http://www.mavericksofthemind.com/janiger.htm
Psychiatric Alchemy
"I get more from what great minds have written about human behavior,
than any psychiatric text."
Interview with Oscar Janiger
Oscar Janiger was born on February 8, 1918, in New York City. He
received his MA. in cell physiology from Columbia, and his M.D. from
the UC Irvine School of Medicine, where he served on the faculty in
their Psychiatry Department for over twenty years. His research
interests have been wide, and he describes himself as a "tinkerer. "
He established the relationship between hormonal cycling and pre-
menstrual depression in women, and he discovered blood proteins that
are specific to male homosexuality. His studies of the Huichol Indians
in Mexico revealed that centuries of peyote use do not cause any type
of chromosomal damage. He is perhaps best known for establishing the
relationship between LSD and creativity in a study of hundreds of
artists. In addition to his research interests he has also maintained
a long-standing private psychiatric practice, which he continues to
this day.
Back in the late fifties and early sixties when LSD was still legal,
Oscar incorporated LSD into some of his therapy, and is responsible
for "turning on " many well-known literary figures and Hollywood
celebrities, including Anais Nin and Cary Grant. More recently Oscar
has been involved in studying dolphins in their natural environment,
and is the founder of the Albert Hofman Foundation--an organization
whose purpose is to establish a library and world information center
dedicated to the scientific study of human consciousness. He has also
just completed a book entitled A Different Kind of Healing, about how
doctors treat themselves. Jeanne St. Peter and I interviewed Oscar in
the living room of his home in Santa Monica on January 3, 1990.
Surrounding virtually every wall in his house is the largest and most
interesting library I’ve ever encountered. Oscar spoke to us about his
scientific research, creativity and psychopathology, the problems he
sees with psychiatry, and his discovery of the psycho-active effects
of isolated DMT. Oscar is an extremely warm, highly energetic man.
There is a deep sincerity to his manner. He chuckles a lot, and one
feels instantly comfortable around him.
DJB
DJB: Could you begin by telling us what it was that originally
inspired your interest in psychiatry and the exploration of
consciousness?
OSCAR: I was about seven years old and I was living on a farm in
upstate New York. The nearest neighbor was a mile away. I would go for
a walk, visit them, play, and then come home in the evening. This was
a wild kind of country setting, and I had to get home before dark.
Some evenings I would be coming home and the scene around me on the
path was filled with menacing figures; pirates and all kinds of cut-
throats ready to grab me and do me in. There was a place I called the
sunken mine, where people had supposedly drowned and there was a
frayed rope hanging from a tree. All of these menacing things gave the
evening a very sinister cast, and I’d finally run to get home. Certain
evenings I’d make the trip, and everything was just light and airy.
Things around me were filled with joy and pleasure. The birds were
singing, rabbits, squirrels and other animals were having a wonderful
Disneyland time. So one day I was thinking, My God, that’s a magic
road! One time it’s this way, another time it’s that way. So I puzzled
over that. I finally came to the conclusion that, if it wasn’t a magic
road, then I was doing something to these surround- ings and if I was
doing it then I could change it. So the next time I came back from my
neighbour’s place, and everything got murky, strange and sinister, I
said, "No! If I’m doing this then bring back the rabbits, bring back
the squirrels, bring back the fairies and let’s lighten this thing
up." Sure enough, it changed. That was the beginning of my interest in
consciousness. It was all crystallized into a marvelous saying from
the Talmud - "things are not the way they are, they’re the way we
are." From then on, when I’d get into situations, I’d determine what
aspect that was within me was being projected outward, and what was a
reflection of the world that others can validate along with me. That,
of course, has been the theme of my work in therapy and as a
scientist. The important distinctions regarding projection are among
the fundamental things that one has to solve to understand how people
behave and the contradictions in their behaviour. Other inspirations
are simply those of curiosity. I was enormously curious about how
things worked. I was always asking why? why? why? Then I got to
medical school and the why extended to the brain and the activities of
the nervous system, which seemed to me to be the largest why of all.
Aslo, I had personal experiences with people who had become, I guesss
you’d say, psychotic, or who acted bizzarrely or strangely. These
matters have been of great interest to me.
DJB: How do you define consciousness?
OSCAR: Well, I was afraid you were going to ask me that. When you say
define something, I’m caught between what I recognize as the accepted
definition - the sources that come out of dictionaries, legal
definitions and all that stuff that belongs in the pragmatic world -
and the definitions that come from my intuition. The Oxford English
Dictionary offers at least six or seven varieties of definition for
consciousness, and several have entirely different connotations. When
you get down to contradictions like being conscious of one’s
unconscious, it get’s pretty strange and labyrinthine. I would say the
conventional definition contains the idea of being aware of one’s self
- a sort of self-reflection. Or you can describe it operationally as
being the end product of a complex nervous system that eventually
produces a state that allows us to be in some way congnizant of
ourselves and the enviroment. It allows us to extrap- olate into
future events, into past events, and allow us to take a position in
one’s imagination so we can examine realities that are not responsive
to the ordinary, daily context of the world around us. Many of these
things require qualifications, but let me then stay with the word as
something that gives us a feeling that distinguishes us as
individuals, that gives us a sense of self, and sense of self-
reflection and awareness.
JEANNE:: Many years ago, while you were studying at Columbia, you had
some problems with your high school teaching job. What happened?
