Tavi All-Stars
Tavistock All Stars - R.D. Laing, Aldous Huxley
JOHN RAWLINGS REES, M.D.
A British physician and psychiatrist, John Rawlings Rees was born on June 25, 1890, in Leicester and died on April 11, 1969, in London. He was a Commander of the British Empire and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
Rees came from a religious background, his father having been a Wesleyan Methodist minister (nonconformist Protestant). He had thought of becoming a missionary, but instead studied medicine. His sense of mission was fulfilled by his leadership at the Tavistock Clinic before World War II, later as chief psychiatrist to the British Army and, after the war, founding and becoming the first president of the International Federation for Mental Health. Rees served as a doctor in World War I, in France, Mesopotamia, and India. There he saw soldiers with nervous breakdowns who were not well treated. He ensured that good treatment was available in World War II. He wrote that it was through his military experiences that he grew up emotionally.
At first he was interested in public health, but moved into psychiatry through meeting with Hugh Crichton-Miller, a pioneer psychotherapist who had founded Bowden House, an in-patient clinic for the early treatment of psychiatric illness. Later Crichton-Miller founded the Tavistock Clinic. Rees did not train as a psychoanalyst, though he had a personal analysis with Morris Nicoll, a Jungian. He was a fine administrator and teacher, who recognized his limits as a therapist. Crichton-Miller resigned in 1932, having grown out of sympathy with developments at the Tavistock, and Rees succeeded him as director. Under his leadership the clinic grew to becoming the main center for psychoanalytic psychiatry in the United Kingdom, in opposition to the Maudsley Hospital at the University of London.
Rees encouraged training in psychiatric social work and child guidance. In the 1930s the clinic was eclectic, with Jungian, Adlerian, and other psychotherapists of many persuasions. Its leading figures were James Arthur Hadfield and Ian Suttie, whose 1935 book The Origins of Love and Hate had an important impact in British psychotherapy. Both John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott acknowledged this influence. Suttie attempted to integrate the individual, the social, and the spiritual. Among the staff in the 1930s was Wilfred R. Bion, who treated Samuel Beckett. Henry V. Dicks, for many years his colleague, described Rees "as a natural unselfconscious leader and originator."
Rees was surprised to be invited in 1939 to take command of British Army psychiatry. He found that there were hardly any psychiatrists in the army at that time and quickly assembled a team, many of whom had served under him at the Tavistock. Rees was able to cooperate with the military hierarchy and to persuade and to show them the value of psychiatry in the selection and allocation of soldiers to work appropriate to their personality and intelligence; in the rehabilitation of psychiatric casualties; and in the maintenance of good morale. He was ably assisted by Ronald Hargreaves. Through their work senior psychiatrists were appointed to army groups and were recognized as valuable advisors.
The education and training of soldiers with limited intelligence was a major innovation in wartime which cleared the way to post-war developments in this field. By 1945 there were 300 trained army psychiatrists and Rees had been promoted to brigadier. After World War II the Tavistock was a changed institution as the younger generation had experienced power and influence in the armed forces, and they were enthusiastic to train in psychoanalysis and to use psychoanalytic knowledge in their work with the clinic. Rees was out of tune with this development and felt pressured to give up as director in 1947.
At the age of 57 he was at the height of his powers and devoted himself to organizing the first Mental Health Congress in London in 1948. He became the leading figure in the movement to maintain and develop wartime international cooperation among psychiatrists. His mission then became the research and treatment of mental illness in its social roots. He was a leading figure in the formation of the World Federation for Mental Health of which he was director for many years. The Federation brought modern psychiatry to undeveloped countries, trained their personnel, and stimulated research. He was indefatigable in his travels, and his London home was always a place of welcome for colleagues worldwide.
Rees published an autobiographical volume, Reflections. His own writings were not original, but he was able to explain psychotherapy in straightforward terms to the general public, and his work in exploring society was influential.
Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) is regarded as one of the most controversial and ground-breaking psychiatrists of the 1960s. Often associated with the Anti-Psychiatry movement and the New Left, Laing became an icon for individual freedom by highlighting the socio-political construction of madness within mental health institutions; arguing that madness is an inherently human language.
The Korean War prevented Laing from going to Basels to study with famous Germain psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, but his subsequent work conveys a strong interest in the Continental philosophical tradition (Existentialism and Phenomenology) in contrast to the Behaviourism school which flourished in post-World War II America. Laing studied at the University of Glasgow between 1953-56 and completed medical training in 1958. He was exposed to the harsh realities of treatment: two years spent in a British Army psychiatric unit and a further two years in a hardcore psyhiatric hospital.
Laing joined the legendary Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London in 1961. His first book 'The Divided Self' (1960) approached mental illness from an unusual viewpoint, emphasizing the social construction of reality and the de-personalizing power of psychiatric language in describing illnesses and subjective experiences. Laing suggested that schizophrenia was a way of Being and of experiencing the objective world, not a disease that one 'has'. 'Self and Others' (1961) was more theoretical.
It was the seminal book 'Sanity, Madness and the Family' (1964), describing a Tavistock 'family dynamics' investigation undertaken with Aaron Esterson, which truly established Laing's international reputation. Drawing upon a unique interpretation of Gregory Batesons' revolutionary 'Double-Bind' hypothesis, Laing and Esterson provided clinical evidence that some schizophrenia was caused by communication breakdown within the family system. Their work focused upon the middle-class nuclear family, influencing many feminists through studying mother-daughter relationships. Laing and Esterson argued that the 'psychiatrist-patient' relationship failed to consider the patients' life-in-context (Existenz).
Laing continued clinical work: he was Director of Psychotherapy at the Langham Clinic between 1962-1965. In 1965, Laing helped establish the Kingsley Hall Therapeutic Center to provide a clinical Space within which people could overcome psychotic breakdowns in a non-institutional context. The five-year project is today wrongly connected with LSD Therapy.
'Inter-personal Perception' (1966) written with H. Phillipson and A.R. Lee provided further Tavistock-derived clinical material. In 'The Politics Of Experience' (1967) Laing questioned societal values systems and the designations of 'mad' and 'normalcy', providing a different perspective to Michel Foucault's geneological studies of asylums. Laing's language analysis fore-shadowed Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
In 1970, Laing left Kingsley Hall and spent a transitional period between 1971-72 travelling to India and Ceylon, where he pursued his personal interests in Buddhism and meditation. His later books including 'The Facts of Life' (1976) and 'The Voice of Experience' (1982) speculated about peri-natal experiences (also researched by Stanislav Grof) and mysticism. 'Do You Love Me?' (1976), 'Conversations With Children' (1977) and 'Sonnets' (1979) were literary efforts. 'Wisdom, Madness and Folly' (1985) was an autobiography covering his early years.
For many, Laing fell from grace during the 1970s, and was never able to recapture the aura he had as one of the Counter-culture's principal figures. Personal controversies overshadowed his continued clinical work and lecture tours.
On 23rd August 1989, R.D. Laing died suddenly of a heart-attack whilst playing tennis in St. Tropez. His creative legacy continues to live on in the Work of diverse thinkers, including Roberta Russell, Robert Anton Wilson, Michael Ventura and James Hillman.
What's New with My Subject? John Rawlings Rees OBE MD RAMC (also known as 'Jack') (25 June 1890 – 11 April 1969) was a wartime and civilian psychiatrist and became a brigadier in the British Army. He was a member of the group of key figures at the original Tavistock Clinic (more correctly called the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology) and became its medical director from 1934. This group specialised in the new 'dynamic psychologies' of Sigmund Freud and his followers, and in particular the Object relations theory of Ronald Fairbairn and others. Although he became a consultant to the British Army during the second world war, he remained with Tavistock, although this is not made clear on the official Tavistock site. According, to Eric Trist, another key member of the original Tavistock group, who was later to become director of the Tavistock Institute[1]:
"In 1941 a group of psychiatrists at the Tavistock Clinic saw that the right questions were asked in Parliament in order to secure the means to try new measures. As a result they were asked to join the Directorate of Army Psychiatry, and did so as a group." After the war, the members of this group went on to found the Tavistock Institute, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Later, many of them would occupy influential posts in world organisations[1], with Rees himself becoming first President and Director of the World Federation for Mental Health which he founded, now a non-governmental organisation with formal consultative status to the United Nations[2].
