By this time, several powerful colleagues and constituencies at Harvard were massing against Leary and his associates, and once again a conflict with authority resulted in a dismissal. In 1963, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert, who had been associated with him throughout this period, became the first Harvard instructors to be dismissed for cause in over a century.

The Wild Party and Its Aftermath, 1963–1996

At this point, Leary took to the trails of popular culture and media in order to bring his message of consciousness expansion and personal cognitive liberty to a wide audience. Between 1963 and 1966, he engaged in communal living at an upstate New York mansion, Millbrook, founded several branches of The International Foundation of Individual Freedom (IFIF) as well as the League for Spiritual Discovery, which he characterized frankly as a species of religion, and contributed to early scientific as well as popular literature on LSD, which in the meantime had become the hallucinogen of choice for Leary and his associates, followers, and a growing crowd of hangers-on. Leary also became erotically and romantically involved with several new partners and traveled to India where he, like many other counterculture figures, gained a guru's cachet, a style that came to define the teacher's role in the mid-1960s alternative culture. In December 1965, Leary was arrested while on a trip to Mexico with his (now fourth) wife and children and charged under Federal narcotics laws with marijuana possession. While this case was appealed he moved to California, where he continued to be involved with the “counterculture” of pop music, “hippies,” post-Beat literary intellectuals, and drug culture which attracted a generation of American youth as well as, again, the enmity of ruling power elites. Leary even became involved briefly in politics, running for Governor of California in 1969 (the Beatles’ song “Come Together” was written for Leary's brief campaign). Leary became one of the most well-known cultural icons of the late 1960s, but his high flight was halted by a second drug conviction in California that landed him in the California Men's Colony in Chino in 1970, from which he escaped by climbing over the fence on a cable. Leary, assisted by both the Weather Underground, his wife, and many others, moved in succession from a stay with fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, to Switzerland, and ultimately to Afghanistan, where he was tricked into arrest and returned to the United States for detention. In those relatively less hyperpunitive times, the man whom Richard Nixon had dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” (Colker, 1996) was released from prison in 1976. After prison, starting from scratch, he reinvented himself as a raconteur or folk philosopher, often appearing with his one time nemesis G. Gordon Liddy, formerly the Distric Attorney who busted Leary in New York in 1966 and who had just come through his own trials in connection with the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. Leary, clad in a vivid silver jumpsuit and flashing his attractive smile, became during the 1980s and 1990s one of the earliest promoters of computer culture and multimedia on several nationwide tours, and finished his life as ebulliently as he lived it: after he considered but ultimately rejected cryogenic preservation, his cremains were shot into space in 1997 (and fell to earth in 2005.)

As can be seen from this very brief review, Leary's career has several places that could be considered inflection points. Some episodes, though they would ordinarily represent critical life change points, did not in Leary's case really result in change. For instance, though he experienced multiple imprisonments between 1965 and 1976, and though these resulted in the creation of an extended prison narrative (Leary, 1972, 1973a), they did not serve to fundamentally alter his outlook on life (as for instance imprisonment did for Oscar Wilde). Other episodes, however, both Leary and his biographers agree, are crucial. One such point is his wife's suicide in 1955. Another candidate for a single seminal episode, also acknowledged as such by Leary and his biographers (e.g., Higgs, 2006) could be his first hallucinogenic experience. One of Leary's many descriptions of the episode conveys the centrality and gravity of the event for him:

Once upon a time, many years ago, on a sunny afternoon in the garden of a Cuernavaca villa, I ate seven of the so-called sacred mushrooms which had been given to me by a scientist from the University of Mexico. During the next five hours, I was whirled through an experience which could be described in many extravagant metaphors but which was, above all and without question, the deepest religious experience of my life.

(Leary 1968, p. 13)

Interestingly, Leary's “many years ago” translates to between four and eight years, depending on when this version of the experience was written. Elsewhere in many places, Leary said that he had learned more in five hours of psilocybin experience than he had either in his graduate studies or in his entire previous 15 years of activity in technical psychology (Leary, 1966/1968, 2007). However, appealing these episodes are as discrete inflection points, it is difficult to privilege one event in the years between 1955 and 1968, which might be termed an “inflection period” in Leary's career. During this time, there is a steady shift in terms of locus of publication and employment: prior to 1960, Leary's published work appeared in standard psychological and psychiatric journals. He was an instructor, a theorist, and a grant administrator, among other activities. Between 1960 and 1966, publications appear with about equal frequency in standard psychological outlets (including reprints of earlier publications in edited texts) and in literary, philosophical, and religious publications. Also at this period, Leary and his associates published extensively in a public debate about hallucinogens that involved physical and biological scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists, and other interested intellectuals (e.g., Solomon, 1964). Post-1966, Leary's published output as well as his daily activity shifted almost entirely to journalistic and entertainment venues, consisting most often, for its literary part, in transcripts of interviews or lectures, journals of psychedelia, and semi-autobiographical proselytizing. Leary had by this time shifted from academic publication to a style of pamphleteering unique to him which he continued for over 20 years, blending traditional prose with multiple media styles and combining personal observations on his own struggles with authority, law, and tradition. These were combined with theories of neurological and cultural evolution progressing from East to West (i.e., to California) and spiced with pseudonymic alter egos and spoofs of his activities and friends. Prior to 1963, Leary was affiliated with academia both in its formal university sense and in related investigative centers, either medical or academic, as a credentialed professional. His dismissal from Harvard represents, in the context of the history of psychology, a watershed event: a breach of a legal as well as symbolic connection to the historic academic center of psychology in the United States and the starting point for Leary's intellectual free agency. Add in that Leary's pre-1960 associates were mainly within the camp of academic psychology and psychiatry, while his associates after 1963 were mostly in literary and countercultural circles, and that Leary was most likely to be found at the concerts, activist gatherings, and “happenings” that characterized the era, and the picture of a developing career discontinuity, starting with his first wife's suicide and centering on his Harvard dismissal in 1963, is plain.

Exile from the Mainstream

This fracture in Leary's career has reduced Leary's presence in the history of psychology in several ways. There is a strong cultural consensus that Leary left psychology and changed his state or phase when he left academia in 1963: as David Jay Brown put it in the introduction to his 1989 interview with Leary: “When his (Leary's) research with psychedelic drugs began to have an impact on the general public, and Leary refused to discontinue his research, he was dismissed from Harvard. Leary metamorphosized from academic professor to counterculture folk hero” (Brown, 1993). In general there is a tendency, among those who consider Leary's career, to rush toward the breach and focus on the aftermath. This tends to magnify Leary's activity post-1963 and minimizes what leads up to it, and also tends toward classifications of Leary as a pre-1963 “psychologist” and a post-1963 “something else.” One of the few substantive appearances of Leary in a comprehensive history-of-psychology textbook illustrates how a strategy of focusing on Leary's transformation from psychologist to something quite different can be put to use. In the context of describing the emergence of a “new Hellenism” questioning the authority of reason, Thomas Leahy, not necessarily an unsympathetic observer of the 1960s psychological scene, describes Leary's activity in terms of its influence on youth culture in the 1960s, specifically on the “hippies”:

A much more visible manifestation of the new Hellenism were the hippies, who, like the ancient cynics, dropped out of the conventional society they scorned and rejected…. to explore and express their feelings hippies turned to drugs. Few had heard of Carl Rogers or Abraham Maslow, though the hippies shared their values; but they had heard of another psychologist, Timothy Leary. Leary was a young, ambitious, and successful Harvard psychologist whose personal problems drove him inward, to his feelings. He began to use drugs, first peyote (sic) and then LSD, on himself and others to attain the Heraclitan state of being, the “integrated process of changingness” open to new experience and intensely aware of every feeling. The hippies followed Leary into the “psychedelic,” mind-expanding world, using drugs (as had Coleridge and other young Romantics) to erase individual discursive consciousness (Kant's Verstand) and replace it with rushes of emotion, strange hallucinations, and alleged transcendental insights