OSCAR: Well, I was practice teaching at the same high school that I
had attended, Erasmus Hall in New York, the second oldest high school
in the country. I was teaching general science with the lady who
taught me, Miss Thompson. I took over her class, and she would sit in
the back of the room. So, I was teaching astronomy to these sophomore
or junior students. I borrowed a ladder from the custodian and I
bought a bunch of gold stars. I spent the entire night pasting them on
the ceiling in the form of the constellations. When I wound up it was
getting light outside, and I thought I had done this incredible job.
So the next day when we had the class, I said with a grand gesture,
"We’re studying the stars - look up." All the kids looked up, everyone
was fired up and we had a good time learning about all the stars. That
evening, as I was going home, I discovered a note stuck in my letter-
box from Mr McNeal, the principal of the school. It said, "See me." So
the next day I went to see him. He said, "The custodian told me that
you pasted things on the ceiling." He shook his head and said, "I’m
afraid you’re going to have to remove those, that’s defacing school
property," and he just waved me aside. I spent all the next night
scraping the stars off the ceiling, thinking about the errors of my
ways. A week later, I decided that we would study eclipses. I said to
the kids in the first row, "You bring in the lemons." To the second
row I said, "You bring oranges." The third row I told, "You bring in
grapefruits." To the fourth row I said, "You bring in knitting
needles." So they were all very eager and they came back with these
required things. I said, okay, the grapefruits are the suns, the
oranges are the planets, the lemons are the moons, and the knitting
needles go through the planets to make them tilted and spin around
accordingly. So we had a ball, but a big commotion ensued. During this
general upheaval, the door opens and McNeal puts his head in and pulls
back again. So sure enough, in my little box, there’s a note that
says, "See me immediately". So I see him, and this time he’s very
unhappy. I said, "Dr McNeal let me explain about the sun and the moon
and the oranges and the lemons," but I couldn’t explain it. He said,
"Did you know that the teachers on the floor were complaining about
you? You were making a lot of noise." I said, "Yeah, well, you know
it’s very difficult to get the spatial relationships
right." (laughter) He said, "I don’t understand. You come from
Teacher’s College, that’s the finest college in the country for
teachers, it’s the cradle of American education. It was Dewey’s
shrine. Don’t they teach you about discipline in the classroom?" I
said, "Gee, yeah, I guess so." He says, "Well, your classroom was in
chaos!" I said, "Gee, I....but let me tell you about the oranges and
the lemons." He said, "What are you talking about?!" The guy was ready
to explode, he just couldn’t handle it. He said, "I don’t under- stand
this, Mr Janiger, but I’m sure that we can work it out. Now please
understand we’re here to keep discipline in our classrooms." I said,
"Okay." So I continued teaching and one day we had to study
fermentation. That was my undoing. I brought into class that day, a
loaf of bread which was covered with penicillin mold, a flask of
vinegar, a few pieces of blue cheese and a little flask of wine. I put
them out on the laboratory table and I said, "These are the useful and
harmful results of fermentation. Then after class I said, "If any of
you want to come up, you can sample a little bit, you can see how the
cheese tastes, and so on. So one kid came up and nothing would please
him, but he had to have a slug of the wine. Then I get the note, "See
me immediately!"
DJB & JEANNE:: (simultaneously) Uh oh!
OSCAR: I went to see McNeal. He shook his head and said, "I’ve been a
principal for twenty years and I’ve never run into this in my life.
You will have to go back and see your professor because you’re under
suspension right now." I said, "What’s wrong?" "Wine, wine! You
brought spirits into the classroom!" I said, "Now let me tell you
about fermentation." "Please!" he said, "don’t tell me about it, I
don’t wan’t to hear about it!" He was apoplectic. So I go back and see
my professor, the holy of holies, the teacher of teachers. He was
perplexed and then said to me, "There’s something you should know.
We’re here to teach children, not to entertain them." Well, that
phrase broke loose in me and I got very upset. I got up and said, "You
know what professor? You can take your goddamn class in general
science and stuff it." For weeks after, he’d call me and write me
letters saying, we can work this out, but I refused. That was my stint
at teaching in high school. It was the best thing that ever happened,
I’d still be teaching high school today if it hadn’t.
DJB: You’ve used the term "dry schizophrenia" in desribing a creative
artist. Could you explain what you mean by this and what similarities
and differences you see between certain aspects of madness and the
process of creativity?
OSCAR: Well, of course that’s always been on my mind. I remember that
I could make the wallpaper do all kinds of tricks when I had a fever,
and I could sit - if you’ll excuse me - on the john, and watch the
tiles recompose themselves and make patterns. Therefore I suspected
that there was a part of my mind which had a certain influence over
the world around me, and that, under certain conditions, it can take
on novel and interesting forms. The dreams I had were very vivid, very
real, and there were times when I found it hard to distinguish between
the dream life and what we might call the waking life. So there was a
very rich repository of information that was somewhat at my disposal
at times, sometimes breaking through at odd moments. I later on
thought that could be a place that one could draw a great deal of
inspiration from. So I studied the conditions under which people have
these releases, breakthroughs, or have access to other ways and forms
of perceiving the world around them and changing their reality. When I
studied the works of people who profess to go to creative artists and
ask them how they did it and what it was about, I realized that what
we had by way of understanding creativity was a tremend- ous
collection of highly idiosyncratic and subjective responses. There was
no real way of dealing with the creative process as a state you could
refer to across the board, or how one could encourage it. That’s how I
got the idea for a study in which we could deliberately change
consciousness in an artist using LSD, given the same reference object
to paint before and during the experience. Then I would try to make an
inference from the difference between the artwork outside of the drug
experience and while they were having it. In doing so I was struck by
the fact that the paintings, under the influence of LSD, had some of
the attributes of what looked like the work done by schizophrenics. If
you would talk to the artists in terms of the everyday world, the
answers would be very strange and tangential. Then I began to look
into the whole sticky issue of psycho- pathology and creativity. I
found that there are links between the creative state and certain
qualities that people say they have when they’re creating, that were
very much like some of the perceptions of people who were
schizophrenic or insane. I began to notice what made the difference.