Rudolf Hess affair From 1941 Rees, as consultant army psychiatrist, visited Hitler's Deputy Rudolf Hess at the secret prison locations where he was held following his capture after landing in Scotland. Hess's diaries (reproduced by David Irving in Hess the Missing Years), record many meetings with John Rawlings Rees, referred to at this time as Colonel Rees, in which he accused his captors of attempting to poison, drug, and 'mesmerize', him. Rees apparently established a relationship with Hess over the four-year period up to Hess's appearance at the Nuremberg trial. It was at the request of Major Henry Dicks, who was, according to Trist, a fellow member of the Tavistock Clinic group, that Rees first visited Hess in June 1941. In 1945, Rees was a member of the three-man British panel (with Churchill's personal physician Lord Moran, and eminent neurologist Dr George Riddoch) [3], which assessed the capability of Rudolf Hess to stand trial for war crimes. Although the trial proceedings[4] refer to a T Rees, they also refer to "the English psychiatrist, Doctor Rees, who had Hess under observation from the first days of his flight to England". In view of the fact[original research?] that David Irving names this man repeatedly as John Rawlings Rees, and the close Tavistock association with Henry Dicks, it seems certain that this English psychiatrist was indeed John Rawlings Rees, though a T Rees may also have been present at the Nuremberg trials. Post-War "Operation Phoenix":
After the war, according to Trist[1], Rees and five others got together and formed an 'Interim Planning Committee' (IPC) chaired by Wilfred Bion, meeting twice a week to formulate a new way forward for their work at the Tavistock, based on war-time experience.
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Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO (8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) was a British psychoanalyst. A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences. He later wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock, 1961. Experiences in Groups was an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields.
Bion's training included an analysis with Melanie Klein following World War II. He was a leading member in the Kleinian school while in London, but his theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, eventually revealed radical departures from both Kleinian and Freudian theory.[1] While Bion is most well known outside of the psychoanalytic community for his work on group dynamics, the psychoanalytic conversation that explores his work is concerned with his theory of thinking and his model of the development of a capacity for thought.
Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England.[2] After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (on 18 February 1918, for his actions at the Battle of Cambrai),[2][3] and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.[4] He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917,[5] and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 June 1918,[6] and to acting captain on 22 March 1918, when he took command of a tank section,[7] he retained the rank when he became second-in-command of a tank company on 19 October 1918,[8] and relinquished it on 7 January 1919.[9] He was demobilised on 1 September 1921, and was granted the rank of captain.[10] The full citation for his DSO read:
AWARDED THE DISTINGUISHED SERVICE ORDER.
[...]
T./2nd Lt, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Tank Corps.
For conspicuous gallantry, and devotion to duty. When in command of his tank in an attack he engaged a large number of enemy machine guns in strong positions, thus assisting the infantry to advance. When his tank was put out of action by a direct hit he occupied a section of trench with his men and machine guns and opened fire on the enemy. He moved about in the open, giving directions to other tanks when they arrived, and at one period fired a Lewis gun with great effect from the top of his tank. He also got a captured machine gun into action against the enemy, and when reinforcements arrived he took command of a company of infantry whose commander was killed. He showed magnificent courage and initiative in a most difficult situation.[11]
Subsequently, he studied history at Queen's College, Oxford and medicine at University College London. Initially attracted to London by the 'strange new subject called psychoanalysis', he met and was impressed by Wilfred Trotter, an outstanding brain surgeon who had also written the famous Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War in 1916, based on the horrors of the First World War. This was to prove an important influence on Bion's interest in group behaviour. After obtaining his medical qualification Bion spent seven years in psychotherapeutic training at the Tavistock Clinic, an experience he regarded, in retrospect, as having had some limitations. It did, however, bring him into fruitful contact with Samuel Beckett. He wanted to train in Psychoanalysis and in 1938 he began a training analysis with John Rickman, but this was brought to an end by the Second World War.
He was recommissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant on 1 April 1940,[12] and worked in a number of military hospitals including Northfield Hospital where he initiated the first Northfield Experiment. These ideas on the psychoanalysis of groups were then taken up and developed by others such as S. H. Foulkes, Rickman, Bridger, Main and Patrick De Mare.
The entire group at Tavistock had in fact been taken into the army, and were working on new methods of treatment for psychiatric casualties (those suffering post-traumatic stress, or 'shell shock' as it was then known.) During the war Bion's wife gave birth to a daughter, but, tragically, she died soon afterwards. His daughter, Parthenope, became a highly-regarded psychoanalyst. She herself died prematurely, in a car crash in Italy in 1998.
Returning to the Tavistock Clinic Bion chaired the 'Planning Committee' that reorganised the Tavistock into the new Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, alongside a new Tavistock Clinic which was part of the newly launched National Health Service. As his interest in psychoanalysis increased, he underwent training analysis, between 1946-1952, with Melanie Klein. He met his second wife, Francesca, at the Tavistock in 1951. He joined a research group of Klein's students (including Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld), who were developing Klein's theory of the paranoid-schizoid position, for use in the analysis of patients with psychotic disorders. He produced a series of highly original and influential papers (collected as "Second Thoughts", 1967) on the analysis of schizophrenia, and the specifically cognitive, perceptual, and identity problems of such patients.
During the forties, he produced a series of brilliant papers on group dynamics, (collected as "Experiences in Groups", 1961). Later he attempted to understand thoughts and thinking from a mathematical and scientific point of view, believing there to be too little precision in the existing vocabulary. Later he abandoned the complex, abstract applications of mathematics, and even the Grid, and developed a more intuitive approach, culminating in the Memoir of the Future.
From 1962 till 1965, Bion was President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He spent his later years in Los Angeles, California, before returning to the UK shortly before his death.
He left a reputation which has steadily grown in Britain and internationally. Some commentators consider that his writings are often gnomic and irritating, but never fail to stimulate. He defies categorisation as a follower of Klein or of Freud.
Bion created a theory of thinking based on changing beta elements (unmetabolized psyche/soma/affective experience) into alpha elements (thoughts that can be thought by the thinker).
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Transcript - The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962 Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior. Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man's physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr. Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he has been concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty- Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of them, but I mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the word 'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps), just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in- between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records. And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have to have letters written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it's very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example in recent years by what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler. Anyone who has read, for example, (Sounds like Bulloch's) Life of Hitler, comes forth with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood human weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all the resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew intuitively this pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This of course is why all his big speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kampf, this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his techniques he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much more clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this susceptibility to hypnosis I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government . If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank heaven, as yet have not be used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example, the pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in BNW. I invented a hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different substances you could get almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don't think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals of these drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example, in the underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic that have been dug up in Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were already using this most ancient and powerful and dangerous of narcotics, even before the days of the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the traditional mind- changers, and the new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the new ones are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed, and I mean the other ones, the non-permissible ones, such as opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed. They rapidly produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic diseases, that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true, many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce extraordinary effects, and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be used with the utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting the CNS which can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole mental process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents to me the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these substances in one kind or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the result would be, you can imagine a euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean after all this is even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago remarked after reading Milton's Paradise Lost, He Says "And beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man" (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely crude drug compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the Theologicians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does. And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This of course has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a hold of by a dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they'd press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center. The result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying "To be or not to be that is the question". (Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the (sounds like franken huminizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait some time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there's a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you're stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they're fitted with a miniature radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she's hatching out an egg, or a fighting rooster would go into depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently very remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he's seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes inserted into the pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they'd feel very cheerful and happy. So there again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has profoundly changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise, I mean it seems to me that it was during the late 18 century early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory situation. It was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and this country for sixty or seventy years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the techniques would not take place, well then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been imposed on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to think about the problems with automation and more profoundly the problems, which may arise with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances to be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation.
JOHN RAWLINGS REES, M.D.
A British physician and psychiatrist, John Rawlings Rees was born on June 25, 1890, in Leicester and died on April 11, 1969, in London. He was a Commander of the British Empire and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
Rees came from a religious background, his father having been a Wesleyan Methodist minister (nonconformist Protestant). He had thought of becoming a missionary, but instead studied medicine. His sense of mission was fulfilled by his leadership at the Tavistock Clinic before World War II, later as chief psychiatrist to the British Army and, after the war, founding and becoming the first president of the International Federation for Mental Health. Rees served as a doctor in World War I, in France, Mesopotamia, and India. There he saw soldiers with nervous breakdowns who were not well treated. He ensured that good treatment was available in World War II. He wrote that it was through his military experiences that he grew up emotionally.
At first he was interested in public health, but moved into psychiatry through meeting with Hugh Crichton-Miller, a pioneer psychotherapist who had founded Bowden House, an in-patient clinic for the early treatment of psychiatric illness. Later Crichton-Miller founded the Tavistock Clinic. Rees did not train as a psychoanalyst, though he had a personal analysis with Morris Nicoll, a Jungian. He was a fine administrator and teacher, who recognized his limits as a therapist. Crichton-Miller resigned in 1932, having grown out of sympathy with developments at the Tavistock, and Rees succeeded him as director. Under his leadership the clinic grew to becoming the main center for psychoanalytic psychiatry in the United Kingdom, in opposition to the Maudsley Hospital at the University of London.