(Vernunft). (1992, pp. 435–436)

Here, Leary is characterized as a species of “pied piper,” the same phrase that headlined his New York Times obituary in June 1996, a misleader followed by an entire group (“Timothy Leary, Pied Piper”, 1996). Leahy then asks the question “But was there anything more to the 1960's than sound and fury?” to which the answer, confident and monosyllabic, is “no” (Leahy, 1992, p. 436). Leary's Harvard dismissal has served the purpose of, in some cases, setting a context for a dismissal of Leary's psychological career accompanied by outright scorn, manifested continually from 1963 onward, in which pejoratives and castigations are still lively and prominent.3

Along with the negative statements of others about Leary are statements that Leary himself made about his profession, which suggest the bad feelings may have been mutual. He saw his Berkeley career situated in a grim milieu:

I was a rootless city-dweller. An anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars, and drove home each night and drank martinis and looked like and thought like and acted like several million middle-class liberal intellectual robots.

(Leary 1968, p. 4, in Marshall, 1976)

Leary later described individuals like this as “hive” individuals at a primordial, unawakened state of consciousness (Leary, 1973b, 1979b). Leary also characterized psychology somewhat cynically as a game which could be played, parlayed into success, as he described it in a 1963 article, “American Education as an Addictive Process and its Cure”:

Undergraduates come to me very often and say, “I want to go on to graduate school in psychology. Where should I go?” And I always ask them the question, “Why do you want to study psychology?” And as I listen to them, usually one of two answers develops. Answer number one is “I want to become a psychologist. I want to play the psychology game. I want to be able to play the role and use the terms you use, and I want to be an assistant professor and then a full professor, and I want to get tenure, and maybe if I'm really ambitious, I might get to be president of the American Psychological Association.” Well, that's fair enough, and for someone who has that ambition I can give them advice about the strategic universities to go to, like go to Michigan or Yale but don't go to XYZ.

(Leary 1963a, p. 247).

While games were at the core of Leary's conception of life (e.g., Leary, 1979b, 1996), real learning could only be achieved outside of the system of academic psychology. In the next paragraph, Leary advised a hypothetical prospective student that

If you want to learn about delinquency and reducing crime, go down to the tough section, learn the crime game, learn how to make a man-to-man contact with tough guys, learn from them why they are crooks and criminals. Spend a year in prison, not as a psychologist, but maybe as a guard, or cleaning up the garbage, and you'll learn more than you will ever learn in a criminology textbook.

(Leary 1963a, p. 247).

The impression of Leary's disdain for psychology also may have been strengthened inadvertently by others. For example, an early unauthorized Leary biographer, Charles Slack, characterized the MS and PhD in psychology as “meal tickets” for Leary (Slack, 1973), a dismissive statement reinforcing Leary's own characterizations. The implication of these and other statements of and about Leary post-1963 is that psychology as he practiced it before the break had become not only irrelevant to his new aims of creating what amounted to a consciousness raising religion based on psychedelic experience but was in some essential way an impediment to real psychological knowledge.

The presence of widespread negative attitudes about Leary, along with the obloquy connected with drug use, and Leary's own expressed cynicism regarding organized psychology contribute, no doubt, to keeping him out of general textbook histories of psychology as well as out of the history of psychology at large. His own apparent disparagement and downrating of psychology as a profession adds to the perception of Leary as a self-determined exile from the field. However, other more impersonal and statistical factors related to Leary's career break may exert an even larger effect in keeping him out of historical accounts. For instance, Leary has gone missing even in histories of areas of psychology that might be more congenial to some of his message of self-discovery, for instance histories of humanistic psychology, where a good deal of his intellectual ancestry lies. Leary stated many times that his basic orientation toward psychology was “humanist” (Leary, 1982, 1996.) But this may have more to do with the relation of the timing of the change in Leary's career trajectory related to the development of humanistic psychology than anything else. For instance, at the time of the Old Saybrook conference in 1964 (Taylor, 2000), an important early culmination and crystallization of the “third force,” Leary was occupied both with the debates about psychedelics and also with the Millbrook communal activities. In this case, Leary took the lesser of two less traveled roads and moved farther from the psychological mainstream than humanistic psychology in general did. Other equally prosaic factors connected with premature career termination combine to exclude Leary from historical accounts. Generally, psychologists are expected to have continuity in their careers: premature termination through early death is analogous to leaving the profession at mid-career, and psychologists who die or leave early are usually less prominent in the history of the field, even if they make significant contributions, than those who lead long professional and personal lives inside psychology. Notable exceptions to this are J.B. Watson and Stanley Milgram, whose early exits from psychology are counteracted by the supreme notoriety of their early contributions. In American culture, in which a prison sentence is often equated with civil death, Leary's multiple imprisonments might, along with his exile from psychology, militate against his presence in history. Likewise psychologists with only one major academic book to their credit will rank less highly in a culture in which citation and book counts weigh heavily in estimations of eminence (Haggbloom et al., 2002; Simonton, 2002, 2003). Leary's publication count, by 1959, was on the low side for a Harvard professor even at the beginning of a career. Presence in leadership roles in the profession likewise is a better guarantee of inclusion in formal histories: Leary was not active in APA governance (although he was a member) and did not take on leadership roles in the association as a whole or in any of the divisions related to his activities. Taken all together, there is a respectable amount of evidence supporting a contention that Leary both actively rejected psychology along with putting himself in a position to be passively effaced from it after 1963. The idea that he severed his association with psychology makes it easier to see him “outside looking in” at psychology after that time and minimizes his historical presence.

The Shift As Inflection: Psychological Persistences and Continuities

In counterpoise to the foregoing, however, there are several lines of evidence that suggest that 1963 represents an inflection point rather than a clean break, and that not only Leary's earlier roots in psychology but also his contemporary and continuing influence on the field have been marginalized. Several lines of evidence support the view that Leary continued to advance psychological ideas post-1963 and that his influence on psychology has continued after his death. Through 1963, as mentioned, Leary's output was not particularly large for a Harvard professor: by the time of his dismissal he had one book and 17 articles, conference papers, and brief contributions to his credit. Yet, two activities representing Leary's most significant innovations continue to stand out as the main landmarks in his career: interpersonal personality theory and the Good Friday Experiment. Both of these elements of Leary's work have continued to attract interest and followers. Though interpersonal personality theory as conceived by Leary has only infrequently entered the canon of textbook personality theory, it attracted several influential practitioners during the period 1960–1980, among them Jerry Wiggins (Wiggins, 1996), and interest in the theory has continued and coalesced into the Society for Interpersonal Theory and Research (SITAR) founded in 1997. Writing in SITARs 2007 newsletter, Theodore Millon traced his personality “circulargram” to Leary's 1957 circumplex, locating the lineage of his own theory as well as that of interpersonal theory as a whole in a sequence starting with Alfred Adler in the 1930s and progressing through Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan. At this point, in the 1950s, according to Millon,

(a) group of young psychologists, not psychiatrists, at UC Berkeley, became centrally involved in further advancing the subject, most notably the researchers comprising the mentors and colleagues of Timothy Leary, part pioneer and part folk legend, who drafted their ideas as the senior author of Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, the key stimulus for personality circumplex models.

