Humphry Osmond – Early History Psychedelic Consciousness

the following is from

1983

 

“Believing that you’ve become the center of the universe… in a sense may be true. But in an actual, practical sense of our four-dimensional world, this is a disaster of the first order.

I mean, there are truths that are unuseful. And there are also truths for which a particular culture has no slot. We have no real slot for people who wish to become the center of the universe.”

Schizophrenia: A New Approach
Humphry Osmond and John Smythies

1952

 

Osmond experienced mescaline in the early 1950s, and in May 1950 provided this to Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles. Huxley’s report to Osmond, The Doors of Perception, remains a milestone in psychedelic history, as does the word that Osmond coined — “psychedelic.” Currently, Osmond works as a psychiatrist in Tuskaloosa, Alabama.

He is co-author of The Hallucinogens (Academy Press), co-editor of The Psychedelics – The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs (Anchor Books), and author of Understanding Understanding.

 

Osmond’s interest in this field grew out of a fascination with schizophrenia and alcoholism. His story starts earlier, however — shortly after he went into the Navy once he had qualified for medicine at Guys Hospital in London in 1942. He had six weeks of training, and then went to Scotland and then in a convoy into the North Atlantic. It took three weeks to get across and on the way back he got caught in the climax of the battle of the Atlantic.

It took 25 years before I discovered really why this convoy has been so fascinating to historians. It was when Donyits threw in 40 of his U-boats and caught us while we were building up for the invasion. It’s now called the “Battle of St. Patrick’s Day,” in which we were really heavily worsted. But this was the beginning of a series of great triumphs against the U-boats. We sunk 100 U-boats in 100 days. Those in the film Das Boot were our opponents.

Then I had this very, very unusual experience of being in the House of Commons in Parliament 24 hours after landing, and hearing them debating this great disaster. Very few people have actually been able to go directly from war to the legislature to hear what they are doing there, so it was a very great and interesting lesson.

In the Navy, when I had been at sea a year, the question came। what was I to do. Because there was a general policy there that young naval officers — medical doctors — if they spent more than about a year or two at sea on their own probably would become alcoholics. I don’t know whether it was true or not, but that was the Admiralty’s fear. 

So they wrote to ask me what I would d0, and I had seen a number of cases — both going from ship to ship, and in our own ship/of people who clearly were suffering from psychiatric conditions. I treated a few of them successfully, and I had seen the impact of these illnesses, particularly on ships at sea, and the impact on the young men — many of them had been sunk under dreadful conditions — trying to come to terms with the great misfortunes from which they had suffered.

Now and again, we would get someone who was, in fact, gravely mentally ill. They had a notable effect upon the rest of the crew. And, after all, if someone goes over the side suddenly believing that they are an angel or a merman or something like this — sailors, first, as I was pointing out yesterday, Friday the 13th, are naturally superstitious. But added to this, they have this sort of idea that they are a very special breed of animal. And apparently this thing is sort of contagious.

Almost all of our people were landsmen they weren’t sailors at all. But in a remarkably short time, they had picked up the sailors’ superstitions. Presumably the sea and its roughness, and its strangeness and the fact that we haven’t been aquatic for some time, impresses these ideas upon us.

So I said that I wanted to go into psychiatry and I was told that there were absolutely no openings. I was very sorry about this, and I thought otherwise I might go in for tuberculosis — which was at that time still quite a going concern, because they hadn’t brought in the great antibiotics yet.

So I happened to be in a club in London and I met a man over a bar. I found he was at one of the naval psychiatric hospitals. I told him where I was, and he said, “What are you going to do when you leave the sea, which you will inevitably do?” since he (knew I had been at sea over a year.)

“Well, what I would like to do would be to go into psychiatry. Well, why don’t you?”

I explained to him, and he said, “I don’t know about that. I’ve been talking to Surgeon Captain Curran, who is the head of Naval Psychiatry, and he’s been telling the Admiralty that they would love to have young psychiatrists, but no one wants to go in for it.”

So I wrote a letter to him, and he was always very amused by this. He said, “That just shows what bureaucracies are like.” They had been telling him he must get as many yoyng psychiatrists with as possible because after the invasion of Europe and the Far East things, they were going to need far more than the actual trained psychiatrists could conceivably supply.

I had been in the Atlantic in all of 1943, and in 1944 we’d been going up and down the channel. I think it was about the 14th of April when I was suddenly moved. I was extremely upset about this. First, I knew all the people, and secondly, I knew perfectly well that if there was an invasion with the kind of casualties we were expecting — which were 30% — that I would then be moved to another ship where I didn’t know anyone, and one of the ways of staying alive in a ship was to know the crew, and to know where to get off and when to get off.