Rees encouraged training in psychiatric social work and child guidance. In the 1930s the clinic was eclectic, with Jungian, Adlerian, and other psychotherapists of many persuasions. Its leading figures were James Arthur Hadfield and Ian Suttie, whose 1935 book The Origins of Love and Hate had an important impact in British psychotherapy. Both John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott acknowledged this influence. Suttie attempted to integrate the individual, the social, and the spiritual. Among the staff in the 1930s was Wilfred R. Bion, who treated Samuel Beckett. Henry V. Dicks, for many years his colleague, described Rees "as a natural unselfconscious leader and originator."
Rees was surprised to be invited in 1939 to take command of British Army psychiatry. He found that there were hardly any psychiatrists in the army at that time and quickly assembled a team, many of whom had served under him at the Tavistock. Rees was able to cooperate with the military hierarchy and to persuade and to show them the value of psychiatry in the selection and allocation of soldiers to work appropriate to their personality and intelligence; in the rehabilitation of psychiatric casualties; and in the maintenance of good morale. He was ably assisted by Ronald Hargreaves. Through their work senior psychiatrists were appointed to army groups and were recognized as valuable advisors.
The education and training of soldiers with limited intelligence was a major innovation in wartime which cleared the way to post-war developments in this field. By 1945 there were 300 trained army psychiatrists and Rees had been promoted to brigadier. After World War II the Tavistock was a changed institution as the younger generation had experienced power and influence in the armed forces, and they were enthusiastic to train in psychoanalysis and to use psychoanalytic knowledge in their work with the clinic. Rees was out of tune with this development and felt pressured to give up as director in 1947.
At the age of 57 he was at the height of his powers and devoted himself to organizing the first Mental Health Congress in London in 1948. He became the leading figure in the movement to maintain and develop wartime international cooperation among psychiatrists. His mission then became the research and treatment of mental illness in its social roots. He was a leading figure in the formation of the World Federation for Mental Health of which he was director for many years. The Federation brought modern psychiatry to undeveloped countries, trained their personnel, and stimulated research. He was indefatigable in his travels, and his London home was always a place of welcome for colleagues worldwide.
Rees published an autobiographical volume, Reflections. His own writings were not original, but he was able to explain psychotherapy in straightforward terms to the general public, and his work in exploring society was influential.
Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) is regarded as one of the most controversial and ground-breaking psychiatrists of the 1960s. Often associated with the Anti-Psychiatry movement and the New Left, Laing became an icon for individual freedom by highlighting the socio-political construction of madness within mental health institutions; arguing that madness is an inherently human language.
The Korean War prevented Laing from going to Basels to study with famous Germain psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, but his subsequent work conveys a strong interest in the Continental philosophical tradition (Existentialism and Phenomenology) in contrast to the Behaviourism school which flourished in post-World War II America. Laing studied at the University of Glasgow between 1953-56 and completed medical training in 1958. He was exposed to the harsh realities of treatment: two years spent in a British Army psychiatric unit and a further two years in a hardcore psyhiatric hospital.
Laing joined the legendary Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London in 1961. His first book 'The Divided Self' (1960) approached mental illness from an unusual viewpoint, emphasizing the social construction of reality and the de-personalizing power of psychiatric language in describing illnesses and subjective experiences. Laing suggested that schizophrenia was a way of Being and of experiencing the objective world, not a disease that one 'has'. 'Self and Others' (1961) was more theoretical.
It was the seminal book 'Sanity, Madness and the Family' (1964), describing a Tavistock 'family dynamics' investigation undertaken with Aaron Esterson, which truly established Laing's international reputation. Drawing upon a unique interpretation of Gregory Batesons' revolutionary 'Double-Bind' hypothesis, Laing and Esterson provided clinical evidence that some schizophrenia was caused by communication breakdown within the family system. Their work focused upon the middle-class nuclear family, influencing many feminists through studying mother-daughter relationships. Laing and Esterson argued that the 'psychiatrist-patient' relationship failed to consider the patients' life-in-context (Existenz).
Laing continued clinical work: he was Director of Psychotherapy at the Langham Clinic between 1962-1965. In 1965, Laing helped establish the Kingsley Hall Therapeutic Center to provide a clinical Space within which people could overcome psychotic breakdowns in a non-institutional context. The five-year project is today wrongly connected with LSD Therapy.
'Inter-personal Perception' (1966) written with H. Phillipson and A.R. Lee provided further Tavistock-derived clinical material. In 'The Politics Of Experience' (1967) Laing questioned societal values systems and the designations of 'mad' and 'normalcy', providing a different perspective to Michel Foucault's geneological studies of asylums. Laing's language analysis fore-shadowed Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
In 1970, Laing left Kingsley Hall and spent a transitional period between 1971-72 travelling to India and Ceylon, where he pursued his personal interests in Buddhism and meditation. His later books including 'The Facts of Life' (1976) and 'The Voice of Experience' (1982) speculated about peri-natal experiences (also researched by Stanislav Grof) and mysticism. 'Do You Love Me?' (1976), 'Conversations With Children' (1977) and 'Sonnets' (1979) were literary efforts. 'Wisdom, Madness and Folly' (1985) was an autobiography covering his early years.
For many, Laing fell from grace during the 1970s, and was never able to recapture the aura he had as one of the Counter-culture's principal figures. Personal controversies overshadowed his continued clinical work and lecture tours.
On 23rd August 1989, R.D. Laing died suddenly of a heart-attack whilst playing tennis in St. Tropez. His creative legacy continues to live on in the Work of diverse thinkers, including Roberta Russell, Robert Anton Wilson, Michael Ventura and James Hillman.
What's New with My Subject? John Rawlings Rees OBE MD RAMC (also known as 'Jack') (25 June 1890 – 11 April 1969) was a wartime and civilian psychiatrist and became a brigadier in the British Army. He was a member of the group of key figures at the original Tavistock Clinic (more correctly called the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology) and became its medical director from 1934. This group specialised in the new 'dynamic psychologies' of Sigmund Freud and his followers, and in particular the Object relations theory of Ronald Fairbairn and others. Although he became a consultant to the British Army during the second world war, he remained with Tavistock, although this is not made clear on the official Tavistock site. According, to Eric Trist, another key member of the original Tavistock group, who was later to become director of the Tavistock Institute[1]:
"In 1941 a group of psychiatrists at the Tavistock Clinic saw that the right questions were asked in Parliament in order to secure the means to try new measures. As a result they were asked to join the Directorate of Army Psychiatry, and did so as a group." After the war, the members of this group went on to found the Tavistock Institute, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Later, many of them would occupy influential posts in world organisations[1], with Rees himself becoming first President and Director of the World Federation for Mental Health which he founded, now a non-governmental organisation with formal consultative status to the United Nations[2].
Rudolf Hess affair From 1941 Rees, as consultant army psychiatrist, visited Hitler's Deputy Rudolf Hess at the secret prison locations where he was held following his capture after landing in Scotland. Hess's diaries (reproduced by David Irving in Hess the Missing Years), record many meetings with John Rawlings Rees, referred to at this time as Colonel Rees, in which he accused his captors of attempting to poison, drug, and 'mesmerize', him. Rees apparently established a relationship with Hess over the four-year period up to Hess's appearance at the Nuremberg trial. It was at the request of Major Henry Dicks, who was, according to Trist, a fellow member of the Tavistock Clinic group, that Rees first visited Hess in June 1941. In 1945, Rees was a member of the three-man British panel (with Churchill's personal physician Lord Moran, and eminent neurologist Dr George Riddoch) [3], which assessed the capability of Rudolf Hess to stand trial for war crimes. Although the trial proceedings[4] refer to a T Rees, they also refer to "the English psychiatrist, Doctor Rees, who had Hess under observation from the first days of his flight to England". In view of the fact[original research?] that David Irving names this man repeatedly as John Rawlings Rees, and the close Tavistock association with Henry Dicks, it seems certain that this English psychiatrist was indeed John Rawlings Rees, though a T Rees may also have been present at the Nuremberg trials. Post-War "Operation Phoenix":
After the war, according to Trist[1], Rees and five others got together and formed an 'Interim Planning Committee' (IPC) chaired by Wilfred Bion, meeting twice a week to formulate a new way forward for their work at the Tavistock, based on war-time experience.
*
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO (8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) was a British psychoanalyst. A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences. He later wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock, 1961. Experiences in Groups was an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields.
Bion's training included an analysis with Melanie Klein following World War II. He was a leading member in the Kleinian school while in London, but his theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, eventually revealed radical departures from both Kleinian and Freudian theory.[1] While Bion is most well known outside of the psychoanalytic community for his work on group dynamics, the psychoanalytic conversation that explores his work is concerned with his theory of thinking and his model of the development of a capacity for thought.
Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England.[2] After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (on 18 February 1918, for his actions at the Battle of Cambrai),[2][3] and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.[4] He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917,[5] and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 June 1918,[6] and to acting captain on 22 March 1918, when he took command of a tank section,[7] he retained the rank when he became second-in-command of a tank company on 19 October 1918,[8] and relinquished it on 7 January 1919.[9] He was demobilised on 1 September 1921, and was granted the rank of captain.[10] The full citation for his DSO read:
AWARDED THE DISTINGUISHED SERVICE ORDER.