(Millon 2007, p. 2)

As for the Good Friday experiment, it has continued as a focus of interest in psychology, stimulating not only sympathetic criticism (Doblin, 1991) but also a recent replication, with comparable results, at Johns Hopkins in 2006 (Griffiths et al., 2006). Leary's and others’ work in the area of psychedelics and their relation to behavior and consciousness has also continued to thrive, as is seen in several Basel conferences of the World Psychedelic Forum (2008) as well as in the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS, 2010).

While this evidence suggests at least paradigmatic continuity for Leary, continuity in his psychological career between the work he completed prior to 1963 and what followed it until the time of his death in 1996 is not immediately apparent, especially if one looks for it in his published writings during that time. After 1963, as mentioned earlier, Leary seldom wrote in a conventional scientific or theoretical psychological style. David McClelland, one of Leary's mentors, expressed this view in a Newsweek interview in 1963, opining that “The more drugs Alpert and Leary took, the less they were interested in science (“No Illusions”, 1963).” But science is only one of the styles of psychology, and after leaving Harvard Leary produced a series of books and feuilletons coalescing mainly around political and religious themes, intertwined with a picaresque ongoing autobiographical commentary on his various adventures. After 1963, Leary regularly styled himself a philosopher, and taken as a whole his post-Harvard production promotes, simply put, a libertarian hedonism centered around what Leary defined as “The Two Commandments for the Molecular Age: I. Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow men. II. Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness” (Leary, 1968, p. 95). Within this autobiographical-philosophical-political mix are embedded many ideas that connect to the psychology of the time: a baker's dozen of the most frequently occurring of these are

1. Neurological instantiation of mind;
2. Self-management of conscious experience through control of the brain;
3. Increase in intelligence with experience and information;
4. Levels of consciousness corresponding with both brain and behavioral complexity;
5. “Imprinting” as the basic process of gaining knowledge;
6. The date 1946 as “year zero,” genesis of clinical psychology, clinical psychology as source of change;
7. Transactional interpersonal information interchange;
8. Interpersonal role and game playing as a mediator of or obstacle to change;
9. Envisioning the future as a necessary element in personal change;
10. Consciousness connected to sensation;
11. Expansion of consciousness through expansion of sense;
12. Sexuality as a motive element; motivations parallel to emotions in system;
13. Questioning authority.

These ideas, familiar tropes in 1950s and 1960s science, futurisms, and psychology, are draped on Leary's post-1963 work in no particular systematic order. Leary considered himself a seer, speculator, and idea generator—“a cheerleader for change” as he memorably styled himself (Leary, 1983). As such, he was more content with epigrammatic or aphoristic expression of the connection between these ideas and his calls for action and was more interested in stimulus than in proof. Expressions such as “tune in, turn on, and drop out” recombined much background information that was not specifically referenced by Leary to its sources in contemporary psychological discourse. In the case of this particularly famous expression, “tune in” refers to information reception and processing, “turn on” of course to heightened consciousness through drugs, and “drop out” has a specific reference in remarks Leary made in an address at the University of Washington in 1963, mentioned earlier above (Leary, 1963a/1968), in which he advised students in college to strike off on their own if they wanted to learn anything—a sentiment echoed by prominent mainstream psychologists who were also critics of education at the time (e.g., Rogers, 1969; Skinner, 1968). Partly this need for epigrammatic condensation, recombination, and phrase-coining was due to Leary's need to style himself a nonconformist, and partly it was because of the potboiler approach Leary needed to take to ensure a steady income stream along with visibility on the national stage. The widespread presence of these ideas in Leary's massive popular output is a marker, however much distorted by being passed through a psychedelic refracting mirror, of continuity with contemporary psychology.

Discernible within this vast popular output are some works that might be characterized as “psychologies”—comprehensive and systematic presentations of specific viewpoints in psychology: The Theory and Practice of Hedonic Psychology (1973c) and Neurologic (1973b) are the best examples of these. Whether or not these would qualify as productive psychological theories is a question for another time and another method: in general, each contains many ideas that support a libertarian hedonism, a particular passion of Leary's at the time. In the case of the Hedonic Psychology (originally appearing as a popular article in Psychology Today in January 1973), the central theme is unrestricted use of pleasure producing drugs: in Neurologic, the focus is on a stage theory of expanding consciousness that forms the stem for several subsequent works. While each of these works appears to be mainly metaphorical, lacking the density of connections to specific precursor and contemporary theories that usually characterize theory in psychology, Leary not only continued to utilize a recognizable conceptual vocabulary derived from contemporary psychology but also constructed speculative, but recognizably psychological, theory in psychology after 1963. This evidence, to the extent that it represents psychological vs. metaphorical discourse, is another argument for Leary's post-1963 persistence in the field.

Every Psychedelian His Own Historian

Leary was aware not only of the developments in contemporary psychology but also of the importance of historically situated connections. As he expressed, it in the context of one of his excursions into psychological futurism in 1979:

Understand “roots”. Intelligence Agents (Out-Castes) study history very carefully. Because we can't navigate precisely into the future unless we understand the rhythms and coherences of past voyages. However, once we've traced our roots back, it's necessary to move on to the future and create blossoms.

(Leary, 1979a, 2007 p. 20)

James Capshew, one of the few historians of psychology to give Leary a significant place in post-WWII psychological history, says that

(p)artly for legal reasons, he (Leary) took refuge in the rhetoric of religion and translated his earlier scientific concern with personality development into a mystical quest for personal enlightenment on a mass scale. The transformation from respected scientist to counterculture guru was so complete that Leary's origins as an academic psychologist have become obscured.

(Capshew, 1999, p. 251)

Capshew suggests that Leary's career as a whole fit well with the evolution of a humanistic, personal-growth approach within psychology during the 1960s, and leaves open the possibility that there is also an obscured continuity between Leary and individuals and traditions in psychology's history. After 1963, Leary took a lively interest in establishing the general intellectual grounds for his work, which can be extracted from many impromptu brief histories of concepts or interests contained in interviews or in parts of his post-1963 works. For instance, interviewed by David Brown in 1989, Leary traced his interest in his then-current passion, computers and the information revolution, first to its sources in his work as editor on his high school newspaper where he described his activity as “fissioning and collaging ideas” and then to several contemporary sources as follows (in a taste of vintage Leary popularizing style):

I cite this as an example of my interest in communication, and new modes of communication. To me, the philosophy of the twenty-first century, which is quantum philosophy, is the philosophy of information. We see this in the linguists, the seniticions (sic—probably either semanticists or semioticians mistransposed), Kojipsky (sic—most likely Korzybski), Wittgenstein, and then the enormous breakthrough provided by the thought-digitizing appliance known as the computer. The history of the roaring twentieth century is the history of our becoming an information species, and you could hardly be a philosopher, or for that matter, a scientist, in the twentieth century, if you're not working in this wave.

(Brown, 1993)

Leary's most ambitious attempt at locating himself in psychology's traditional history is found in Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982), which collates, excerpts, and recombines much of Leary's work across his career. After offering a dedicatory homage to both Julian Offray de la Mettrie and Christopher Columbus, Leary, in Chapter 4, presents a table of intellectual ancestry arranged in three columns (Leary, 1982, p. 42). The first column is headed “mechanist scientists who ignore the internal” and includes, reading from top to bottom, earliest to latest, “early Newton,” “classical physics,” “Swedenborg the engineer,” “Einstein the relativist and field theorist,” a selection of behavioral psychologist—Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, and lastly “computerism, military control of space, and energy technology.” In the right-hand column, under the heading “occultists, mystics, theologians who ignore the external” are ordered, parallel to the left-hand column, “the later Newton (alchemist, theologian, mystic)”; “all religionists, Blake's mysticism, German romanticism & idealism”; “Swedenborg the mystic—no clue as to brain”; “Einstein the conventional, cliché religionist”; “psychoanalysis, theosophy, Neo-Hinduism”; and last, “soft headed humanistic psychology, wholistic health, ecological Puritanism, antiscience, and antinukees.” Finally, in a central column bridging the other two, are ordered first “Julian Offray de la Mettrie (Father of Neurologic)”; “Gustav Theodor Fechner & Wilhelm Wundt, founders of psychophysics and psychophysiology”; “Georges I. Gurdjieff uses drugs and physical vibrations to activate new brain centers”; “neurologic, neurophysics emerging in 1960's, psychopharmacology, ethology, imprinting theory, drug therapies, recreational drugs, biofeedback, left-brain/right-brain theory”; and finally, in a central box at the bottom marked “1980–1999,” “Sociobiology, neurogenetics, Gaia theory, human ethology, 3rd generation of brain change drugs, longevity pill, intelligence increase drugs, civilian space migration.”