It seemed that the artists were able to maintain a certain balance,
riding the edge, as it were. I thought of creativity as a kind of
dressage, riding a horse delicately with your knees. The artist was
able to ride his creative Pegasus, putting little pressure on his
ability to control the situation, enabling him to just master it,
while allowing the rest to flow freely so that the creative spirit can
take it’s own course. The artist is faced with the dilemma of allowing
this uprush of material to enter into their conscious mind, much like
trying to take a drink from a high-pressure fire hose. This allows
them to integrate their technique and training, and still be able to
keep relatively free of preconceived ideas, formulated notions or
obligatory reality. In that state they were able to harness it enough
so that the overriding symptoms of psychosis were not present, but
every other aspect of their being at that time seemed as though they
were in a semi-psychotic state. So I evoked the term, "dry
schizophrenia" where a person was able to control the surroundings and
yet be "crazy" at the same time, crazy in the sense that they could
use this mode of consciousness for their work and creative ability.
There’s a lot of documentation about psychopathology and creativity
but I think it’s all from a central pool, kind of a well-spring of the
creative imagination that we can draw from. It equally gives it’s
strenth to psychosis in one sense, or breaks through in creativity,
theological revelation in the world of the near-dying and people who
are seriously ill, and so on. All of that provides us with a look into
this cauldron, this very dynamic, efficacious part of the brain, that
for some reason or other is kept away from us by a semi-permeable
membrane that could be ruptured in different ways, under different
circumstances. I recall reading that James Joyce had a daughter named
Lucia who schizophrenic. She was the sorrow of his life. Upon
persuasion from Joyce’s patron, both of them were brought to Carl
Jung. This was against Joyce’s wishes because he didn’t like
psychiatrists. Jung examined Lucia, then finally came in and sat down
with Joyce. Joyce said to him that he thought Lucia was a greater
artist and writer than he was. Can you imagine? So Jung said, "That
may be true, but the two of you are like deep-sea divers. You go into
the ocean, a rich, interesting, dramatic setting, with your baskets,
and you fill them up with improbable creatures of the deep. The only
difference between the two of you is that you can come up to the
surface, and she can’t."
DJB: Basically it’s like the difference between being able to swim in
the ocean or being....
OSCAR: Caught by the waves and dashed to pieces, right. There’s a
wonderful book that describes the process of this ever-changing
remarkable flux of consciousness that Sherington called "the enchanted
loom". It’s called The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes. I
recommend it highly as an exercise in the ways of the imagination.
DJB: Could you tell us about the thought-experiment that you devised
to categorize what you refer to as "delusions of explanation?"
OSCAR: Imagine that someone is taken quietly at night while they’re
sleeping, out of their bed, and are then deposited in one of the most
unearthly places on the planet - Mammoth Cave. We found by repeated
experiments that upon awakening, there are only five explanations that
someone in a Western culture would come up with and I refer to these
main headings or rubrics as "delusions of explanation." They are: (not
in order of frequency) I must be dead, I must be dreaming, someone or
something has played a trick on me, I’ve gone crazy or I am in Mammoth
cave. Through my experience in mental hospitals, I’ve found that
schizophrenics will try to explain the extraordinary nature of their
experience by using one of these basic rubrics. In our culture
explanations for unexplainable phenomena are rather sparse. My
supposition is that other cultures may have different explanations for
such phenomena.
JEANNE:: What are your thoughts on the mind-body problem?
OSCAR: This is related to the problem of consciousness, but isn’t
quite the same thing. The mind-body problem is, I guess, as old as the
human race. It has to do with how the "soup becomes a spark." How is
it that the material world, and the material substrate of ourselves,
can give rise to something that seems to be of a different universal
order, that of thought? Obviously consciousness stands somewhere
between this maneuver of going from material things to thought. There
are several different propositions that occur. Brain function
simultaneously coexists with thought processes, and this interacts in
a dynamic fashion. That’s one theory. Another theory is that the
brain, being so complex and convoluted, spawns or gives rise to what
we experience as thinking, which seems to have a semi-independent
existence. This is a dualistic approach to the problem. The third
notion is simply that mind is also spirit, and this is imposed on the
brain from the outside in some strange way. This is a theological sort
of explanation. The vitalist notion claims that the life-force gives
rise to, or at least coexists with, the soul, which after the death of
the material host, leaves and finds somewhere else to reside. I’ve
never had a problem with the notion that material substance could give
rise to immaterial energy. It’s not odd to conceive of the fact that
you can build a machine out of material substances and that out of it
comes electrical energy, or that you can press a button and out of
these batteries comes a beam of light from your flashlight. So the
light doesn’t seem to me any more miraculous in relationship to the
batteries than does the thought process coming out of the material
aspect of the brain.