So anyway I was sent off, after some delays and uncertainties to his hospital called Berigernia. There I met a man who later became my boss and I spent a very peculiar six weeks crash course. Why this has bearing on this is in the course of this I saw a number of people who were schisophrenic.

I had seen a few before. My first girl I ever recall seeing was a young lady who came in who looked like the movie star Diana Derby — I don’t know, you probably hardly remember her. She was a singing movie star of sixteen, and people were very fond of her — and quite rightly so, too. She sang beautifully and looked very attractive. This girl looked like her, and she came in to see me and I said, “What’s the matter?”

She said, “I looked in the mirror this morning and I saw an elephant.” I looked at her and I said, “What do you mean?”

And she said, “I looked in the mirror this morning and I saw what looked like an elephant.” I said, “Well, what was that?” She said, “Well, that’s me.” I said, “I don’t think that’s you at all.” And she said, “Well, that’s what I saw in the mirror.”

I was very, very puzzled about this, so I went to my chief and said, “What could that be?”

He said, “Well, you know she has schizophrenia.” I said, “Well, what’s that?”

This question kept popping up for a time and when I raised it, and he had seen quite a number of them, he said to me, “Well, there’s only one person who really knows what this thing is like, and this is a chap called Anthony Hampton,” who was, in fact, a Jungian analyst running a little officers.’ hospital.

I went over to see him, and I drank a lot of very good champagne cider and listened to his thing. He was a very nice man, and he told me that the real way to learn about schizophrenia was to read a book written by one of his patients called The Witnesses, by Thomas Hennell.

“The Witnesses,” he said,”will tell you what it’s like to be from the inside of schizophrenia.”

He said, “If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.” He said, “I can assure you it’s not an easy thing to understand. The books really do not tell you what this is like.” He said, “It’s not that they do not want to. It’s that it’s extremely difficult.”

I was very impressed by this. I tried to get this book — I spent about four or five months getting it. Publishers Row in England in the city of London had been burned out and most of these huge quantities of books had been burned. But I found one secondhand and I started to read it. I read it on a number of occasions.

Since, my old friend had told me this was terribly important, I read it with a great attention, but it was still extremely difficult to reconcile these very strange remarksi how, as the illness began, the strange significance of objects, the unusual noises in the night, the uncertainty of his self-identification, the feeling of destiny, and then this extraordinary walk that he makes to Oxford in which he walks down the road, and the road seems to be going into eternity, the people on the edges of it look strange and look at him significantly. And then as he goes on as night approaches, the fields begin to boil and the constellations swing overhead and he is suddenly seized by either a group of secret policemen or something, who put him into a van filled with meat, so he believes, and then take him off to prison. And then these various things happen.

So I read this assiduously. I thought about it a great deal. And then, about a year after that, I was sent out to Malta to fill one of these positions temporarily that the Navy was doing, since they were now preparing — this was in 1950 the war in Germany is coming to an end, the army are beginning to withdraw their people in order to get ready for the Par Eastern campaign. The idea was, as far as I know, that the younger psychiatrists would go out to the periphery and then would be leap-frogged towards the Par East. In fact, of course, it all turned out very differently.

I spent almost 2 years there, since I was a regular naval officer. And there I saw substantial numbers of people with schizophrenia. I became deeply interested in this. Remembering what Hampton told me, I would talk to them but it still seemed to me it didn’t really make any great sense.

And I went back to my old hospital in London, Guys Hospital, spent a short time there doing some neurology. And then my chief in the Navy at St. George’s, who’s now become a professor of psychiatry there, took me over there and I became his first assistant. I became able again to see lots of schizophrenics and treat them with deep insulin, talk with them and ponder about them.

During this time, we had a very junior resident come along — a chap called John Smythies. And John — he’d just come out of the Navy. At this time he was extremely difficult, he had had a very, very strange upbringing. He was brought up in India like a young — I don’.t think he would even object to my saying this — like a young princeling in an Indian state. His father was the chief forester there, a sort of administrator. They made most of their money out of their forests.

To the age of seven he was brought up, you know, with numerous Indian amors or something looking after him. And then he was suddenly shipped to an English — what we call a “preparatory school,” which is not the same as ones here — where he put on the same airs as he had as a young princeling, and was beaten up mercilessly.

To further his education, he once or twice went back, I think, to India, longing to stay there, of course, and then was sent back again. He was then sent to an English public school, where life was even more dismal. So he spent from the age of seven until about eighteen living an extremely miserable life with this paradise lost, you know.