Another example of a comprehensive table of ancestry is embodied in the commentary he offered to the symposium on Interpersonal Theory at the 1994 meeting of the American Psychological Association (Leary, 1996). After situating his remarks in the context of “this particular time and place in the evolution of human thought and human philosophy: The last years of the roaring twentieth century and the upcoming millenium” (p. 301) he proceeded to offer a list of those people “who have influenced all of us,” that is, interpersonalists. This list includes, in order: Abraham Maslow; Carl Rogers; Frank Barron; Humanism (in general, in its 1950s–1960s psychological context); Gordon Allport; Robert White; David McClelland; Harry Murray; Emmanuel Swedenborg; William James; Wundt, Helmholtz, and Fechner; Morton Prince; Harry Stack Sullivan; and The Harvard Psychedelic Research Project team: Richard Alpert; Ralph Metzner, Flo Ferguson, George Litwin, Gunther Weil, Madison Preznell, and Walter Clark. The list closes with the following tribute to

my pals at Berkeley in the 1950's. What a hive of buzzing humanism there! Hugh Coffey, Erik Erikson. Jean Walker McFarlane. Group therapy. Group dynamics. Jean McFarlane started that legendary longitudinal research—the California Study. We're all lucky to share the wisdom of these people.

(Leary, 1996, p. 306)

This is a good sample of the varied cast of historical characters Leary offered as background in his post-1963 writing—again, offered with no particular unifying theme or framework to organize them or relate them to his work. Taken as a whole it seems more an impromptu collage of names intended to provide ambient atmosphere, a kind of gathering by family resemblance—“Here Comes Everybody!” Leary, his biographers note, was relationship- rather than data-centered and it is not unjust to say that he probably included the names on these lists as friends and fellow travelers rather than as symbolic representatives of premises in an extended argument. This is not the only reason to exercise caution in taking Leary's self-assessments of his roots at face value, for numerous inconsistencies, exaggerations, and inaccuracies are embedded within them as well. For example, Leary's claim in Changing My Mind, Among Others that “the book you are now reading (and my life) is a faithful, dutiful, follow-up to the work and life of Fechner” (Leary 1982, p. 43), is to the historian of psychology sudden, striking, and surprising. In the next paragraph, for instance, Leary offers a sketch of Fechner's life, emphasizing the “neurological or psychosomatic” quality of Fechner's early “illness” (Leary's quotes), his belief “that all life was a unity,” his subsequent “‘scientizing' the internal ineffable” and his maintenance of the view that “life is manifested in the objects of the universe” (Leary, 1982, p. 43). This is all in harmony with Leary's general philosophical views as well as reasonably standard fare that could be derived from many brief biographies of Fechner in textbooks of psychological history at the time. Leary drew a direct line between psychophysics and what he termed “neurophysics,” his metaphor for managing consciousness, and leads up to this with references to Fechner. Speaking slightly earlier in the same piece of the psilocybin studies at Harvard—a section originally written in 1964 and referring to the very earliest Harvard psychedelic experiments in 1960 and 1961—he wrote that

The experimental methods and attitudes used were more important than the drugs. These neurological experiments were the first wide-scale, systematic, deliberate application to human behavior of the relativistic theories of particle behavior. Our research picked up precisely where the giant founders of experimental psychology—Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Fechner, William James, Edward Titchener—left off a long generation before. Our aim, like theirs, was the precise correlation of objective-external differences with internal conscious reactions.

(Leary, 1982, p. 39)

This is not the only place where Leary invokes Fechner, or where Leary is associated with Fechner. In June 1973, in a letter to Psychology Today from a maximum security prison in California, Leary mounted a spirited defense of his hedonic theory, which had been published in that journal the previous January through the efforts of his friends. Along with a wry deflation of his unwelcome biographer Slack, mentioned earlier, Leary offered some clues as to his valuation of Fechner. Noting that Slack had rendered “a wounding injustice to one of my seven most precious self-images, that of the hardheaded, objective scientist,” he continued:

My epistemological defense appeals to the rules of PSY PHI (Science Fiction). I have conducted and reported in the scientific literature large sample investigations on: psychiatric diagnosis, interpersonal diagnosis, outcome of therapy, psychosomatic indices, group process, assessment of divinity students, psychotics, top-management executives, analysis of psychotherapy process, existential-transactional methods of behavior change, etc.; as well as controlled studies on the effects of psychedelic drug ingestion on divinity students, maximum-security prisoners, artists, musicians, homosexuals, alcoholics, heroin addicts, neurotics, etc. In the course of these experiments I have developed many methodologies still used by other researchers. My posture in most of these studies has been rigorously behavioral and conventionally statistical.

It is true that, in the Wittgensteinian sense, my interpretations of my data and data reported by geneticists, neurologists, etc. are completely fictional and “pseudoscientific”….Perhaps the history of science can remind us that it is often the investigator most faithful to his data who can afford to go farthest out in self-conscious speculation. Gustav Fechner has always been my personal professional hero.

(Leary, 1973d, p. 4)

Leary's contribution to Frank Barron's Festschrift Unusual Associates (Montouri, 1996), a concise summary of the varieties of experimental approaches to consciousness, also features Fechner. Leary's Fechnerian spirit is further emphasized in Thomas Riedlinger's 1999 memorial essay, in which he compares Leary's appreciation of Fechner with William James's (Riedlinger, 1999). Yet, Riedlinger was surprised to find, in 1995, that Leary had not read what he termed Fechner's “most popular book,” On Life After Death, a work in which science and spirituality most sharply coincide, suggesting the need for caution in making any specific claim for the source of Fechner's—and by extension anyone's—influence on Leary based on Leary's own estimations of it. Caveat lector!

Another individual gets pride of place in the 1994 list: Frank Barron (1922–2002), a fellow graduate student at Berkeley who became his friend for the rest of his life and whom credited for introducing him to psilocybin in 1960. Barron is best known for his contributions to psychological creativity theory, especially in its early days during the 1950s and 1960s. Like Leary, Barron was very much invested in symbolic genealogy and traced himself back to Aeneas, Merlin, and Yeats. His more proximal psychological influence derived at base from his 1948 Minnesota MA degree. In Creativity and Personal Freedom (Barron, 1968), Barron counted Herbert Feigl's seminar on the philosophy of science—the “Meegle-Feegle” seminar with Paul Meehl—as his most significant experience there. In an autobiography (Barron, 1995) however, Barron also reveals significant influences from the intensely practical applied psychologist Donald Paterson and the generalist Richard Elliott: he is one of Elliott's few direct intellectual descendants. Barron and Leary were professionally associated through the 1950s in California: they published a study on the correlation between personality and psychotherapy outcomes in 1955 (Barron and Leary, 1955) which Leary cited many times thereafter as one of the reasons for his disbelief in traditional psychotherapy. Barron was also associated with Leary during the early part of Leary's Harvard career. Beyond being the conduit for Leary's first psychedelic experience, Barron also collaborated with Leary on creativity research in conjunction with the Rhode Island School of Design in 1961. Their paths diverged after this, but Barron remained one of the few psychologists who publicly affirmed Leary's continuing status as a psychologist: in his Introduction to the Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (Barron, 1988), Barron wrote:

Timothy Leary would be the last, I think, to place himself in the camp of the mystics, but there is a tendency for readers of daily newspapers to find his behavior incomprehensible. The kindest of his pragmatic-minded critics call him a mystic; the unkindest, a charlatan. His friends are more likely to think of him as a gentleman and a scholar, as I do; with of course a streak of wild Irish rebellion, imagination, unconventionality, and love of battle. But whatever his character, personality, and religion, he unquestionably served as a catalyst in a time of major social change, a change in consciousness as well as a change in manners, the mysterious ‘60s.