DJB: Or the same goes for magnetic fields. They’re defined as non-
material regions of influence on the material world.
OSCAR: Yes. You could make a machine where the electricity could turn
itself back and regulate it’s own existence to some extent. When I
worked with Barbara Brown in her bio-feedback laboratory in Sepulveda
V.A, I was able to see my brainwaves in the form of patterns on a
screen. I got the notion that as I’m watching my brainwaves, I’m
changing them at the same time. They’re constantly being influenced by
my watching them, so I’m never really seeing the objective evidence of
my own brain. You could argue that if someone else was watching my
brainwaves they might get a different notion, but I’m watching them,
I’m taking that information in and in turn sending out something else
which is subtly influenced by what I just took in. This has been
called the auto-cerebroscope; a device where you see something
happening that projects what your brain is registering, but in
witnessing it, you change its content. Do you ever see things as they
really are? This philosophical dilemma is never more clearly outlined
than when under these conditions.
DJB: What are some of the main problems that you see with the state of
psychiatry today and how do you think we can improve it for the
future?
OSCAR: Boy, you’ve really got a tiger by the tail there! I think that
the material emphasis of psychiatry and neuropathology of the last
century, where everything was reduced to the simplistic notion of the
mind as a switchboard, and all illnesses were the result of patho-
logical processes in the brain itself, didn’t set well. It did not
provide a dynamic framework for understanding human behavior. So when
the emphasis changed, and Freud and others came on the scene for
modern dynamic psychology, I suspect the pendulum swung equally too
far in the opposite direction. The heyday of psychoanalysis and depth
psychology then ushered in a kind of behavioral construct that seemed
to be dependent only upon the dynamic thought process, and left very
little to any kind of physical explanation. So I think we were trapped
in constant psychological formulations of all our behavior. This was
mirrored very well in my own studies. I was interested in finding out
the way that the chemistry of the brain and the state of the body
influences our thoughts and the way we feel. The trouble was I coudn’t
find a suitable research prospect. I couldn’t get a definitive case
where I could show that the state of the body influenced thinking and
feeling in a specific way. That was supplied serendipitously by a lady
who came in and told me that a week prior to her period she
experiences profound depression. Suddenly a light went on and I said,
"That’s what I’m looking for!" I realized that an optimal experimental
subject for human behavior was a woman because of her menstrual
period. She is a wonderful biological metronome that you can count on
because of this reliable episodic lunar event. So using that concept,
I began to plan a series of behavioral events employing this strategy.
I found that some women regularly, about a week before their period,
have terrible changes in their general demeanor: their behavior,
feelings and thinking. I made a study of three or four good clinical
subjects, who went into serious states of mental change around that
time. In studying them I was struck by the fact that all of them
seemed compelled to give me psychological explanations of their
behavior. For example, a woman would say, "Well, I had a fight with my
husband yesterday, that’s what made me depressed." And I said, "Yes,
that’s interesting because you had a fight with him last week and it
didn’t make you depressed. And every month you have a fight with your
husband exactly at the same time and you get depressed." She agreed,
it seemed very odd. So then I went to the psychoanalytical texts. They
explained this phenomena by saying, well a woman is afraid that in a
week or so she’s going to bleed. This suggests to her that she is
being castrated and her penis was removed, so why shouldn’t she be
depressed? (laughter) Another analytical interpretation is that this
fear is a ubiquitous reminder of her feminine identity and that she
was therfore inferior. That’s a good one. (laughter) I decided to use
progesterone as a means of seeing if I could break into the problem of
premenstrual depression. I took this woman and I presented her case to
my residents when she was depressed. I said, "I’m going to allow you
to ask her any question you want, except one, which I’ll keep to
myself." At the end of the presentation I asked the group, "Well, what
do you make of this woman?" These residents, who knew quite a bit of
psychiatry said, "There’s no question that she has classical clinical
depression." Since pure progesterone is not absorbed through the gut,
you have to give it either by injection or vaginal suppository. So I
devised an experiment. I double-blinded my progesterone. I injected
the material randomly and didn’t know which was which. Then I charted
the symptoms and found, when I broke the code, that progesterone had
an extremely salutory effect in relieving these women of premenstrual
symptoms. I began to see clear evidence of a substance in the body
that, in short supply, was markedly influencing the behavior of these
women. I gave a talk before the Medical Society and outlined what I
had done. I said that premenstrual depression could best be treated by
looking at this as a hormonal problem, and that it had certain
implications for the way the body influences the mind. The people in
the group were skeptical and some said, "How do you know that it isn’t
some unconscious factor that’s still operating regardless?" They said,
"You haven’t proven that she still isn’t worried about her castration
fears. You’ve only proven that if you give her progesterone, that
could be modified, but you haven’t attacked the basis of the problem."