[...]
T./2nd Lt, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Tank Corps.
For conspicuous gallantry, and devotion to duty. When in command of his tank in an attack he engaged a large number of enemy machine guns in strong positions, thus assisting the infantry to advance. When his tank was put out of action by a direct hit he occupied a section of trench with his men and machine guns and opened fire on the enemy. He moved about in the open, giving directions to other tanks when they arrived, and at one period fired a Lewis gun with great effect from the top of his tank. He also got a captured machine gun into action against the enemy, and when reinforcements arrived he took command of a company of infantry whose commander was killed. He showed magnificent courage and initiative in a most difficult situation.[11]
Subsequently, he studied history at Queen's College, Oxford and medicine at University College London. Initially attracted to London by the 'strange new subject called psychoanalysis', he met and was impressed by Wilfred Trotter, an outstanding brain surgeon who had also written the famous Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War in 1916, based on the horrors of the First World War. This was to prove an important influence on Bion's interest in group behaviour. After obtaining his medical qualification Bion spent seven years in psychotherapeutic training at the Tavistock Clinic, an experience he regarded, in retrospect, as having had some limitations. It did, however, bring him into fruitful contact with Samuel Beckett. He wanted to train in Psychoanalysis and in 1938 he began a training analysis with John Rickman, but this was brought to an end by the Second World War.
He was recommissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant on 1 April 1940,[12] and worked in a number of military hospitals including Northfield Hospital where he initiated the first Northfield Experiment. These ideas on the psychoanalysis of groups were then taken up and developed by others such as S. H. Foulkes, Rickman, Bridger, Main and Patrick De Mare.
The entire group at Tavistock had in fact been taken into the army, and were working on new methods of treatment for psychiatric casualties (those suffering post-traumatic stress, or 'shell shock' as it was then known.) During the war Bion's wife gave birth to a daughter, but, tragically, she died soon afterwards. His daughter, Parthenope, became a highly-regarded psychoanalyst. She herself died prematurely, in a car crash in Italy in 1998.
Returning to the Tavistock Clinic Bion chaired the 'Planning Committee' that reorganised the Tavistock into the new Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, alongside a new Tavistock Clinic which was part of the newly launched National Health Service. As his interest in psychoanalysis increased, he underwent training analysis, between 1946-1952, with Melanie Klein. He met his second wife, Francesca, at the Tavistock in 1951. He joined a research group of Klein's students (including Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld), who were developing Klein's theory of the paranoid-schizoid position, for use in the analysis of patients with psychotic disorders. He produced a series of highly original and influential papers (collected as "Second Thoughts", 1967) on the analysis of schizophrenia, and the specifically cognitive, perceptual, and identity problems of such patients.
During the forties, he produced a series of brilliant papers on group dynamics, (collected as "Experiences in Groups", 1961). Later he attempted to understand thoughts and thinking from a mathematical and scientific point of view, believing there to be too little precision in the existing vocabulary. Later he abandoned the complex, abstract applications of mathematics, and even the Grid, and developed a more intuitive approach, culminating in the Memoir of the Future.
From 1962 till 1965, Bion was President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He spent his later years in Los Angeles, California, before returning to the UK shortly before his death.
He left a reputation which has steadily grown in Britain and internationally. Some commentators consider that his writings are often gnomic and irritating, but never fail to stimulate. He defies categorisation as a follower of Klein or of Freud.
Bion created a theory of thinking based on changing beta elements (unmetabolized psyche/soma/affective experience) into alpha elements (thoughts that can be thought by the thinker).
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Transcript - The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962 Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior. Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man's physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr. Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley's works will know, this is a subject of which he has been concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I'd like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn't attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the effects it's likely to have on society and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty- Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I don't think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don't know all of them, but I mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn't know the word 'hypnosis' they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You'll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps), just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in- between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don't work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records. And in between there are those who don't get much results and they have to have letters written to them saying "Go persist my dear, go on" (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it's very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example in recent years by what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler. Anyone who has read, for example, (Sounds like Bulloch's) Life of Hitler, comes forth with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood human weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all the resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew intuitively this pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This of course is why all his big speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kampf, this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his techniques he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much more clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this susceptibility to hypnosis I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government . If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank heaven, as yet have not be used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example, the pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in BNW. I invented a hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different substances you could get almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don't think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals of these drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example, in the underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic that have been dug up in Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were already using this most ancient and powerful and dangerous of narcotics, even before the days of the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the traditional mind- changers, and the new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the new ones are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed, and I mean the other ones, the non-permissible ones, such as opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed. They rapidly produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic diseases, that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true, many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce extraordinary effects, and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be used with the utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting the CNS which can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole mental process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents to me the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these substances in one kind or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the result would be, you can imagine a euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean after all this is even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago remarked after reading Milton's Paradise Lost, He Says "And beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man" (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely crude drug compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the Theologicians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does. And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This of course has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a hold of by a dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they'd press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center. The result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying "To be or not to be that is the question". (Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the (sounds like franken huminizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait some time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there's a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you're stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they're fitted with a miniature radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she's hatching out an egg, or a fighting rooster would go into depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently very remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he's seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes inserted into the pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they'd feel very cheerful and happy. So there again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has profoundly changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise, I mean it seems to me that it was during the late 18 century early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory situation. It was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and this country for sixty or seventy years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the techniques would not take place, well then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been imposed on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to think about the problems with automation and more profoundly the problems, which may arise with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances to be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/ainsworth.html
MOTHER-CHILD Bond & Security
Mary D. Salter Ainsworth Mary Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio, in December of 1913 (Biography, 2002). Ainsworth had two younger sisters and "a close-knit family" (O'Connell, 1983, 201). According to O'Connell, both of her parents graduated from Dickenson College. Her father earned a Master's degree in history. Ainsworth's mother taught for a while then started training to become a nurse, but was soon called home to care for her sick mother. Five years after her mother graduated, she married Ainsworth's father and became a homemaker. When Ainsworth was five, her father was transferred to a job in Canada working at a manufacturing firm, so the entire family moved there (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, her father soon became President of his branch. Weekly trips to the library were a regular family event for Ainsworth. Ainsworth says that her parents placed "high value on a good liberal arts education" and it was assumed that her and her sisters would go to college (O'Connell, 201, 1983). At age fifteen, Ainsworth read William McDougall's book entitled Character and the Conduct of Life, which led her to a career as a psychologist (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth had not previously realized that a person could look within oneself to explain how one behaved and felt rather than focus on how external forces shape behavior.
Ainsworth enrolled at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1929 (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth entered the honors psychology curriculum where only four other students accompanied her. Ainsworth earned her BA in 1935, her Master's degree in 1936, and her PhD in developmental psychology in 1939, all from the University of Toronto (Biography, 2002).
Ainsworth taught at the University of Toronto for a few years before joining the Canadian Women's Army Corp in 1942 during World War II (Arcus, 1998). Ainsworth even reached the rank of Major in 1945 (Biography, 2002). After the army, Ainsworth returned to Toronto to teach personality psychology and conduct research (Arcus, 1998). According to Arcus, Ainsworth married Leonard Ainsworth in 1950. The couple moved to London so that Leonard could finish his graduate degree at University College. In England, Ainsworth joined the research team at Tavistock Clinic in England where John Bowlby was the project director (Timeline). Here, Ainsworth was involved with a research project investigating the effects of maternal separation on children's personality development (Arcus, 1998). Ainsworth and Bowlby soon realized that before they could access the effects on personality development stemming from the disruption of the mother-child bond, they needed to first understand the development of normal mother-child relationships (McCarty, 1998). Ainsworth and Bowlby found evidence that a child's lack of a mother figure leads to adverse developmental effects (Timeline).
Ainsworth's earlier interest in security was developed further at the Tavistock Clinic and she planned to conduct a longitudinal field study of mother-infant interaction in order to further examine the development of normal mother-child relationships in a natural setting (Arcus, 1998).
Ainsworth got her chance to conduct this study in 1954 when she left the Tavistock Clinic to do research in Africa (Timeline). Ainsworth's husband had accepted a position at the East African Institute of Social Research in Uganda (Arcus, 1998). According to Arcus, this was where Ainsworth studied the interactions of mothers and their infants. This data was published years later after she became a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. Ainsworth found that while the majority of the mother-infant interactions involved comfort and security, some were tense and conflicted. Ainsworth also found evidence that suggested the patterns of interactions between mothers and their infants were related to the level of responsiveness that the mothers showed their infants. Ainsworth developed the "Strange Situation," which was a procedure to assess differences in infants' reactions to a series of separations and reunions with their mothers (Arcus, 1998). According to Arcus, when administering the "Strange Situation," the researcher takes a mother and child of approximately one year old into an unfamiliar room with toys. There is a series of separations and reunions where the mother and child are first alone in the room and then the researcher enters, and after a few minutes, the mother leaves. A few minutes later, the mother returns and the researcher observes the child's reaction to this return.