(p. 10)

Leary reciprocated Barron's positivity many times in expressions that exemplify his literary style as well as his tendency to hyperbolic exaggeration. In The Intelligence Agents, one of the five volumes of the “Future History Series” (Leary, 1979a), Leary praised Barron as a fellow member of the “Irish Renaissance” who had avoided the “priest-run ghettoes of the Atlantic Seaboard by moving to the rough frontier of the Pennsylvania mining mountains” (p. 108). According to Leary, Barron “became a central figure in American psychology, taking over the position previously held by William James” (p. 108). In his 1994 public reminiscences, Leary told an anecdote about himself and Barron in the early 1950s, when Leary had just taken the MMPI and was mortified with the results.

So I'm a hypomanic psychopath, for starters. And yeah, I was pretty high on femininity. You see, I like poetry and flowers. Obsessive-compulsive? Nope, I bottomed out there! But Schizophrenia, off the wall! Frank looked at me with a very tolerant, older brother look—although I think I'm older than he is—and said, “It's all right, Tim. You should see my profile. Never score yourself on someone else's scale.

(Leary, 1996, p. 302)

As Barron put it, “Tim Leary somehow never made tenure on either the academic or mystic ladders, a fact which I feel sure makes him both proud and happy” (Barron, 1988, p. 13). This symbolically rich story—triumph over life's vicissitudes, homecoming after a long voyage, beating the professional long odds, self-transcendence over admitted weaknesses and flaws—is a recurrent Leary theme according to his biographers (e.g., Greenfield, 2006; Marshall, 1976), and also shows the level of intimacy Leary maintained with his friends—unreserved, open, and outside of the form and structure of ordinary historical and academic discourse. It is hardly the case, though, that an accurate account of the Barron-Leary association could be gained from Leary's account alone. Interspersed through the 1994 list are several comments very typical of Leary's friendly exaggerations of the contributions of his more distant intellectual predecessors. For instance, regarding Emerson, he notes that “We were practicing Visionary Humanism in the very spot where Ralph Waldo Emerson spun out his visions. I guess that's why they originally called it Divinity Avenue” (1996, p. 304). And also,

Please do not forget that Brother Ralph was thrown out of Harvard for the same reason Dick Alpert and I were bounced. We were saying exactly the thing he was saying: “Don't look up to the temples. Don't get obsessed by the Bibles and theology books. Look within! Look within!”

(1996, p. 305)

According to Leary, William James founded the first psychological laboratory in America (1996, p. 305) after Wundt and Helmholtz and Fechner (the Europeans). He makes note of James's use of “hashish and opium and nitrous oxide” and stars The Varieties of Religious Experience “which many consider our greatest visionary tract” (1996, p. 305). Leary sweepingly locates the origin of abnormal psychology with the work of Morton Prince, though in the context of its “authoritarian” connotations: “Why be normal?”, asks Leary (1996, p. 305).

Finally, inaccuracies that seem more like either memory lapses or possibly false memories emerge in Leary's lists of predecessors. In The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (Leary, 1957), Erik Erikson and Harry Stack Sullivan, along with George Herbert Mead and others, are included in an extensive review of the precursors of interpersonal personality theory where the contributions of each are described, succinctly but thoroughly. Elsewhere in his post-1963 production, Leary treats Sullivan as an exemplar of game and role playing and ascribes the interpersonal viewpoint in psychotherapy to him (Leary, 1982). But in 1994, regarding Sullivan, Leary said: “Harry Stack Sullivan is still a wonderful mystery to me” (Leary, 1996, p. 305). Leary claimed never to have seen a photograph of Sullivan before this symposium. And further, Leary states that:

In the 1950's, Sullivan was an amazing recluse. He was like Thomas Pynchon the novelist, or J. D. Salinger. Sullivan simply would not play any of the literary academic games. You never caught him at an APA convention,—or if he was there, he was probably tending bar and taking notes on the saloon talk.

(Leary, 1996, p. 305)

Again, as with Fechner, the strength of Leary's acquaintance with Sullivan is called into question to the extent that he appears not to have minded that Sullivan was not even alive in the 1950s (except of course in his writings—which are not specifically cited—and by reputation). His inclusion of Erik Erikson in the Berkeley “hive of humanism” is probably the most egregious historical discrepancy here. Erikson overlapped Leary at Berkeley for less than two years, between 1949 and 1951, and was in proximity to him when Leary was teaching at Harvard between 1959 and 1963, though there is no record that they ever came into contact at that time. The only specific connection between them is Erikson's recalling walking out on a lecture by Leary at Harvard in 1966 or 1967, saying that he was “tuning out” as he left (Friedman, 2006). In similar fashion, Leary's inclusion of Henry Murray, Gordon Allport, and other figures of humanism may be a kind of attempt at wishful inclusion in the humanistic psychological enterprise he missed joining earlier in his career.

Foundations of Continuity in Leary's Academic Genealogy, 1940–1960

“They're all heroes in my book” said Leary at the conclusion of his 1994 APA remarks, offering “a toast to our glorious past, our lively present, and our unpredictable future” (Leary 1996, p. 306). His description of his intellectual lineage, while it indicates a broad general knowledge of psychology, may also be hampered by superficiality and marred by historical inaccuracy or selective memory, and thus may be only a crude indicator of Leary's roots. But as with the evidence for his abandonment of the field discussed earlier, it may be the case that there is more prosaic and objective evidence of Leary's rootedness in psychology. Examination of Leary's connections to his formative influences in the field—his early mentors and teachers—reinforces some of Leary's views of his intellectual sources and also suggests some of the dimensions of the psychology against which his later critiques were directed. From 1941, when Leary entered psychology, through 1950, Leary was mentored by several individuals. First among these was Donald Angus Ramsdell (1904–1965), who inducted Leary into psychology at the University of Alabama. Ramsdell was a Middlebury College graduate who spent two graduate years at Brown, from 1931 to 1933, in psychology with Harold Schlosberg and Leonard Carmichael, and five years at Harvard (1933–1938). Ramsdell worked in S.S. Stevens's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory and his PhD—a combination of Seashore and Metfessel's work on vibrato and Stevens's psychophysics (Ramsdell, 1938)—was signed by Stevens, Boring, and Lashley (Lashley had no obvious input). Ramsdell was important in directing Leary, recognizing talent, and most importantly saving Leary from himself and for psychology when Leary was a wild recruit.