How could I do that? Psychoanalysis has an answer for everything. I
went to two of my brightest women medical students, and I asked, "How
would you like to spend the summer in Europe? I want you to go to all
the primate centers there, and find out, do great apes have a
menstrual cycle similar to humans? I want you to talk to the keepers
and find out if they have any reason to suspect that their behavior is
any different during their menstrual cycle." For the next three months
I had letters from all the European zoological gardens. We were
excited to discover that in the Berlin zoo, Fritz, who took care of a
female gorilla named Olga said, "A week before her period I can’t get
near Olga, she’s just a mess. All she does is throw all kinds of shit
at me." (laughter) At my next opportunity to present I said, "Ladies
and gentlemen, I have discovered that the gorillas have feminine
identification problems, and they also have castration fears,
(laughter) because they can get very upset before their period."
Everyone applauded and started to laugh. That was the beginning of my
understanding of how mental and emotional difficulties could be
correlated with one’s biochemistry. This is the basis for the
treatment of depression by altering one’s neurochemistry.
DJB: So part of the problem was that people were locked into the idea
that the mind could only be affected by the body and not the other way
around?
OSCAR: Yes. I think the over-emphasis on psychodynamics, in deriving
everything from psychological theory, retarded us from reaching the
same conclusions that the British made. For a long time this
perspective stale-mated progress in American psychiatry. In fact, it
was difficult to achieve any academic status in psychiatry without
having taken psychoanalytic training. At present, psychiatric
residents are less inclined to enter psychoanalytical training
programs, which may reflect their opinion on pscyhoanalysis as an
effective treatment.
JEANNE:: So, in Amercian psychiatry, there was an initial reluctance
to use drugs to treat emotional problems?
OSCAR: Right. In that sense European psychiatry was much more
progressive. In fact, most of the innovations in psychiatry came from
Europe. And you would wonder why, considering the status of American
medical research and the abundance of psychiatrists. The British were
making strong gains with psychotropic medication that we adopted later
on. When you come to think of it, Freud was European, as well as Jung.
Menduna in Hungary and Bini and Cerlucci in Italy were the first to
use insulin and electro-shock therapy. Neuroleptic drugs were first
developed in France. Psycho-drama and Gestalt therapy had European and
South African origins. The basis for Behavioral therapies originated
in Russia. It’s quite remarkable how little innovation we have brought
to the field. We’re good at taking what they give us and grinding it
out, but we have a poor record at innovation in the field of
psychiatric treatment. Also, psychiatrists have been more locked into
their therapeutic systems with little flexibility. In my LSD
experiments we ran close to a thousand people, and we found that
psychiatrists tended to have negative experiences. The ministers were
next. The artists had the most positive experiences. It would seem
that the psychiatrist has a strong investment in a particular norm or
standard of reality.
JEANNE:: What about in the field of psychobiology and
psychopharmacology?
OSCAR: In psychobiology the situation is a little different. I think a
lot of the research in psychobiology is relatively free of the
psychological bias than the clinical work, and in that respect, more
progressive. Psychopharmacology is where the action is. The medicines
have been remarkable. Even so, there’s been no remarkable new anti-
depressants. There’s been a span of about twenty years between the
last ones, which were the tricyclics, to the new ones of Prozac and
Zoloft, which came out recently. All in all, the psychologists have
stolen a great march on the psychiatrists. They’re more accessible and
they speak a language which the public finds easier to understand, and
they pander to the public’s fear of medicines and pills.
DJB: Why do you think that there’s such a fear and resistance against
using chemicals to heal the mind?
OSCAR: We’re a drug-phobic culture. It’s a contradiction in terms
because we consume more drugs than in any other country. We make a
strange distinction between various kinds of pills. Somebody ought to
do a research paper on that, on why certain pills are acceptable and
others are not. You see people who take handfuls of vitamins in the
morning, and they go to a herbalist and take herbs which they know
nothing about. But many have great reservations about "drugs".
DJB: I was talking to a friend about anti-depressants. He said, "I
think people should be able to do it by themselves and not rely on
drugs." But then at the end of the phone call, he starts telling me
about this herbalist that recommended something for his allergies that
he felt had an amazing effect. (laughter)
OSCAR: Yes. We have this funny schizophrenia about pills.
JEANNE:: What is your view on bridging alternative medical modalities,
such as acupuncture and herbalism, with modern methods?
OSCAR: For ten years I was Research Director on the board of an
organization call the Homes Center. We gave sums of money to
scientifically validate unconventional and unorthodox treatment
methods. So you can see where I’m at. The Homes Center was the first
and for a long time, the only organization to be doin that. One of the
grants was for Stephen LaBerge’s work in lucid dreaming. Some of the
other work we funded was in support of energy healing, biofeedback and
acupuncture. So I’m very much in favor of the scientific exploration
of alternative methods, but not just accepting them unreservedly
without discrimination.
DJB: You told me about the theory of an emoting machine that embodied
the complex array of emotions. Could you explain this concept to us?