Three major differences in reactions were recorded when Ainsworth was developing this method: anxious/avoidant (the child may not be distressed when the mother leaves and may avoid her when she returns), securely attached (the child is distressed by the mother's departure and seeks comfort from her when she returns), and anxious/resistant (the child stays close to the mother in the first few minutes alone and becomes highly distressed by her departure, only to seek comfort when she returns, but then reject her closeness) (Arcus, 1998). These three differences form the major types of attachment of Ainsworth's attachment theory: anxious/avoidant, secure, and anxious/resistant.
After two years in Uganda, Ainsworth and her husband moved to Baltimore where Leonard had found a position as a forensic psychologist (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth became a teacher at Johns Hopkins University and also provided psychological service for two days out of each week to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. Ainsworth and her husband divorced in 1960, and this was very painful for Mary (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, she became depressed and sought psychoanalytic therapy. This type of therapy was a great influence on her career. She became very interested in the psychoanalytic literature, especially Freud.
At Johns Hopkins, Ainsworth confronted sex discrimination (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, her salary did not fit her age, experience, and contributions, and three chairmen had recommended her for annual increases in salary. Her income did not significantly increase until the pressures of affirmative action set in and after Ainsworth had written a letter to the Dean. Until 1968, women were also required to eat in a separate lunch room than the male faculty. The University claimed that this was so the women would not have to see their male counterparts in informal clothing at lunchtime.
After 1968, Ainsworth noted that a sort of reverse discrimination set in where women were high in demand as teachers and every university committee had to include a woman (O'Connell, 1983). In 1962, Ainsworth continued her research on attachment and security at Johns Hopkins (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth used the "Strange Situation" and observed infants and mothers in their natural setting. Ainsworth visited the homes of the mothers frequently and approximately 72 hours of observation for each infant occurred. As in the Uganda studies, Ainsworth found that infants used their attachment figures as secure bases from which to explore the world.
Ainsworth never had any children, but considered her colleagues and students as her family (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, John Bowlby and Ainsworth continued to work as partners in attachment research and theory. Ainsworth was included in the Tavistock Mother-Infant Interaction Study Group, which communicated with various developmental scientists of different nationalities and disciplines. In 1975, Ainsworth relocated to the University of Virginia to teach because some of her colleagues from John Hopkins had moved there, and also because there were many developmental psychologists there. Jim Deese, the chair of the department at Johns Hopkins, and a close colleague of Ainsworth's, had also relocated to Virginia. Ainsworth was a fellow of the American Psychological Association from 1972 to 1977 (Curriculum). According to the "Curriculum Vita," she was also a member of the British Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, the Virginia Psychological Association, and she served as President of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1977 to 1979.
Ainsworth also received many awards, including the G. Stanley Hall Award from the APA for developmental psychology in 1984 (Curriculum). According to the "Curriculum Vita," she also received the Award for Distinguished Professional Contribution to Knowledge from the APA in 1987 and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the APA in 1989.
Ainsworth also published many articles and books, including Child Care and the Growth of Love (1965), Infancy in Uganda (1967), and Patterns of Attachment (1978) (Biography).
In 1998, the American Psychological Foundation awarded Ainsworth the Gold Medal for Scientific Contributions (McCarty, 1998). According to McCarty, Ainsworth was also a co-recipient of the first Mentoring Award in the developmental psychology division of the APA.
Ainsworth continued as Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia from 1984 to 1999 (Curriculum).
Mary Ainsworth died in 1999 at the age of eighty-six (Curriculum).
References
http://mgv.mim.edu.my/books/bookpref/945.htm
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Pierre Turquet, who was killed in a car accident in France on 27 December 1975, at the age of 62. In planning the volume, which subsequently has been a long time in the making, it was felt that the invited papers ought to report any new shifts in thinking about group relations training as developed and practised around the ideas of W. R. Bion by A. K. Rice and his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. The wish of the editor was for a volume of papers that would be associative and reflective of experiences around group relations training, as opposed to a somewhat more didactic text.
The principal reason for this policy was inextricably bound up with the editor's experiences of Pierre Turquet in working with him in group relations training and as a member of the same unit within the Tavistock Institute. It has to be said that this relationship between the two was not always a calm one and could, at times, be very angry. But there was always a worked-through rapprochement. To work with Pierre Turquet was essentially to move into an educational adventure. It is the idea of adventure that needs to be held on to in retrospect. There might be discomfort, even pain, often amusement, but always learning.
When surrounded by a set of sympathetic colleagues on the staff of a group relations conference, Pierre Turquet would lead them into new problem areas. When colleagues were less sympathetic to the primary task he would somewhat more contumaciously attack what he thought were the problems. By doing this he stretched the capability of his colleagues to experience and interpret group and institutional phenomena and so, quite directly, enhanced their ability to take risks in leading themselves, in the roles of consultants, into the conscious and unconscious issues of group and institutional life. Thus members of working conferences were also led into issues so that they, too, could find their authority to explore and name phenomena for themselves.
Turquet's ability to ratiocinate about the larger issues of group relations training often was best demonstrated at the midday staff meetings during the working conferences of which he was director. Quite explicitly at times he would lead the staff outside the immediate 'skin' of the conference to consider particular institutions of which staff members had experience-universities and schools, the health services, prisons, the churches, for example. The boundary between a conference as a system and other institutions as systems he always saw as an open one. The relatedness between and among institutions would lead into a questioning of the state of contemporary societies in the world. At times he could be monstrously wrong in his judgements, but then that did not matter quite so much to him as the fact that he had led into a discussion by attempting to relate what might be happening within the boundary of a conference across that boundary into what might be happening in the environment of institutions and societies.
From these discussions psychoanalysis was never far absent but neither was classic literature, both English and European, nor the social sciences, nor contemporary politics. It was on such a large canvas that he worked. And art was one of his many interests. Those of his colleagues who could not engage on all these dimensions sometimes were left feeling angry or unwanted. But for others he pointed to new realms. He awakened in some the wish to come to grips with their cultural heritage and relate it to contemporary society in order to illuminate what C. Wright Mills (1970 edn) has called the 'private troubles and public issues of our times.
An indication of the size of canvas Pierre Turquet could work on can be illustrated by an experience in Ireland. There he was acting as a consultant on a working conference on group behaviour in institutions, entitled 'Leadership and Authority', organized by the Grubb Institute and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was excited about the possibilities offered by this conference and he was committed to its success because representatives were present of various Irish political parties, the predominant religions, and various interest groups from the whole of Ireland. He suggested that the conference was timely because Ireland was being given the problems of the world to solve on its behalf. In his view, South Africa had failed to take the opportunity to make a creative purchase on the issues of intergroup relations, but now Ireland was being given the chance to interpret its experiences of the problems and to provide an innovative solution that might provide a tentative model for other countries experiencing intergroup problems. It became clear in subsequent conversations that he was viewing the world as a massive group and as such subject to irrational and unconscious social and psychological forces but, nevertheless, able, albeit unconsciously, to give authority to particular nations. To report his thought thus is, however, to oversimplify because clearly he was holding in his mind some conception of the world and its large-scale social phenomena that was beyond the ken of others.
Turquet wrote a great deal even though he published sparingly. He kept notes on all his work and reading. Now, after his death, it is possible to realize why he could bring such sustained enthusiasm to his work in the field of group relations training. In the background, he was continually adumbrating ideas, relating his experiences to his wide-ranging reading.
As is well enough known, it was the 'large group' that was Turquet's particular interest and his unique metier was as a consultant to large groups. He and the late A. K. Rice were the first consultants to take a large group which was introduced to a working conference at Leicester in 1964. His conceptualization of what were, at the time, incomprehensible forces present in large configurations of people, numbering between 40 and 80, are substantial. Turquet's two papers, 'Leadership: the individual and the group' and 'Threats to identity in the large group' (Turquet, 1974; 1975), are likely to stand the test of time. What Pierre Turquet brought to bear on group relations training, then, was a passionate search for what might be the truth of phenomena and processes in the large group, the small group, between groups, and between institutions. To aid him in his chosen task he could call on a wide range of cultures with their literature and art, together with psychoanalytic thinking as well as other social sciences, but essentially it was his lived experience that enriched so much of his work in group relations training.
The writer only knew Turquet in the last few years of his life and so had to search out the facts from his wife and family and professional colleagues. Born in London in 1913, Turquet attended Westminster School from 1927 to 1932, and Trinity College, Cambridge, for the next four years. Although a College Prizeman in English and History, he graduated in the Natural Sciences. Immediately he followed this with attendance at the London Hospital Medical School and qualified as a medical practitioner in 1939. At one point earlier he considered entering the library service, but he opted for medicine. This choice may well have reflected his preoccupation with the human predicament. That he was able to hold the world of scholarship and the human predicament in some creative tension was evinced in the largeness of the view he brought to bear on his professional work.