Though Leary never mentioned him anywhere else but in his 1983 autobiography, he recognized Ramsdell's—alliteratively or pseudonymically rendered as “Dr. Dee”—importance in his life. Remembering his registration for courses in 1941, Leary wrote:

The university gymnasium was the site of registration. I joined a long line of students seeking to major in philosophy. At the booth next to PHIL was PSYCH. Behind the PSYCH desk was a pleasant-looking baldheaded man who waved and beckoned. He introduced himself as Dr. Dee, Chairman of the Psychology Department. He seemed delighted to find I was from Massachusetts. He had taken his doctorate at Harvard. “Why in the world,” asked Dr. Dee, “are you standing in the philosophy line? There is no philosophy department at this university…. Dumb coeds and football players are the only ones who sign up. If you are searching for intellectual stimulation, you should major in psychology. I'm just building the department here and need bright students.

(Leary 1983, p. 124)

Leary and Ramsdell shared an intense mentorship experience: Ramsdell was more or less Leary's sole tutor in psychology in several different venues between 1941 and 1945: as an undergraduate student at the University of Alabama, Ramsdell not only was his teacher in the very small department there but also ran freewheeling seminars in his home at which, George A. Miller remembers, anything and everything could be discussed. Miller, another of Ramsdell's Alabama students, graduated in 1941 and stayed for another year until he left for Harvard. He recalls that Ramsdell's

“teaching style was wonderful, he attracted a number of students into his seminars, which were given at his home in Tuscaloosa, around his dining room table. Somehow he got us arguing with each other—I've always admired it but never (have) been able to imitate it…. his curiosity and gift for teaching must have made him an unusual therapist.”

(Miller, 2006)

In 1943, Ramsdell managed to get Leary posted to Deshon Military Hospital where Ramsdell was the director of the Auditory Rehabilitation Clinic. It is not hard to believe that a person studying psychology under a mentor trained by both Leonard Carmichael and E.G. Boring, one whose doctoral thesis bristled with Bessel functions and who was his internship preceptor in an audiology lab, would have received some of the history of psychophysics along with everything else. A less speculative though not necessarily less mystical marker of continuity between undergraduate and later life experiences is the frequency with which Count Korzybski surfaces in Leary. Leary continues mentioning him in the 1980s, far later than most dedicated general semanticists (Leary, 1979a). Korzybski was one of Ramsdell's Alabama seminar topics. As George Miller remembered it, a grad student (Fred Stahly) had gone off to Chicago for the express purpose of taking a course of General Semantics and his return was most anxiously anticipated—and most disappointing afterward, as he could only report on how wonderful Korzybski was (Miller, 2006). Eventually Ramsdell become chief clinical psychologist at a Veteran's Administration hospital in Massachusetts. In his autobiography (Leary, 1983), Leary alluded to several other formative influences in the 1941–1944 period, among these brief stays at both Georgetown University and The Ohio State University in 1943, and another significant (and pseudonymous) Alabama mentor, an inspiring and supportive biology professor and a close associate of Ramsdell's, probably Charles Marc Pomerat, all suggestive of potentially important educational experiences as well as psychological connections, but as yet subject to intriguing speculation.

After leaving the Army in 1945, Leary moved to Washington State College. There, his thesis committee consisted of Lee Cronbach, Tolbert Kennedy, and Charles Erickson. Cronbach was on a path to eminence: Kennedy and Erickson are mostly historically mute. C.I. Erickson was an Iowa graduate and was the sponsor of one of the charter Psi Chi clubs, becoming president of the National Council of Psi Chi in 1939 (Washington State University, 2010). Although he came from the same sort of experimental psychology background as Ramsdell, he probably had no direct influence on Leary. However, Leary's first journal publication, containing a description of his experience of positive race relations in the Army during WWII, was with Kennedy (Leary and Kennedy, 1946), a sociologist who was, later in his career at WSU, responsible for the third largest U.S. production of black sociologists at the time as well as an egalitarian educator (Morgan, 1980). This is probably significant in light of Leary's later discomfiture and awkwardness regarding race and racial politics. Turning to psychometrics, Leary plays with two themes repeatedly from 1960 to the end of his career: the search for a simple behavioral metric, and individuals’ transcendence of experts’ predictions and test indicators: “knowing the score” and ‘beating the odds.” In regards to knowing the score, Leary, from at least 1961, claimed that baseball was superior to psychology in terms of its system of measurement (Leary, 1961). Baseball, according to Leary, consists of a set of well defined rules, expert observers with clear criteria for scoring, two- or three-person interpersonal transactions, providing a running, changing total of the behavioral and social stream. It represents a kind of Pasteurian statistical simplicity emerging from a mass of inchoate data, one of Leary's scientific ideals, and Leary referred to it often throughout his career. In 1945, Leary continued working on his MA with Lee Cronbach (1916–2001), a recent (1940) graduate of The University of Chicago, and well on his way to eminence in psychometrics. Within 10 years of 1945 he would establish his reputation in measurement and testing, first by developing the reliability coefficient known as Cronbach's alpha in 1951 and then, with Paul Meehl, publishing the seminal work on construct validity in the psychometric literature (Cronbach and Meehl, 1955; Shavelson, 2003). Though Leary did not reciprocate it in print and in fact did not refer to Cronbach in any subsequent publications, Cronbach, in his 1989 autobiography, was complimentary of his master's student:

In 1945 Timothy Leary, back from a clinical post as an Army noncom, came to Pullman, his wife's hometown. He was in remission that year from his anti-Establishment life course, and we worked cordially. As he completed a master's degree under my direction, he taught me about clinical test interpretation, particularly of the Rorschach and Wechsler.

(Cronbach, 1989,  p. 70)

In the next paragraph, Cronbach describes his work on training submariners in 1944–1945:

…I developed a course on echo-ranging (topside) sonar, then one on underwater listening for submariners ….. A complete course, a manual, and a set of tests resulted. Here, if ever, were perfect conditions for instructional research: unambiguous goals, replicable lessons, objective and detailed evidence of student progress and perplexities, and perfect communication between the evaluator and the person charged with improving the instruction. Also, not to be overlooked, close association with intelligent and observant instructors.

(Cronbach, 1989,  p. 70–71)

There are affinities between Leary's characterization of the ideal measuring process and the language of test validity as it was being developed at the time: elimination of bias; accurate translation of qualitative descriptions into tractable probabilistic language; and the agreement of multiple raters on criteria. While there were no doubt many other sources for the development of Leary's understanding of personality and his continuing reference to the statistical simplicity and purity of baseball, the 1945 views of Cronbach as expressed in his autobiography are consonant with the ideal of clear, simple measurements.

Leary moved on to further graduate study at Berkeley in 1946. Hubert Coffey, Leary's graduate field advisor who arrived at Berkeley the same time Leary did, influenced him in two important ways. It is natural to associate Coffey with Kurt Lewin, as Coffey held an Iowa PhD (1938), but it is also important to recognize that Coffey was a representative of an older American tradition in developmental psychology, whose MA and PhD work were done in connection with his cousin Beth Wellman at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (University of Iowa Medical Museum, 2010). Coffey was also, according to Peter Whitmer, a likely conduit for another major influence on Leary, that of Harry Stack Sullivan, who, Whitmer suggests, imported ideas of Moreno's about interpersonal and milieu therapy into an American idiom (Whitmer, personal communication). Wellman's work on the development and change of intelligence dovetailed nicely with the expertise with the last of Leary's advisors to be mentioned here, his dissertation chair Jean Walker Macfarlane. Macfarlane (1894–1989) had over 25 years experience at Berkeley. She was, after Olga Bridgman, the second PhD in the Berkeley Psychology Department, and a feisty elemental force. During Leary's time at Berkeley she led the Clinical Psychology program: she is in the 1949 Boulder group photo (Calisphere, 2010). She was most closely associated with her work on the Berkeley Guidance Study, which along with Nancy Bayley's Berkeley Growth Study was one of a number of pioneering longitudinal studies of development at that period (Carolina Population Center, 2010; Elder, 2003).