OSCAR: It was an extension of things I had seen and read, but I put it
in a new form, which hypothesized that emotions have a kind of
quantitative nexus. That means that they are composed of particles,
just like photons in a beam of light. In the final analysis emotions
are a form of energy that have a pulse or quanta like the electrons in
an electrical field. Once you assume that emotions can be quantified
and measured then they no longer need to be seen as this vague,
amorphous thing that just pours over you, that seems to arise in some
strange, spontaneous way, and has no form or substance. We know
something of that part of the brain that specifically regulates
emotions -- it’s called the limbic system. Here, emotions are
engendered, and in some way made appropriate for the occasion. I see
emotions as relating to cognitive experience in the same way a music
score relates to a movie. The musical score is not discersive, it
doesn’t tell you anything about the specific action, but it lends a
kind of overtone, a richness to the experience that fleshes it all
out. For example, it’s hard to imagine seeing Chariots of Fire without
the musical score. I think emotions act in very much the same way. I
believe that emotions can be traced and channeled. Some day we may
have a way of regulating emotions, and devise a system of emotions
just like we have a grammer of logic or cognitive effects. In theory,
it is possible that a machine could be made that could emote, but
we’re a long way off from that. In order to do this, emotions would
have to be reduced to some formula, using the analogy of color. They
are like the three primary colors. Out of red, blue and yellow, every
other nuance of color is created. I think somebody once said that it
runs into the thousands, the discernible hues we can see. Thousands,
can you imagine that? So I figured you can get a vast array of
emotions from three primary emotions. Fear, anger and love would seem
to be the most basic and reasonable choices. Out of fear, love and
anger, mixed in the proper tinctures and proportions, you might get
such complicated emotions as indignation, apprehension and so on. All
these fancy sounding ones. But there are two which don’t seem to fit
in. One is curiosity and the other is disgust. I had a lot of fun with
this, it’s really off-the-wall stuff. Let’s assume that this is
possible, that the body is equipped to create fear, love and anger in
some way. The limbic region may be the generator. We found that
emotions are mediated through the nervous system and they are
transmitted through specialized neurons in the form of chemical
messengers called neuro-transmitters which seem to carry an emotional
charge. It is a very elegant way of thinking, that emotions are
transmitted through this chemical interchange. That was proven by the
fact that if you alter the chemistry, then you alter the emotional
content of the mind or the brain. So you now have a beginning theory
for emotions as having some substrate in material things that could be
quantified. This leads to some way of building an emotional model that
may work.
JEANNE:: What is your view with regard to the evolutionary process of
male-female relationships?
OSCAR: The word relationship in this context is a bothersome one. I
think men and women have certain attributes that are native to their
individual biology. How they manage to coordinate them is something
that requires a tremendous amount of tolerance and understanding for
what is unfamiliar to the other person. I think that men and women
have to somehow appreciate the differences between them, and not
assume that either of those differences have a more superior quality
than the other. And there are differences, I think the danger is
assuming there are none. I think it’s an issue of how mature the human
race gets. It’s the difficulty in discriminating between the
biological and cultural differences and their resolution. The problem
here is that they are hopelessly mixed up, and that has to be sorted
out before you can say anything definitive about it. For example, all
kinds of cultural values are placed on behavior which has nothing to
do with biology.
DJB: Well culture and biology are quite intertwined.
OSCAR: Yes, they’re intertwined, but there is a way of studying this
in relative respect to the circumstances involved. Now we see you have
a group of people who feel that men and women live differently in
different conditions. That is to say, there was a time in the world
when things were primitive and presumably better, and our modern
problems are really the result of industrialization and male supremacy
and egotism. Women, in an effort to become compensatory have become
goddesses. These changes in historical conditions made these
differences exaggerated, but I wouldn’t go any further with that,
because it’s too easy to fall into established predjudices on this
issue. I think basically women make an extraordinary contribution in
their own biology, so to speak, and it’s mental equivalence, and men
make their contribution.
JEANNE:: What kind of philosophy do you think people should adopt in
regard to social responsibility in general?
OSCAR: I think what we need more than anything else is enlight -ened
self-interest. This is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness is
gaining something at the expense of others. Enlightened self-interest
is somehow nourishing and gaining something in terms of ourselves and
what we need, not at the expense of others. Unfortunately, instead of
that we have charity and sacrifice which only compounds the problem.
You can see clearly that I’m not one of the holy types. Let your
mothers and fathers take care of themselves. Freud said the most
important story he every heard was of a mother bird carrying a little
bird on it’s back. There were three little birds and she carried them
across the channel. In the middle of the channel the mother bird said,
"When I am old and sick, would you carry me on your back?" The first
bird said, "Yes mother, I’d be happy to." And the mother turned over
and dumped the bird. The second bird, the same problem. The third bird
however, said, "No, I won’t carry you on my back, I’ll carry my
children on my back." Think about it. If everyone here did that, we’d
have no more problems. Your obligation is to carry your children, not
your mother on your back. If she did the right thing, you wouldn’t
have to carry her. She would have already prepared, like you’re going
to prepare for your children. That’s what I’m talking about --
enlightened self-interest.
DJB: Oz, you’ve worked with and interacted with many of the
outstanding minds of our time. Who have been some of the most
important influences in your development and where have you found
inspiration when you needed it?