Turquet first became interested in group phenomena while concerned with the selection of officers (War Office Selection Boards). He was a member of the original team which instituted this procedure and so would have had contact with those who subsequently were to found the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1946. Later in the war he was seconded to special selection duties and work in the Ps'ychological Warfare Section on enemy and allied morale. His career in the Royal Army Medical Corps ended in 1946, but for just over a year before that he had been seconded to the French War Office to help organize their Selection Services for the French Army, Navy, and Air Forces.
After the war, Turquet worked in the field of psychiatry. Subsequently he was employed in the Social Medicine Research Unit, the Medical Research Council, concentrating on the intrapersonal and interfamily relations of young people suffering with duodenal ulcers, until he joined the Tavistock Clinic in 1952 as a consultant psychiatrist.
Turquet's interest in group phenomena was, as his colleague Dr Robert Gosling pointed out in his memoir delivered at Turquet's memorial service, 'not however as an academic observer or participant, but always as a deeply committed participant, a stance that was further refined by his psycho-analytic training. In these matters he was chiefly influenced by Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion, Melanie Klein, Michael and Enid Balint and A. K. Rice (Gosling, 1976). His passion for understanding the overt and unconscious processes at work in groups meant that he deployed himself in a wide range of activities (in addition to his National Health Service work) to ensure that all kinds of colleagues in the helping professions became more familiar with group processes because he believed that such understanding would enrich people's experiences of themselves and their work.
Within the frame of the Tavistock Clinic he worked for the Adult Department and the School of Family and Community Psychiatry. In these departments he was engaged in psychotherapy and in the advanced training of general practitioners, probation officers, social workers, health visitors, and physio- therapists. With the Tavistock Institute he was among those who helped to establish the Institute of Marital Studies, which was formerly the Family Discussion Bureau. In 1962 he also became a part-time consultant in the then Centre for Applied Social Research of the institute. This seemed appropriate given his involvement in the Group Relations Training Programme of that unit since 1957. Here amply demonstrated was Turquet's capacity to work across institutional boundaries and he remains one of a very small band of people in the Tavistock Centre who have wanted and been able to do so.
To new ventures he would give his unstinting support. He had been a consultant for the Grubb Institute of Behavioural Studies since 1965, and he was the first consultant to the Chelmsford Cathedral Centre for Research and Training established in 1969 by Canon R. W. Herrick. For a number of years he annually travelled to America and Canada to take part as a staff member in the working conferences of the A. K. Rice Institute in Washington, DC, and the Rosehill Institute of Human Relations in Toronto.
It can be seen that publication was an activity on which Turquet placed little value. His thrust was always towards experiencing, discovering, and articulating his thoughts. In some ways we, his colleagues, are all the beneficiaries. If he had published more, much of our understanding of group phenomena might have been captured. As it is, he gave us his energy through talking and arguing, causing us to explore for ourselves-which is the greatest of gifts he could possibly give, and which he constantly offered to those who participated in any group, small or large, which he took as a consultant.
In the last two months or so of his life he was full of sadness* at the human condition. He was angry about the National Health Service, with which he was disillusioned. He felt passionately that the Tavistock Clinic, with which he had been associated for just under half his life, had failed to move psychoanalysis from its essentially dyadic preoccupations to become a cultural tool, which he, along with others, had tried to do within the frame of group relations training. And he, at times, would despair at the inability of men and women in con- temporary society to question the authority structures and organizations of their institutions; to get behind the easily understood and taken-for-granted assumptions of group and institutional living. This had been his elected task which consumed much of his energy for much of his life.
MOTHER-CHILD Bond & Security
Mary D. Salter Ainsworth Mary Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio, in December of 1913 (Biography, 2002). Ainsworth had two younger sisters and "a close-knit family" (O'Connell, 1983, 201). According to O'Connell, both of her parents graduated from Dickenson College. Her father earned a Master's degree in history. Ainsworth's mother taught for a while then started training to become a nurse, but was soon called home to care for her sick mother. Five years after her mother graduated, she married Ainsworth's father and became a homemaker. When Ainsworth was five, her father was transferred to a job in Canada working at a manufacturing firm, so the entire family moved there (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, her father soon became President of his branch. Weekly trips to the library were a regular family event for Ainsworth. Ainsworth says that her parents placed "high value on a good liberal arts education" and it was assumed that her and her sisters would go to college (O'Connell, 201, 1983). At age fifteen, Ainsworth read William McDougall's book entitled Character and the Conduct of Life, which led her to a career as a psychologist (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth had not previously realized that a person could look within oneself to explain how one behaved and felt rather than focus on how external forces shape behavior.
Ainsworth enrolled at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1929 (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth entered the honors psychology curriculum where only four other students accompanied her. Ainsworth earned her BA in 1935, her Master's degree in 1936, and her PhD in developmental psychology in 1939, all from the University of Toronto (Biography, 2002).
Ainsworth taught at the University of Toronto for a few years before joining the Canadian Women's Army Corp in 1942 during World War II (Arcus, 1998). Ainsworth even reached the rank of Major in 1945 (Biography, 2002). After the army, Ainsworth returned to Toronto to teach personality psychology and conduct research (Arcus, 1998). According to Arcus, Ainsworth married Leonard Ainsworth in 1950. The couple moved to London so that Leonard could finish his graduate degree at University College. In England, Ainsworth joined the research team at Tavistock Clinic in England where John Bowlby was the project director (Timeline). Here, Ainsworth was involved with a research project investigating the effects of maternal separation on children's personality development (Arcus, 1998). Ainsworth and Bowlby soon realized that before they could access the effects on personality development stemming from the disruption of the mother-child bond, they needed to first understand the development of normal mother-child relationships (McCarty, 1998). Ainsworth and Bowlby found evidence that a child's lack of a mother figure leads to adverse developmental effects (Timeline).
Ainsworth's earlier interest in security was developed further at the Tavistock Clinic and she planned to conduct a longitudinal field study of mother-infant interaction in order to further examine the development of normal mother-child relationships in a natural setting (Arcus, 1998).
Ainsworth got her chance to conduct this study in 1954 when she left the Tavistock Clinic to do research in Africa (Timeline). Ainsworth's husband had accepted a position at the East African Institute of Social Research in Uganda (Arcus, 1998). According to Arcus, this was where Ainsworth studied the interactions of mothers and their infants. This data was published years later after she became a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. Ainsworth found that while the majority of the mother-infant interactions involved comfort and security, some were tense and conflicted. Ainsworth also found evidence that suggested the patterns of interactions between mothers and their infants were related to the level of responsiveness that the mothers showed their infants. Ainsworth developed the "Strange Situation," which was a procedure to assess differences in infants' reactions to a series of separations and reunions with their mothers (Arcus, 1998). According to Arcus, when administering the "Strange Situation," the researcher takes a mother and child of approximately one year old into an unfamiliar room with toys. There is a series of separations and reunions where the mother and child are first alone in the room and then the researcher enters, and after a few minutes, the mother leaves. A few minutes later, the mother returns and the researcher observes the child's reaction to this return.
Three major differences in reactions were recorded when Ainsworth was developing this method: anxious/avoidant (the child may not be distressed when the mother leaves and may avoid her when she returns), securely attached (the child is distressed by the mother's departure and seeks comfort from her when she returns), and anxious/resistant (the child stays close to the mother in the first few minutes alone and becomes highly distressed by her departure, only to seek comfort when she returns, but then reject her closeness) (Arcus, 1998). These three differences form the major types of attachment of Ainsworth's attachment theory: anxious/avoidant, secure, and anxious/resistant.
After two years in Uganda, Ainsworth and her husband moved to Baltimore where Leonard had found a position as a forensic psychologist (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth became a teacher at Johns Hopkins University and also provided psychological service for two days out of each week to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. Ainsworth and her husband divorced in 1960, and this was very painful for Mary (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, she became depressed and sought psychoanalytic therapy. This type of therapy was a great influence on her career. She became very interested in the psychoanalytic literature, especially Freud.
At Johns Hopkins, Ainsworth confronted sex discrimination (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, her salary did not fit her age, experience, and contributions, and three chairmen had recommended her for annual increases in salary. Her income did not significantly increase until the pressures of affirmative action set in and after Ainsworth had written a letter to the Dean. Until 1968, women were also required to eat in a separate lunch room than the male faculty. The University claimed that this was so the women would not have to see their male counterparts in informal clothing at lunchtime.
After 1968, Ainsworth noted that a sort of reverse discrimination set in where women were high in demand as teachers and every university committee had to include a woman (O'Connell, 1983). In 1962, Ainsworth continued her research on attachment and security at Johns Hopkins (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, Ainsworth used the "Strange Situation" and observed infants and mothers in their natural setting. Ainsworth visited the homes of the mothers frequently and approximately 72 hours of observation for each infant occurred. As in the Uganda studies, Ainsworth found that infants used their attachment figures as secure bases from which to explore the world.