At Christmastime 1960, on the back of stationery from the Harvard Center for Personality Research, Leary drafted a chapter for a projected book on psychological research methods. Titled “The Corrupted Research Design,” never published, and found among Macfarlane's archived papers, it is an appreciation of her career and at the same time a paean of personal admiration (Leary, 1960). It begins with a description of Macfarlane:

Now very soon it became clear to me that Jean Mac Farlane was a not-to-be-listened to person. Out of it. Towards the real-hot, progressive issues of the times, like the Rorschach, and the TAT (which she perversely kept calling the Murray pictures, which somehow made this instrument a personal, realistic device rather than a ritual) and worst of all towards PSYCHOANALYSIS, Jean MacFarlane maintained a tolerant, amused distance….. Jean MacFarlane was like Eleanor Roosevelt. You had to love and respect her somehow, but she was just out of it. Behind the times. We all flocked to the clinics where we could listen to psychoanalysts and young fellows from Minnesota who could divine and augur the future by looking at a series of numbers on a printed form.

(Leary, 1960, pp. 1–2)

Leary draws a further contrast between Macfarlane and other scientific clinicians, one that mirrors the tension in Leary himself during his period as a clinical theorist:

And another funny thing, She seemed to treat us students very much the way she described herself treating her research subjects and, for that matter, the way she treated her touchy and nervous fellow faculty members. How can I describe this treatment? She would kind of look you straight in the eye and smile at you so that you knew that she liked you and then she would matter-of-fact-like tell you something about yourself that was quite outrageously personal and accurate and relevant to the issue at hand.

(Leary, 1960, p. 2)

Leary continues, comparing her “scandalous” subjective methods of conducting research with the more disciplined, “hard science” Berkeley faculty. Macfarlane was the director of the Berkeley Guidance Study, which had begun in the late-1920s. In Leary's view, the height of folly, according to conventional wisdom, was the awarding of massive amounts of Ford money to old-line established researchers in the 1950s to continue their misdirected research. But turning to the effect of the Ford grant when applied to Macfarlane, apparently after a conversation with her about the results of the 1959–1960 adult follow-up of the Guidance Study (Elder, 2003) he reached a far different set of conclusions. Leary continued—

About two years after the followup I talked with Jean MacFarlane and just what I feared had happened. Jean was full of stories about the cases she had re-interviewed. The schizoid boy who was now a top scientist with a jolly wife and three fine kids. The sick, mixed up daughter of an alcoholic father and prostitute mother who was now a relaxed, easygoing insightful wife of a successful businessman. Jean was as enthusiastic as ever about her subjects and really it was pretty boring to listen to if you were a behavioral scientist looking for generalizations and theoretical models. At this point I moved away from Berkeley…and when I returned…there were more cases, enough to satisfy even the hunter-of-general-truth. There were several clear-cut conclusions. The first had to do with prediction. The hot-shot projective tests and the All-American clinical forecasters had struck out. The kids with all that 'pathology’ turned out to be adaptable successful adults. The young sick became the middle-aged well.

It occurred to me all of a sudden that there were some good reasons why the early pathology, the rugged childhood experiences of these people had not led to hopeless psychosis but instead to a tough, adaptable resilience. One reason was general and had to do with the wonderful, elastic, resourceful nature of human nature. And the other was specific and had to with Jean MacFarlane and her corrupted, subjective research. She had been giving these kids over the years an experience, a relationship, a problem-solving readiness, a bluff resilience that enabled them not only to “recover” from their unhappy past but to use their troubles like a Toledo steelman uses the fire to temper his blades.

(Leary, 1960, p. 7)

Among the events leading up to Leary's mid-career change in 1963 was his rejection, expressed in many ways, of a form of psychotherapy more like management than like direct interpersonal transaction. Leary consciously aimed, between 1955 and 1960, to refashion clinical psychology into a system of interpersonal social transactions, a vision that was not lost but amplified when psychedelic drugs entered the mix after 1960. The tenor of Leary's description of Macfarlane's therapeutic technique as he observed it during his years of graduate study at Berkeley is perhaps the clearest evidence of all that the change in Leary's approach to psychology was not a rash, precipitate move but rather the result of a long gestational process, one which, moreover, also had some roots in longstanding developmental traditions in mainstream American psychology.

Placing Timothy Leary in the History of Psychology: Conclusions and Implications

Examination of the whole of Timothy Leary's career reveals that placing him in the history of psychology is not a simple matter of endorsing a view of Leary emphasizing his mid-career shift as a radical and complete break with psychology. Several lines of evidence converge to support the idea that far from breaking with psychology, Leary exerted himself to remain a force within psychology as well as outside of it. Consideration of the most verifiable parts of his intellectual ancestry, his earliest mentorships, reveals a diverse pattern presaging the hybrid nature of all modern psychologists’ backgrounds. Leary also drew on elements from the classical history of psychology, from psychophysics and experimental psychology, from nascent multivariate statistics, and especially from developmental psychology to fashion both his pre- and post-1963 theoretical, practical, and even futuristic-speculative contributions to psychology. On the other hand, it can hardly be said that Leary practiced psychology after 1963 in any usual sense. Though he was not averse to calling himself a clinical psychologist, he did not fit the mold of a provider of a health care service, or even an alternative therapy. Nor did his post-1963 “psychologies” enter mainstream psychological theory as his Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality did.

On balance, the evidence for Leary's changing state after his Harvard dismissal is about on a par with the evidence supporting continuity of his psychological career in another direction. Both lines of evidence contribute reasons why Leary's presence in disciplinary historical accounts is limited. From the discontinuity perspective, his early exit from psychology, his relative lack of academic publications, his involvement in unresolved controversy, his inability to “get along” with the academic establishment—home to most psychologists who find a place in its history—and his own statements expressing disdain for academic and professional psychology combine to diminish his perceived importance and influence. On the other hand, while there is evidence of continuing connection to psychology in Leary's writings after 1963, the connections are mostly superficial and ad hoc, sometimes inaccurate, and at any rate subordinate to a social and political agenda conducted outside of the boundaries of ordinary psychological discourse and practice. If it were just a case of special pleading for a short-term psychologist who made few, though interesting, contributions to the field and who was prolix outside of the bounds of psychology but not particularly prolific inside, then Leary might, deservedly or not, remain silent in a statistical sense, so to say (Simonton, 2002). But this line of reasoning, in Leary's case, plays up the discontinuity and early-truncation arguments at the expense of several reasonably strong lines of evidence for continuity in Leary's career, at least one of which connects his change of direction and its accompanying change in style and activity to earlier traditions in psychology. It also appears problematic to exclude one of the most visible and vocal psychologists of the twentieth century from a history of psychology, precisely because he was one of the strongest critics of, indeed a rebel against, the systematization and scientization of psychology, a criticism that emerged not on a whim or solely based on a drug-induced epiphany but emanated, at its root, from the mainstream of developmental, experimental, and psychometric psychology. Restoring Leary to psychology and acceptance of the continuity of his career would demand further analysis of his post-1963 production to resolve the question of whether it is simply another evanescent pop psychology or a significant creative critique of psychology, connected to other critiques as well as other futurisms and utopianisms in psychology (Morawski, 1982; Murphy, 1969). If he attacked the field, it was from within rather than without, and his critique appears more pertinent and worthy of further scrutiny in the proportion to his association with some essential traditions of experimental and developmental psychology (to say nothing of the psychological investigation of self-induced altered states of consciousness, a tradition of which he is the most visible modern exponent).