OSCAR: Well, Aldous Huxley has been a real source of inspiration to
me. Let me give you an example. I was on the stage of the Ebel Theater
as part of a three doctor team, to examine a man who professed to be
able to lower his blood pressure, stick pins through his cheeks, and
remain buried alive in some way where he could get no air. I was to
examine him, along with the other two doctors, to see that he wasn’t
faking. He stuck a hatpin right through his hand. It didn’t bleed, and
we reported that dutifully to the audience. He said he would then
lower his blood pressure to 50 over 30, a level at which I felt a
person couldn’t live. I took his blood pressure and it was high -
about 180 over 110, and I reported that. Then he huffed and puffed and
went into a trance. He got rigid, and then we took his blood pressure
again. It was 110 over 70 and I reported that to the audience. That
evening we met with Aldous, his wife Laura, Anais Nin and her husband
Rupert, and this issue came up and I recounted my experience at the
theater that morning. And then I said, "So you can clearly see that
this man was faking. He said he would lower his blood pressure to 50
over 30, and he didn’t." I went on to lament that so many of these so-
called miracle workers are charlatans. I was very self-righteous. Then
Aldous looked at me. He said, (with a British accent) "Dr Janiger." I
said, "Yes?" He said, "Don’t you think it was remarkable that he was
able to lower it at all!" (laughter) A light went on in my head. From
that moment on, I got a lesson that I always remembered. Then there
was Alan Watts, who I had the good fortune to know and to be his
physician for part of his life. He was a remarkably intelligent man,
probably the best conversationalist I ever met. A witty, very open,
candid person - great guy. He lived his life to the hilt. We went to
see one of his television shows in which he was a featured guest. The
audience was filled with hippy-type kids and everyone was fascinated.
During the performance he was smoking these little cigarellos, they’re
like little round cigars. So at the end of the performance a hand shot
up. "Mr Watts. You tell us about life, and how to be free and
liberated. Then why are you smoking these terrible cigars?" Old Alan,
when he would get excited, one of his eyes would drift over to the
corner of his head. He had this funny look and I knew something was
coming. He looked at the young man and he said, "Do you know why I
smoke these little cigars? Because I like it!" (laughter) So that’s
Alan for you, and it tells the story of his whole life. If that’s Zen,
more power to him. Another incomparable man was Gerald Heard. He could
get up, give a lecture, and you could transcribe it, with footnotes
and all, and it was ready for publication. It came out flawlessly. It
was a seamless performance. Somebody in an audience once asked him,
"Could you say a few words on architecture?" So Gerald replied, "What
kind of architecture?" He said, "Oh, British architecture." "What year
of British architecture?" He said, "Well, let’s say about the end of
the nineteenth century." "Precisely what period are you referring to
young man?" He said, "Well, the 1890’s." Gerald said, "Would you say
the first half of the 1890’s?" He said, "Yes." (laughter) Then Gerald
went off for an hour and a half on architecture in England during the
first half of the 1890’s. It was a virtuoso performance. Aldous said
to me that he thought Gerald was the best informed man alive. Coming
from Aldous, that was quite a compliment. Then there were people I
didn’t know, but read. Great influences were Joyce, Camus and Bertrand
Russell. These were people who meant a lot to me. An incomparable
writer named B.Travin added a lot to my understanding of human nature.
I get more from what great minds have written about human behavior,
than any psychiatric text. Sometimes I feel that I have learned more
psychology from Dostoyevsky and Conrad than I have from Freud. I
approach my practice that way; by interacting with people as if they
were protaganists in their own dramas. That way you can’t be biased.
It was the way Proust described the Tower of Combrey. He said, if you
really want to know the tower you must see it in the morning light,
and in the evening light. You must see it in the winter time covered
with snow. You must see it in the summer time. You must see it in the
mist, and you must see it sometimes with eyes half closed. You must
see it from above and from below. You must see it from the east,
north, south and west. Then you’ll begin to know the Tower of
Combrey.
DJB: Have you ever given any thought to what happens to human
consciousness after physical death?
OSCAR: I’ve given a lot of thought to it, (laughter) but I’m afraid
not much productive thought. My bias is that when the current is shut
off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality. That is the only way
I can put it. Shakespeare said of death, ‘that strange bourne from
which no traveller doth return.’ No traveller has ever returned from
this journey, so there’s no direct evidence, (laughter) except people
who say they have. Well, you can decide for yourself whether they have
or not. In any case, my thought is that, for myself only, that I’m
simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I -- which is
now a kind of fruitless phrase -- am somehow restored to the earth, or
to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschlime, or the
fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive
primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the
Big Bang I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in
history. (laughter)
JEANNE:: How has your experience with psychedelic drugs influenced
your life, your work and your practice?
OSCAR: In a word - profoundly. It really took me out of a state in
which I saw the boundries of myself and the world around me very
rigorously prescribed, to a state in which I saw that many, many
things were possible. This created for me, a sense of being in a kind
of flux, a constant dynamic equilibrium. I used a phrase at that time
to designate how I thought of myself at any given moment. It’s a
nautical term called a ‘running fix’. It means that when you report
your position in a moving vessel, you are only talking about a
specific time and circumstance - the here and now. The illusion of
living in one room has now given rise to the ill- usion that there are
a great many rooms. All you have to do is get out into the corridors,
go into another room, and see what’s there. Otherwise you’ll think
that the room you’re living in is all there is.
DJB: Could you tell us about your discovery of DMT?
OSCAR: Yeah! (laughter) It is a psychoactive ingredient of the
halllucinogenic brew they use in the Amazon called Ayahuasca. An
analysis by chemists revealed that it contained a substance called
dimethyltriptamine, DMT. This was unusual because it was almost
identical to a chemical found naurally in the body, and it didn’t make
sense that we’d carry around with us such a powerful hallucinogen.