Ainsworth never had any children, but considered her colleagues and students as her family (O'Connell, 1983). According to O'Connell, John Bowlby and Ainsworth continued to work as partners in attachment research and theory. Ainsworth was included in the Tavistock Mother-Infant Interaction Study Group, which communicated with various developmental scientists of different nationalities and disciplines. In 1975, Ainsworth relocated to the University of Virginia to teach because some of her colleagues from John Hopkins had moved there, and also because there were many developmental psychologists there. Jim Deese, the chair of the department at Johns Hopkins, and a close colleague of Ainsworth's, had also relocated to Virginia. Ainsworth was a fellow of the American Psychological Association from 1972 to 1977 (Curriculum). According to the "Curriculum Vita," she was also a member of the British Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, the Virginia Psychological Association, and she served as President of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1977 to 1979.
Ainsworth also received many awards, including the G. Stanley Hall Award from the APA for developmental psychology in 1984 (Curriculum). According to the "Curriculum Vita," she also received the Award for Distinguished Professional Contribution to Knowledge from the APA in 1987 and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the APA in 1989.
Ainsworth also published many articles and books, including Child Care and the Growth of Love (1965), Infancy in Uganda (1967), and Patterns of Attachment (1978) (Biography).
In 1998, the American Psychological Foundation awarded Ainsworth the Gold Medal for Scientific Contributions (McCarty, 1998). According to McCarty, Ainsworth was also a co-recipient of the first Mentoring Award in the developmental psychology division of the APA.
Ainsworth continued as Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia from 1984 to 1999 (Curriculum).
Mary Ainsworth died in 1999 at the age of eighty-six (Curriculum).
References
- Arcus, D. (1998). Ainsworth, Mary (1913- ). Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence. Retrieved December 1, 2002, from http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/g2602/0000/2602000016/print.jhtml.
- Biography: Mary D. Salter Ainsworth (2002). The McGraw-Hill Companies. Retrieved December 1, 2002, from http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch03/ainsworth.mhtml.
- Curriculum Vita: Mary Ainsworth. Curriculum Vitae and Reference Lists. Retrieved December 1, 2002, from http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/ewaters/vitae/Mdacv.htm.
- McCarty, R. (1998). Attached to Mary. The Monitor, 29 (8). Retrieved December 1, 2002, from http://www.apa.org/monitor/aug98/sd.html.
- O'Connell, A.N., & Rusoo, N.F. (1983). Models of achievement: Reflections of eminent women in psychology. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Timeline of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Great Ideas in Personality. Retrieved December 1, 2002, from http://www.psych.nwu.edu/~hedlund/bol-ain.html.
http://mgv.mim.edu.my/books/bookpref/945.htm
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Pierre Turquet, who was killed in a car accident in France on 27 December 1975, at the age of 62. In planning the volume, which subsequently has been a long time in the making, it was felt that the invited papers ought to report any new shifts in thinking about group relations training as developed and practised around the ideas of W. R. Bion by A. K. Rice and his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. The wish of the editor was for a volume of papers that would be associative and reflective of experiences around group relations training, as opposed to a somewhat more didactic text.
The principal reason for this policy was inextricably bound up with the editor's experiences of Pierre Turquet in working with him in group relations training and as a member of the same unit within the Tavistock Institute. It has to be said that this relationship between the two was not always a calm one and could, at times, be very angry. But there was always a worked-through rapprochement. To work with Pierre Turquet was essentially to move into an educational adventure. It is the idea of adventure that needs to be held on to in retrospect. There might be discomfort, even pain, often amusement, but always learning.
When surrounded by a set of sympathetic colleagues on the staff of a group relations conference, Pierre Turquet would lead them into new problem areas. When colleagues were less sympathetic to the primary task he would somewhat more contumaciously attack what he thought were the problems. By doing this he stretched the capability of his colleagues to experience and interpret group and institutional phenomena and so, quite directly, enhanced their ability to take risks in leading themselves, in the roles of consultants, into the conscious and unconscious issues of group and institutional life. Thus members of working conferences were also led into issues so that they, too, could find their authority to explore and name phenomena for themselves.
Turquet's ability to ratiocinate about the larger issues of group relations training often was best demonstrated at the midday staff meetings during the working conferences of which he was director. Quite explicitly at times he would lead the staff outside the immediate 'skin' of the conference to consider particular institutions of which staff members had experience-universities and schools, the health services, prisons, the churches, for example. The boundary between a conference as a system and other institutions as systems he always saw as an open one. The relatedness between and among institutions would lead into a questioning of the state of contemporary societies in the world. At times he could be monstrously wrong in his judgements, but then that did not matter quite so much to him as the fact that he had led into a discussion by attempting to relate what might be happening within the boundary of a conference across that boundary into what might be happening in the environment of institutions and societies.
From these discussions psychoanalysis was never far absent but neither was classic literature, both English and European, nor the social sciences, nor contemporary politics. It was on such a large canvas that he worked. And art was one of his many interests. Those of his colleagues who could not engage on all these dimensions sometimes were left feeling angry or unwanted. But for others he pointed to new realms. He awakened in some the wish to come to grips with their cultural heritage and relate it to contemporary society in order to illuminate what C. Wright Mills (1970 edn) has called the 'private troubles and public issues of our times.
An indication of the size of canvas Pierre Turquet could work on can be illustrated by an experience in Ireland. There he was acting as a consultant on a working conference on group behaviour in institutions, entitled 'Leadership and Authority', organized by the Grubb Institute and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was excited about the possibilities offered by this conference and he was committed to its success because representatives were present of various Irish political parties, the predominant religions, and various interest groups from the whole of Ireland. He suggested that the conference was timely because Ireland was being given the problems of the world to solve on its behalf. In his view, South Africa had failed to take the opportunity to make a creative purchase on the issues of intergroup relations, but now Ireland was being given the chance to interpret its experiences of the problems and to provide an innovative solution that might provide a tentative model for other countries experiencing intergroup problems. It became clear in subsequent conversations that he was viewing the world as a massive group and as such subject to irrational and unconscious social and psychological forces but, nevertheless, able, albeit unconsciously, to give authority to particular nations. To report his thought thus is, however, to oversimplify because clearly he was holding in his mind some conception of the world and its large-scale social phenomena that was beyond the ken of others.
Turquet wrote a great deal even though he published sparingly. He kept notes on all his work and reading. Now, after his death, it is possible to realize why he could bring such sustained enthusiasm to his work in the field of group relations training. In the background, he was continually adumbrating ideas, relating his experiences to his wide-ranging reading.
As is well enough known, it was the 'large group' that was Turquet's particular interest and his unique metier was as a consultant to large groups. He and the late A. K. Rice were the first consultants to take a large group which was introduced to a working conference at Leicester in 1964. His conceptualization of what were, at the time, incomprehensible forces present in large configurations of people, numbering between 40 and 80, are substantial. Turquet's two papers, 'Leadership: the individual and the group' and 'Threats to identity in the large group' (Turquet, 1974; 1975), are likely to stand the test of time. What Pierre Turquet brought to bear on group relations training, then, was a passionate search for what might be the truth of phenomena and processes in the large group, the small group, between groups, and between institutions. To aid him in his chosen task he could call on a wide range of cultures with their literature and art, together with psychoanalytic thinking as well as other social sciences, but essentially it was his lived experience that enriched so much of his work in group relations training.
The writer only knew Turquet in the last few years of his life and so had to search out the facts from his wife and family and professional colleagues. Born in London in 1913, Turquet attended Westminster School from 1927 to 1932, and Trinity College, Cambridge, for the next four years. Although a College Prizeman in English and History, he graduated in the Natural Sciences. Immediately he followed this with attendance at the London Hospital Medical School and qualified as a medical practitioner in 1939. At one point earlier he considered entering the library service, but he opted for medicine. This choice may well have reflected his preoccupation with the human predicament. That he was able to hold the world of scholarship and the human predicament in some creative tension was evinced in the largeness of the view he brought to bear on his professional work.
Turquet first became interested in group phenomena while concerned with the selection of officers (War Office Selection Boards). He was a member of the original team which instituted this procedure and so would have had contact with those who subsequently were to found the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1946. Later in the war he was seconded to special selection duties and work in the Ps'ychological Warfare Section on enemy and allied morale. His career in the Royal Army Medical Corps ended in 1946, but for just over a year before that he had been seconded to the French War Office to help organize their Selection Services for the French Army, Navy, and Air Forces.
After the war, Turquet worked in the field of psychiatry. Subsequently he was employed in the Social Medicine Research Unit, the Medical Research Council, concentrating on the intrapersonal and interfamily relations of young people suffering with duodenal ulcers, until he joined the Tavistock Clinic in 1952 as a consultant psychiatrist.
