From Psychological Tests to Psychedelic Tests, 1957–61

"Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others ..."

Timothy Leary (original source unknown)

First and foremost, Timothy Leary was a psychologist, dedicated to exploring the workings of the mind. As scholars of psychology, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert approached the study of the human mind and behavior by applying standard scientific methods from the field of social sciences. As professors in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, they were tasked with the usual duties of advising graduate students, applying for grants, and conducting research studies under the support of Harvard's Center for Research in Personality. At the time, Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner's theories in behaviorism dominated the department. His models entailed the ideas of stimulus-response, conditioning, and reinforcement in shaping human behavior.

Prior to his appointment in 1960, Leary authored a well-received monograph, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation (1957). This work was built on psychometric studies that he had conducted as a clinical psychologist at the Kaiser Hospital and Foundation in Oakland, California.

Some may not realize that before Leary ever dabbled in psychedelics, he received accolades for designing psychological tests. His "interpersonal circumplex" or "interpersonal behavior circle" was the first circular model for mapping interpersonal behavior. Developed in collaboration with psychologist Hubert Coffey and fellow Berkeley alumni in the Kaiser Foundation Research Group (Mervin Freedman, Rolfe LaForge, and Abel Ossorio), this model used group psychotherapy sessions and psychological test data to create a vector model for personality in the context of interpersonal relationships.

Visually charting the results of personality tests was a revolutionary idea. Established personality tests at the time included the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), which followed a linear approach for summarizing data, whereas Leary's graph incorporated measurements in magnitude and direction, offering a richer, multifaceted picture of an individual's interpersonal traits, as interrelated. As he would discover post-psychedelics, a "web" would serve as an analogy to describe our interrelated relationships, including a person's reactions and, thus, personality characteristics.

Leary marketed his own product, calling it the Interpersonal System of Personality, which also incorporated the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), a technique that uses picture interpretation to evaluate patterns of thought. Leary described his own product as a "complex combination of methods and measures for assessment of personality. ... The raw data for the diagnoses are obtained from the MMPI, the TAT, and a test which was especially developed for interpersonal diagnosis. ... The booklet provides space for summarizing interpersonal scores from the MMPI (at two levels) and at five or more scores from the Interpersonal Check List. The scores are standardized and plotted on the diagnostic grid. The diagnostic ratings are then used to calculate over 30 indices of conflict."

Data from experiments using the model could be recorded in three booklets that Leary had specially designed: the Record Booklet of Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, the Record Booklet for Analysis of Group Dynamics, and the Record Booklet for Analysis of Family Dynamics, in addition to checklists, a template, and a manual.

His tests were used by other psychologists who ordered copies of his diagnostic worksheets throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, as found in the records of his Psychological Consultation Service. It is striking that experts continued to use Leary's tests even after he had been declared the "guru" of LSD. For Leary, his adventures into LSD research and his work as a psychologist went hand in hand.

Considering that Leary's training and professional career focused on the measurement of personality and behavior traits, it is not surprising that he applied these same methods to analyze and describe psychedelic substances, as seen in session report forms and later plotting circles. His social science training informed his approach to understanding the psychedelic experience. As expected, his graphs and plotting circles become more and more unusual after the introduction of drugs.

Leary had his first experience with a hallucinogenic or psychedelic drug as a mature man — a Harvard professor in psychology, a widower, and a father of two. His wife's suicide was only five years prior. As previously mentioned, he was vacationing in Mexico that August 1960, as he had done several times before, this time in Cuernavaca — a popular haunt with his social science peers. His Berkeley colleague Frank Barron had recounted his own mushroom experience in Mexico to Leary the previous summer. Barron and linguist Lothar Knauth encouraged and prepped Leary to try it for himself. Leary was by all accounts a "square": a middle-aged, single father with a solid alcohol and tobacco habit who had not as yet dabbled in psychoactive substances. This was not a teenage, thrill-seeking, recreational happening. The hippie was not yet realized, the peace sign was still largely unknown outside of Britain and Leary was nearly forty years old. In his autobiography High Priest (1968), Leary stated that "ever since that last weekend and the mushrooms, I didn't know as much anymore. I had started the slow process of throwing things out of my mind, junking mental furniture that had been clogging up my brain."

Clearly, the experience for Leary was life-changing. Afterwards, he was determined to explore the potential that such drugs could offer and he began exploratory studies at Harvard that fall semester. By November 15, 1960, he wrote a report to Dave McClelland, Head of the Department of Social Relations, outlining the status of his research thus far. He stated that his aims were "to determine the conditions under which psilocybin can be used to broaden and deepen human experience; to determine which persons are benefited by the drug and in which direction; and to determine methods of making the beneficial effects durable and recoverable without subsequent exposure to the chemical."

Leary's initial approach to this research was fairly typical for the time. He started as a scientist to quantify and characterize the psilocybin experience. The subjects were to...