Also, much of what Leary wrote post-1963 fits, perhaps more easily than into psychology, into genres of imaginative writing, and further study of the interplay, in Leary, between fantasy and reality can reveal much about material composition, intellectual tensile strength, and plasticity of its theoretical roots in psychology as these relate to other forms of creative expression.

Aside the problem of how a figure as prominent socially and culturally as Leary becomes marginalized in the history of psychology, there are a few other issues of interest for further historical investigation in which Leary's career shift could play a role. Among these are: (1) The curious absence of Leary from not only standard histories of psychology but from specialized histories of humanistic psychology and personality psychology. (2) The question of how much weight to place on a psychologist's artistic and creative writings as well as personal reminiscences when these are the main evidence for productivity and thought. Leary once opined that LSD did three things for memory: it improved long-term memory, worsened short-term memory, and he could not remember the third. The main source for Leary post-1963 is Leary himself, and he is often unreliable and operated outside the usual public checks for accuracy and believability to which most psychologists submit. (3) The location of the break itself: Leary's biographers lay weight on the psilocybin experience in Mexico in 1960, and Leary himself, true to form, did not dissuade anyone from thinking that the crucial point in his development was this personal epiphany. This leads to the further question of how much weight should be placed on personal revelatory experiences of heightened consciousness in the historical record. Undoubtedly there are others—Fechner's “Eureka” moment is a famous one in psychology—but how much the history of psychology should value these experiences is an open question. (4) Following the discontinuity lead, Leary is one of the few “establishment” psychologists who can be interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as wholly rejecting psychology. What other psychologists have made such a public rejection of the field? In what ways was Leary's rejection of psychology similar to other challenges to orthodoxy in clinical psychology (Wilhelm Reich, George Albee) as well as general psychology? Reich in particular seems a likely parallel, and Reich was another of Leary's self-acknowledged ancestors (Leary, 1973c). Ultimately, concentration on Leary could lead to better definition of what a critique of the mainstream of psychology was and is. (5) The role of political liberalism vs. conservatism in the definition of the field during and after Leary's career, and the role of politics itself in history. Leary was unique among psychologists in mounting a political campaign that ultimately led to his challenging a major figure in reactionary American politics for the California governorship, Ronald Reagan. Leary may provide a further reference point for the extreme left of a continuum of political views expressed by psychologists during the 1960s and 1970s. (6) Finally, consideration of Leary's transgressions focuses attention on the role of public moral disgust or opprobrium in the assessment of individual psychologists and psychology as a whole. Regardless of which of these paths were followed, concentration on Leary in the context of the history of psychology would be a source of healthy controversy and further learning.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented under the title “Timothy Leary's Academic Genealogy: Reality Behind the Fantasy” at the 110th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in New Orleans in 2006. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by the Harvard University Archives, the Archives at the W.S. Hoole Library of the University of Alabama, and the Archives of the History of American Psychology, as well as generous contributions of time and information by Peter O. Whitmer and George A. Miller. Special thanks to the reviewers and editor of this Journal, to Graceland University for several grants-in-aid in support of this research, to my colleague Brian Smith for continual support and encouragement, and to Deborah Rowe, my wife, whose sharp archival eye while reading the Macfarlane papers contributed much to this project.

1. 1

   According to the list of “Books and Monographs by Timothy Leary” at the beginning of Changing My Mind, Among Others, Leary published, either as sole author or collaborator, 17 books between 1964 and 1979. Most of these contain recombinations and editions of previously published material. The Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (Horowitz, Walls, and Smith, 1988) describes in detail various editions of these 17 books and monographs, as well as reprinting and repackagings of Leary's books, and includes also a vast number of letters, news articles, commentaries, and other short works. (There is also an extensive current online Archive of Leary's work including photographs and other ephemera: http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/. For purposes of this paper, two of Leary's books, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968) and Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982), will serve as sources of the “collected works” of Leary during his lifetime, because Leary was in charge, in both of these works, of the selection and arrangement of the material and so it may be considered representative of what Leary, rather than his editors, wanted to say. Many subsequent reissues of excerpts and new combinations of Leary's writings have been published by Leary's literary heirs and executors since 1984, mostly under the imprint of Ronin Press or Falcon Press, but also by other publishers (e.g., Leary 2000, 2007). When these later collections are cited, the date and location of the original will also be included.

2. 2

   For Leary's biography, Horowitz (1974), Greenfield (2006), Higgs (2006), Marshall (1976), Whitmer (1987), and Forte (1999) are the most complete and reliable, and contain references to other specialized material. There is no “official” biography in American National Biography (1999) the Encylopedia of Psychology (2000), or other major reference works, probably because of the short lag time since his death. Other shorter biographies contained in obituaries or in the context of other works often contain substantial inaccuracies: the New York Times and Los Angeles Times obituaries cited here are exceptions. Leary's autobiography was an ongoing project distributed through many of his post-1963 works: what may count as its definitive version is Flashbacks (Leary, 1983), which is gappy, unreferenced and not indexed, and, as its title indicates, intensely nonlinear. This brief sketch relies mainly on Greenfield, Horowitz, Whitmer, Forte, and Marshall and contains information which is either corroborated by at least two of each of these sources or which is in the public domain.

3. 3

   Invective directed at Leary began directly after he left Harvard. Leary abstracted many of the claims made in a 1963 Esquire article by Martin Mayer, a prolific popular writer, whose subject ordinarily was economics. This list, published first in Leary and Alpert's rebuttal in Esquire in November 1963 (Leary 1963b/1968a), can stand as the canonical template for all future anti-Leary epithets. Among the expressions cataloged (all prefaced by “Leary and Alpert”) are “…. are like laxative salesmen”; “…have formed a drug cult”; “…. are promoting a deathlike state”; “…. opened a psilocybin dram bin”; “…. are psychosis peddling”; “…. are astonishingly flamboyant”; and “… are extremely irrational” (Leary 1963b/1968, pp. 70–73). When Leary died in 1996, PBS convened an impromptu memorial (“Timothy Leary in Memoriam”, 1996) in which the journalists and essayists Anne Taylor Fleming and Charlayne Hunter-Gault were joined by the Harvard psychiatrist and author Robert Coles, who opined: “Well, I think he had an affair with craziness of sorts. Remember, this message (i.e. tune in, turn on, drop out) proceeded (sic) the death of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy. He started this in the early ‘60s and it's important to remember that when he was saying this, thousands of other people, including students from his Harvard, their Harvard, were leaving the university and other universities and colleges to go South, to be in the Civil Rights Movements, to work in the Peace Corps and Vista and whatever else that had to do with practical deeds to change this country. And I think the contrast between this kind of 1960's behavior, beginning right in 1960, itself, when President Kennedy was inaugurated, and, and Leary's behavior and the behavior of those who followed him is important to remember at this moment. LSD was, is, a very, very dangerous drug. This is not frivolous behavior. This is dangerous behavior. This is destructive behavior, and I think the most interesting question of all is: Why have we paid so much attention to him and people like him in the ‘60s and to this day?” Other negative views of Timothy Leary as a psychologist have resurfaced lately in reviews connected with the publication of Robert Greenfield's 2006 biography, including claims that Leary was a “nutty professor” (Sante, 2006), “a cross between a glorified con man and a narcissistic, deluded false prophet” (Rabin, 2006), and “never serious” (Menand, 2006).

Biography

• DAVID C. DEVONIS is at Graceland University. He has been active as a reviewer and contributor to reference works in the history of psychology for 20 years. His current interests include the living and working conditions of psychologists and the relation of psychologists’ personal and professional lives. He is also the Treasurer of Cheiron, International Society for the History of Social and Behavioral Sciences.