Then, when he was eighteen, he went up to Cambridge and suddenly discovered a marvelous life again. He then went into the Navy, and the Navy, as he said, was very much like going back to his school Rugby. He said that there were all these constraints which Cambridge had removed him from, and he was extremely miserable.

Then when he came back to St. George, he was recovering his confidence again and he told his teachers that his interest in psychiatry was largely due to his interest in philosophy — which didn’t at all impress them. The idea that anyone would want to practice psychiatry with the mere intention that it was to be a sort of annex to philosophy filled them with vexation. It was not their view of what residents did.

As a matter of fact, many people felt this was very pretentious. I got to know John very well. It wasn’t at all pretentious. The only thing pretentious about it — John was very well read, he was very intelligent, he was deeply interested in this — the only thing pretentious about it was the particularly straightforward way in which he put it. He would say, “It is obvious that this is so.” “It’s obvious that the brain can’t work that way.” And people for whom this wasn’t obvious didn’t like this very much.

We got to know each other and, in the course of this, John told me about his interest in parapsychology as part of this general idea of how the mind works — which is, after all, very reasonable. Parapsychology was quite well established there. We had in London the Society for Psychical Research, which has an enormous amount of data, and it seemed not unlikely that things like this happened.

I, myself, come from a family of people — on one side of Scottish people, who had members of the family who had “second sight,” as it was called. And it wasn’t looked at as the least bit unusual. There are family stories about things like this, and I never thought they are impossible. I met patients to whom this had happened, and one doesn’t neglect these kind up. of things. They may be mistaken! they may not.

Anyway, in the course of following these various things, he got a book by a man called Rouhier, a Frenchman, called Le Peyotl. In the course of doing this, he found a picture of a chicken waving a tricolor — a very French idea, this as one of the hallucinations — and then, shortly after, a formula o mescaline.

He brought it along to me on a May morning in 1950, I think it was, and he said, “What does this remind you of?” I said, “It reminds me of something too, and I can’t think what.”

We had a medical student called Julian Redmill, who had been a biochemist, and we asked him what it looked like to him. And he said, “It looks either like thyroid or it looks like adrenaline.”

On the basis of that, John got some mescaline. It was quite easy to get. There was a firm called Lights in London. Very, very cheap — I think it was about less than a dollar a gram or something, very modest. Of course, on our pay then it wasn’t so modest. It was very good stuff, beautiful. And he took some, and he got one of his friends to take this.

We wrote a paper out of this. John went up to see a chap I called John Harley-Mason at Cambridge. And Harley-Mason, who is a very well-known professor of chemistry, told him that, indeed, this was not a fantastic idea. It was conceivable that adrenaline might become a mescaline-like substance by a process known as “transmethylation” — that is, you would add on methyl groups.

You would turn your own adrenaline into mescaline in a very crude way. Anyway, the only snag was that this was not known to occur in any animal. Transmethylation was a regular process in plants, but not in animals.

Well, of course, within about a year, it was found to occur in the squid, and, of course, within three or four years, it was found to occur in humans. It is now one of the main processes in membrane transfer and all these things. Transmethylation seems to be a crucial process. Our paper, that we then wrote, has, strangely enough, become among the most cited papers, and on its thirty-year anniversary, John has just written a paper putting right some of the people who’ve written.

There’ve been various ideas. Some of the more chemically- biased felt that it was John Harley-Mason who made this discovery. Now John and I know exactly what the discovery was. We know that he made the initial observation, I encouraged him in this, we then got hold of Redmill, and then we got hold of Harley-Mason.

But what we also did was to relate the findings of mescaline, which we initially got from reports, and then, from our own experiences — we related this to the symptoms of schizophrenia. And in the table that we wrote, you can see that there are many, ad many correspondences. At that time we didn’t know the term “model psychosis,” but we pointed out that there are these many similarities.

At this time I got a job in Canada because I thought I wanted to be able to see — I had seen a good many schizophrenics, I wanted to see many more, so we could, really, as it were —

Had you already written **On Being Mad”?

No, no. This is how “On Being Mad” got written. I thought, however, that before doing it — since John had taken mescaline and given it to other people — I better take it myself. And so I went up to John’s flat, where he and Verma, who was his girlfriend and who’s now his wife, were living. I said that I thought I ought to take it and we both agreed, and he gave me 400 mg. of mescaline. That’s where “On Being Mad” came from.

