Booted out of West Point, fired from Harvard, Timothy Leary lights into his75th year as a felon, fugitive, guru, and great grandpa. The bad boy of American psychology is not only alive, he is still high on brain-change chemicals and trying to expand his mind--in cyberspace. Writer Bill Moseley first met the grizzled guru when he portrayed him in a fictionalized account of Leary's night in San Quentin cell-to-cell with Charles Manson. (Leary saw the performance eight times.) For this interview, Moseley caught Leary at his Beverly Hills lair showcased on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."
PT: Is there anything you find interesting in cutting edge psychology?
TL: Psychology didn't exist until the beginning of the 20th century. William James and the early experimentalists started the so-called science of human behavior.
Human psychology really became mainstream during World Wars I and II. For the first time in history, instead of selecting warriors on the basis of how big their shoulders were and how dumb they were, you had to have bombers, navigators, and calculators. War had become highly technical. The Army had to select people for various jobs based on their psychological performance.
That started behavioral psychology. The military always gets the new technology first, then it moves over [to the civilians].
PT: The trickle-down theory?
TL: I would say it explodes out; it's explosive! In the 1950s, American affluence, individuality, and self-confidence were beginning to take off. A group of behavioral psychologists, of whom I was one, quite deliberately set out to take the power to describe, control, treat, and change human behavior away from doctors using the pathological model.
Carl Rogers said that if you have a behavior problem, it's not like a disease; you don't go to a doctor. If you're a third baseman and you strike out against left-handed pitchers, you study, you get coached, you go to other people. It's no longer a disease; we all have ups and downs, winning streaks and losing streaks.
In the Eisenhower years, the psychology of the day was adjustment: Tell me, are you well-adjusted? It seems ridiculous to us now. What we would today consider a good, adjusted person was considered abnormal then.
At the present time, if you look in the Yellow Pages, there will be eight pages of self-help stuff. There's hardly one orifice of the body, hardly any kind of disease or relationship to someone with a disease where you don't get together and talk about it as individual human beings, thinking self-reliantly instead of counting on some doctor to tell you what to do. The success of this psychological revolution is staggering.
If you look at the number of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts listed in the 1950 phone book and the 1990 phone book--whew! Naturally, as Gorbachev found to his dismay, once you give people freedom, they luck up and do all sorts of crazy things! Gorbachev never thought that Russians would use their freedom to study alchemy or astrology, but that's the way it is.
PT: What about the Sixties?
TL: We did the same thing at Harvard, but this time with drags. We took the power to use, to control brain-change drugs away: and made it available to train adults. Now the very concept of a government-ap-proved, government-funded study of brain drugs on people, that's [Josef] Mengele. I have been blamed for having mined psychological, scientific studies of psychedelic drugs. I don't deserve the credit; I was one of many.
Currently, we are facing a fascinating situation where the world has been flooded with extremely inexpensive electronic processing devices. They cost less than a textbook and will allow multimedia stuff on screens that can be used to communicate, like a telephone that you can now use audiographically.
The hottest thing on the business page every single day is ITT, the information highway, and the different groups fighting for control, just as they fought over the control of iron before. But they can't control the information highway because they're dealing with packages of light. A computer screen is just dusters of light; it all comes down to light.
We're now learning to communicate. The telephone allowed us to use dectromagnetic magnification of our voice, but now you can do it audiovisually. It's the enormous power of a new language.
Marshall McLuhan is the key; he said electrical communication will create the global village. Philosophy and psychology in the 20th century is all linguistics. McLuhan said, "The media is the message." Change the media, you change yourself; change the media, you change your culture. You've heard me say this, haven't you?
PT: Absolutely.
TL: I want to say one other thing about drugs. I just received a 40-page manual from the DEA or the FDA, with a list of well over a thousand words for different kinds of drugs. Like "Easy Boo" or "Mary Lu." The DEA agents have to learn this language. Here's the government training their agents to learn a cultural language used by a big minority in America. While the language is legal, the government has derided that certain brain-are illegal. The government reserves the right to control any vegetable that will allow you to change your mind.
Everybody wants to control the drugs: the FDA, the DEA, the junkies. There's a good reason for that. Psychoactive brain-activating drugs are the most powerful tools humanity has for operating your mind, your brain, developing new language, building up new communities, new cultures and subcultures.
Tags:
american psychology,
behavior problem,
behavioral psychologists,
behavioral psychology,
carl rogers,
charles manson,
death,
drugs,
eight times,
felon,
human psychology,
humanist,
lifestyles of the rich and famous,
navigators,
religion,
san quentin,
third baseman,
time in history,
timothy leary,
trickle down theory