Nevertheless, a friend of mine, Parry Bivens and I, purified some
dimethyltriptamine. We had it all set up one evening. It was thought
to be inactive orally by itself. To be on the safe side, we thought
we’d inject it into one another the following day. So Parry said he’d
see me in the morning and we’d go ahead and try it out. We had nothing
to go by as it had never been used before. So when Parry left me I was
in the office looking at these bottles, and I got this devilish
thought that I should take a shot of this stuff. But I had no idea of
how much to take. So I said, like Hofmann, I’ll be conservative and
take a cc. I backed myself up to the wall until I could go no further
so (laughter) I had to inject myself in the rear. And from then on --
Man, I was in a strange place, the strangest. I was in a world that
was like being inside of a pinball machine. The only thing like it,
oddly enough, was in a movie called Zardoz, where a man is trapped
inside of a crystal. It was angular, electronic, filled with all kinds
of strange over-beats and electronic circuits, flashes and movements.
It looked like an ultra souped-up disco, where lights are coming from
every direction. Just extra- ordinary. Then I’d go unconscious, the
observer was knocked out. Then the observer would come back
intermittently, then go back out. I had a sense of terror because each
time I blacked out it was like dying. I went through this dance of the
molecules and electrons inside of my head and I, for all the world,
felt like a television set looks when on between pictures. Finally I
lay on the floor, time seemed endless. Then it lightened up and I
looked at my watch. It had been 45 minutes. I’d thought I had been in
that place for 200 years. I think what I was looking at was the
archetonics of the brain itself. We learned later that that was an
enormous a dose. Just smoking a fraction of this would give you a
profound effect. So in that dose range I think I just busted every-
thing up. (laughter) Parry came back the next day, and he said, "Well,
let’s try some." I said, "I got to the North Pole ahead of you."
DJB: That took a lot of courage.
OSCAR: Well, it was fool-hardiness.
DJB: I hear you’ve been doing some interesting work with dolphins and
Olympic swimmers. Perhaps you could tell us a little about this
project.
OSCAR: Albert Stevens, Matt Biondi and I, got the idea several years
ago that we might find an innovative way of approaching wild dolphins,
by using Olympic swimmers - the best in the world. It is difficult to
study wild dolphins because they are free-ranging and peripetetic. We
went to where the dolphins were reported to be, fifty miles off the
coast of Grand Bahamma Island. We waited. When they came we jumped in
with them, and did sa great deal of underwater filming. We studied the
film to try to find out how the dolphins behave, and we’re still in
the process of doing that now. We did it for three years and developed
a good working relationship with these dolphins whom we were now able
to identify. Dolphins are strange and beguiling creatures. Their
language seems totally incomprehensible, as we know our own language
to be nothing like it whatsoever. It appears to be a different order
of communication. What stories the dolphins could bring back from
their alien world of water if we could only communicate with them.
DJB: The final question. Could you tell us about the Albert Hofmann
Foundation and any other current projects that you’re working on?
OSCAR: Well, I co-founded the Albert Hofmann Foundation about three
years ago. I was involved in LSD research from 1954 to 1962. During
that time I accumulated a large store of books, art-work, papers,
correspondence, tape-recordings, news-clippings, research reports and
memorabilia which probably represented a fair sample of what went on
in the psychedelic history of Los Angeles and elsewhere. I was aware
that there is a great deal of this kind of information that is
scattered and isolated and in dager of being lost or destroyed.
Collected and organized this would provide an extremely valuable
resource for future research and historians. I was approached by
several people who were committed to preserving these unique records.
We formed a non-profit organization that we felt was fitting to be
named in honour of the man who discovered LSD and psilocybin - Albert
Hofmann. He was most gracious in his acceptance and pledged his whole-
hearted support. It is based in Los Angeles and functions soley as a
library, archive and information center at this time. We have
collected a great deal of relevant material from the poineers of
psychedelic research; eg. Laura Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Stan Grof,
Humphrey Osmond and many others. I got back an enthusiastic response
from most of the leaders of this movement. The foundation provides the
only open forum for the legitimate discussion of these issues. It
offers a place where people can discuss ideas about their own
experiences under these various agents. I was surprised to learn how
many people out there are closet psychedelic graduates. I’ve talked to
people who I thought that never in a million years would understand
what I was talking about. "Oh my, It was a wonderful experience!" said
a sixty-five year old professor of Medieval French, and I couldn’t
believe that she had said that. There’s plenty of them out there, so
we’re bringing them together and many of them have become members in
our organization. Other projects? I’ve been working in several non-
profit organizations that have some concern for the ecological welfare
of the Earth. One is called, "Eyes on Earth", and another is called,
"Earth Anthem". Eyes on Earth involves a scientific visualization of
the Earth and it’s resources. It is the only true cloud-free picture
of the Earth, projected electronically onto a huge globe. It was
painstakingly assembled by the photographs of the Earth without clouds
taken by satellite and it depicts how different resources are
dwindling and being depleted. Earth Anthem is a contest for people
throughout the world, to find an anthem that represents the earth.
This project will culminate in a program designed to celebrate the
finalists of this contest. We want to find a song that is
representative of the earth, one that we could sing if the Martians
come. (laughter) In addition, my new book - A Different Kind of
Healing - is in publication by Putnam and is to be released shortly.
So that’s what I’m up to, and I keep moving. I think Einstein said it,
"Keep moving!"