Now we were also in the process of writing this paper “Schizophrenia: A New Approach,” and both of us became very much * convinced that if anything like this happened, it would be a “ far more economical account of what was actually happening.

And even if this was not so, the mescaline experience, as many people had said before, gives you a far clearer idea of what patients are talking about.

When people do all this business about LSD and these things not being identical with schizophrenia, well, who the hell said they were? They become extremely close if you give it to someone without their knowing it — which is a dastardly thing to do. But the fact is, as Moreau de Tours found with hashish in the 1840s, if you give your residents or take yourself this, and see for yourself, you are left in no doubt that many of the strictures that are made of our patients — about what they ought or ought not to do — unless you know exactly what they are experiencing ‘and you know exactly what kind of person they are, it’s quite unclear what they ought or ought not to do.

It’s quite clear, however, that they ought to be strongly encouraged to understand something has gone seriously wrong, and that their sort of self-remedies will not necessarily work. That is, doing absolutely nothing, or believing that you’ve become the center of the universe and all these things — in a sense, in a philosophical and theological sense, this in a sense may be true. But in an actual, practical sense of our four-dimensional world, this is a disaster of the first order.

I mean, there are truths that are unuseful. And there are also truths for which a particular culture has no slot. We have no real slot for people who wish to become the center of the universe. We are not really well set up to have a charismatic dictator. The whole aim of the Constitution of the United States and the non-Constitution in Britain is to avoid this misfortune.

Anyway, we wrote this paper — “Schizophrenia A New Approach.” We had great difficulty initially in getting it published. It would never have been published if it had not been for an aberrant editor of the Journal of Mental Science, Dr. G.W.T.H. Fleming, who, in spite of advice from various people, published it. And so, in 1952, it was published.

I had gone off to Saskatchewan by then. I had met my other old friend, Abram Hoffer. He at this time was a biochemist-physician who was becoming a psychiatrist, and he, indeed, became one not very long afterward. He was tremendously interested at first, but, as he said, he had great difficulty in understanding my speech. He wondered why I didn’t speak English.

But he attuned himself to this, and then we eventually — he told me that one of the reasons that he became so interested in this was that he had been down in the United States. He had been around, seeing all the centers. The only things they were interested in was either psychoanalysis or else steroid hormones, with one exception. This was the great Heinrich Kluverr of Chicago. And Kluver told him, he said, “Mescaline is the most interesting substance there is and I advise you to take a look at it.”

Anyway, I gave — there was this morning, which I have described I think fairly accurately, of my apprehensions and concern, and popping the stuff in and Aldous taking it, and then out of this came The Doors of Perception.

In the “letter book,” I described this strange thing of the lady next door, Betty, who was of the impression Aldous was wearing blue jeans. I luckily have this picture. As you can see — I now have had it blown up, and I can see perfectly well he’s wearing the gray flannel bags that English gentlemen of Aldous’ age wore informally. I think I’ve seen Aldous once in blue jeans, when we went out in the desert. But this was seen as very unusual. Aldous normally wore gray flannel trousers, which Englishmen thought was their informal dress.

Anyway, after this Aldous promised to write this report — which became The Doors of Perception. I went back to Saskatchewan, where the political battle went on in a dismal way, but it was eventually resolved. And, of course, for much of this time I was mostly involved in getting the hospital into shape.

But, however, also because of my work with Abram Hoffer and because of his great interest in this, and our later work and interest in the amenochromes, adrenochrome and LSD, we decided that we would really — out of, from our point of view, keeping ourselves sane —

While getting a hospital together is a full-time job in a way, a great deal of the full-time job is getting people to start doing things. And during that time — I later became the director of that hospital, the superintendant — he actually does not lave a great deal to do, if he’s got the moves right.

It’s like a general in the battle. If you’re a good general, you don’t fuss around. You do what Montgomery did — You go to bed on the day the battle begins, and sleep until, as he said, “The soldiers brought the battle back to me.”

Now that — of course, I was too inexperienced then to understand that this is the heartland of command. You get other people to do their duty and you encourage them and support them. You don’t go and breathe down their necks all the time. Otherwise, rou get an organization which will go to bits as soon as you go away.

With my naval experience absolutely delightful but alcoholic captain, and an absolutely marvelous first lieutenant, and they put these things into practice. They ran a marvelous ship, a taut ship — but it was a ship in which people were happy. It’s difficult, you know, in a. destroyer in mid-Atlantic, under dreadful conditions, over-crowded, with young and frightened men on board, inexperienced, । to have them happy. But this genius knew how to do it.

I therefore learnt by watching him that the essential thing there was their morale. That would be quite contrary to many things — even though Karl Henninger came up and said these ludicrous things, like that, “The first thing you must do is get rid of all your present staff.” It’s ludicrous. You can’t do this, I say. With a defeated army, the first thing you do is I to get rid of the army — and then you haven’t got anyone.

In 1906, De Lombargia had just discovered the effects of adrenaline on nerves, and on animals, so that there was tremendous personal interest. He very much liked the idea that adrenaline could turn into these things that he called “Toxin X” so many years ago. As he told me, he said, “Do you think I would have wasted my life with all this if the chemists had anything to tell us?” He remained deeply interested in this extraordinary illness.

In the course of this visit, he did touch upon this matter of temperament, saying how these were matters of temperament. Now Jung — his relationship to his own great book, Psychological Types, and his relationship to temperament, remained very peculiar. He wrote these books — well, he wrote Psychological Types, apparently, to try and define the breakup of the relationship between him and Freud. But the book comes to an end without telling you anything about this, except that he felt — we don’t really know what he felt, because no one ever really cross-examined him on this.

He felt, as he would say sometimes, that the Freudian psychology was really an extroverted psychology, and his was an introverted one. However, since Jung himself was highly extroverted, and Freud was quite introverted, this doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense. I have read accounts — and I’ve met Jung myself — I remember I once asked my old friend John Smythies, “Do you feel that Jung was very Introverted?” and he roared with laughter. He was one of the most outgoing of men. And therefore, obviously something had gone wrong.

One of the things that most people interested in temperament have never thought clearly about is that it’s very likely that you will make serious mistakes in estimating your own temperament. For a variety of reasons. You might — Jung for some reason or another, perhaps simply because he was highly extroverted, “tremendously was fascinated by introversion, and romanticized this.

My own sort of observation on introversion is that it is fine so long as you don’t have too much of it. And then it can be a tremendous burden, in the same way as with all these things. They’re fine if you know how to use them, and if you know what they are. Now if, for one reason or other, you get the belief — particularly if you’re a highly extroverted person and feel rather introverted — then you’re bound to … or the other way around. If you’re an extroverted person brought up in an extroverted family, you have to take on their values.

Of course, Jung had made a much more complex thing of this. But due to the fact that this central theme, as to what his temperament was and what the conflict was with Freud — since this was distorted by this error of judgment, the whole thing remained rather odd.

Added to this, Jung became a kind of semi-willing guru for the Jungians. As Aldous said, Krishnamurti told him — he said, “Never let yourself be made into a guru.” Krishnamurdi, as ; you know, is one of the few retired gurus. He left being a guru at thirty, which was extremely sensible. But he said, “The thing about being a guru is that it’s so bad for the guru. It is liable to destroy him.”

That is, you get pious people who like to have gurus, and they, in fact, turn the chap into an idol. And then he truly does become that, and then the necessity of thinking about these things. Any odd remark he makes, like with Gurdjieff — any old nonsense Gurdjieff made was written down by someone and it was then announced to be, you know, enormous wisdom.

Well, the fact is that it is sort of a crossword puzzle, or an acrostic, or — the most banal of proverbs can be made into wisdom if you think long enough about it, if you’re clever enough and devoted enough. It’s like haiku. Some of the haiku are nonsense, some are brilliant. Some are both.

But the fact is that this is very bad for people — to be placed in the position that their idle remarks are liable to be seen as — Of course, the other point about it is that some of people’s idle remarks are much better than their thought-out remarks. This is true. But the real thing is that it’s bad for the person.

This, of course, is one of the most charming things about Aldous — is that he refused to be a guru. Now he would retreat. If he was bored — I’ve seen him bored at times — he would sort of remove himself, you know, and he would be somewhere else. But he never became a guru. He wouldn’t do that, and that was because he thought of Krishnamurti’s excellent advice.

And also, Gerald Heard came along with this. Gerald Heard told him, and he told me too, that one of the things that religious gurus do — and, of course, not all gurus are religious — is that they burn themselves out in attempting to inspire people beyond the limits of human endurance. The Wolsleys did this. All of them do it, and after they do this they stop being inspiring.

And, of course, for very good reasons. The fact is that if their message is any good, it gets across and very soon becomes converted from being a new and extraordinary truth into being a useful working moral rule.

And then, as my old friend Tom Patterson — Tom and I have groups — participatory relationships — this thing called “typo-methexics.” This tells you in any particular group of people what role you’re likely to fill best. It also tells you what types of groups are probably not viable