Turquet's interest in group phenomena was, as his colleague Dr Robert Gosling pointed out in his memoir delivered at Turquet's memorial service, 'not however as an academic observer or participant, but always as a deeply committed participant, a stance that was further refined by his psycho-analytic training. In these matters he was chiefly influenced by Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion, Melanie Klein, Michael and Enid Balint and A. K. Rice (Gosling, 1976). His passion for understanding the overt and unconscious processes at work in groups meant that he deployed himself in a wide range of activities (in addition to his National Health Service work) to ensure that all kinds of colleagues in the helping professions became more familiar with group processes because he believed that such understanding would enrich people's experiences of themselves and their work.
Within the frame of the Tavistock Clinic he worked for the Adult Department and the School of Family and Community Psychiatry. In these departments he was engaged in psychotherapy and in the advanced training of general practitioners, probation officers, social workers, health visitors, and physio- therapists. With the Tavistock Institute he was among those who helped to establish the Institute of Marital Studies, which was formerly the Family Discussion Bureau. In 1962 he also became a part-time consultant in the then Centre for Applied Social Research of the institute. This seemed appropriate given his involvement in the Group Relations Training Programme of that unit since 1957. Here amply demonstrated was Turquet's capacity to work across institutional boundaries and he remains one of a very small band of people in the Tavistock Centre who have wanted and been able to do so.
To new ventures he would give his unstinting support. He had been a consultant for the Grubb Institute of Behavioural Studies since 1965, and he was the first consultant to the Chelmsford Cathedral Centre for Research and Training established in 1969 by Canon R. W. Herrick. For a number of years he annually travelled to America and Canada to take part as a staff member in the working conferences of the A. K. Rice Institute in Washington, DC, and the Rosehill Institute of Human Relations in Toronto.
It can be seen that publication was an activity on which Turquet placed little value. His thrust was always towards experiencing, discovering, and articulating his thoughts. In some ways we, his colleagues, are all the beneficiaries. If he had published more, much of our understanding of group phenomena might have been captured. As it is, he gave us his energy through talking and arguing, causing us to explore for ourselves-which is the greatest of gifts he could possibly give, and which he constantly offered to those who participated in any group, small or large, which he took as a consultant.
In the last two months or so of his life he was full of sadness* at the human condition. He was angry about the National Health Service, with which he was disillusioned. He felt passionately that the Tavistock Clinic, with which he had been associated for just under half his life, had failed to move psychoanalysis from its essentially dyadic preoccupations to become a cultural tool, which he, along with others, had tried to do within the frame of group relations training. And he, at times, would despair at the inability of men and women in con- temporary society to question the authority structures and organizations of their institutions; to get behind the easily understood and taken-for-granted assumptions of group and institutional living. This had been his elected task which consumed much of his energy for much of his life.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COUNTERCULTURE REVOLUTION:
Radical Change & Counterculture: Huxley, Esalen & Human Potential Movement NARCO-HYPNOSIS / NARCO STATE
The shadow of the social revolution still casts its long shadow back from the future. The 60s were a topsy-turvy time where nearly every aspect of society was converted into its opposite, precisely according to the blueprint of the Tavistock Agenda and the machinations of its allies -- CIA, RAND and SRI. Together they created an ersatz utopia with a heavy dark side much like Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World. It is the forerunner of the New Age and Conspiracy cultures. Counterculture and subculture became new buzzwords which sprung up like Flower Children to describe the morphing social landscape. Human freedom was actually under pharmacological attack, disguised as a quest for chemically-induced happiness.
"...Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World." --From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949; from Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969.
Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1vMWjknRzw
http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=5995
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/huxley_aldous.html
The Mike Wallace Interview
Aldous Huxley, 1958 Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.
The "Case Officer" for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley. He spearheaded Tavistock's plan for pharmaceutical control with LSD's mindbending results which led to the counterculture, the dialectical response to culture on the way to a totally controlled society. Those who thought they were creating a new society were unwittingly "sleeping with the enemy" by essentially brainwashing themselves and paying for the priviledge with their hearts and minds.
Thus, Tavistock channeled and directed youth dissent and rebellion, and disabled the anti-war movement. Youth culture became distracted and disengaged from practical reality and political activism. The revolution was definitely not televised but it was psychoelectric shock treatment. The movement was induced from the top down via CIA-Tavistock agendas and agents of influence. Socially-engineered 'hippies' dropped out of the sociopolitical loop. Psychotropic warfare came to the homefront in the world's biggest social experiment.
In 1936 Aldous Huxley wrote "Propaganda and Pharmacology" - a more detailed prediction of mind-control drug technology than the "soma" found in his 1932 novel "Brave New World". Huxley predicted: The propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists as well as writers." Moksha - Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931-1963" Aldous Huxley, Penguin, 1983, p.38
LSD came to America in 1949. Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders traveled to the United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.
Humphry Osmond was at the cutting edge of psychiatric research in the 1950s. He believed that hallucinogenic drugs might be useful in treating mental illness and he studied the effects of LSD on people with alcohol dependency. His investigations led to his association with the novelist Aldous Huxley and to involvement with the CIA and MI6, which were interested in LSD as a possible “truth drug” to make enemy agents reveal secrets.
Osmond sought a name for the effect that LSD has on the mind, consulting the novelist Aldous Huxley who was interested in these drugs. Osmond and Huxley had become friends and Osmond gave him mescaline in 1953. Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” and sent a rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Instead, Osmond chose “psychedelic,” from the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show), and suggested, “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” He announced it at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957.
Huxley was Tavistock's main propagandist and recruiter. Huxley became a propagandist for hallucinogenic drugs. Huxley first tried LSD in 1955. He got it from "Captain" Al Hubbard, rumored to have connections with CIA's MK Ultra program. In a 1961 handwritten letter from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Huxley mentions meeting Dr. "Jolly" West, a CIA MK-ULTRA operative. Huxley goes on to note that: "You are right about the hopelessness of the "Scientific" approach. These idiots want to be Pavlovians, not Lorenzian Ethnologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The "Scientific" LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychoses."
Timothy Leary consulted the British philosopher who wrote the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. Look past portrayals of Dr. Leary's glamorous life and the enormous amounts of publicity he received for his studies on and promotion of LSD and you find that what he actually helped put together a fine tuned program to manipulate the public. He was also used wittingly or unwittingly by CIA.
In the mid-1950s Leary worked as director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation and taught at Berkeley University. He developed interpersonal theory. Leary devised a personality test, "The Leary," which is used by CIA to test prospective employees. He also became a close friend to Frank Barron, a graduate school classmate who was working for the CIA since at least 1953. Barron worked at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary later acknowledged was "funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists."
Huxley urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for human betterment. "That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on," Huxley tells him. "Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they'll educate the intelligent rich." Huxley probably had it right about chemical and biowarfare when he proclaimed, ''Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.''
"Soma" became a cultural reality in a variety of hypnotic and narcotizing forms. Drugs became the tecnique of choice for crowd control. For some, psychedelics became gateway drugs to harder drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. Pharmaceutical soporifics from Ritalin to anti-depressants became the norm for mood and behavior regulation. In the name of "human potential," consciousness was put to sleep. Psychiatric control of consciousness became an authoritarian imperative.
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." --Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
The counterculture is a conspiracy
The post-1930 promotion and use of cannabis and LSD, was launched from London by the self-described "utopian" circles of followers of the 19th-Century Thomas Huxley—associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aleister Crowley, and a younger generation including Aldous and Julian Huxley, and George Orwell. The practice of mass-indoctrination in use of cannabis, and LSD, was launched, with a leading role by the British psychological warfare organization known as the London Tavistock Clinic and associated circles. The popularization of cannabinol, LSD, and other strongly psychotropic drugs, including the highly destructive use of Ritalin among primary and secondary students, are intended to replicate the fictional role of "soma" depicted in Aldous Huxley's cult-novel, Brave New World.
The U.S.A. and Canadian use of these practices was pioneered in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and left-wing circles, and in Canada locations, during the 1930s and 1940s-1950s, through circles associated with Aldous Huxley and with the London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. During the post-war decades, this work was promoted through the Department of Defense's Special Warfare division, including projects such as "Delta Force." The post-war "Beatniks," and the orchestrated cult of Elvis Presley, are typical of the pilot-projects used to prepare the way for the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" launched, like a rocket, with the appearance of the "Beatles" on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Marilyn Ferguson wrote her Aquarian Conspiracy manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open. The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government." What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as " a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism. Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/aquarian.htm ;In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India. LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods' "Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own 'acid.' "The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.
Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the United States thirty years before its consequences became evident to the public. In 1962, Huxley helped found the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which became a mecca for hundreds of Americans to engage in weekends of T-Groups and Training Groups modeled on behavior group therapy, for Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist transcendental meditation, and "out of body" experiences through simulated and actual hallucinogenic drugs. As described in the Esalen Institute Newsletter: "Esalen started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety of approaches to enhancement of the human potential . . . including experiential sessions involving encounter groups, sensory awakening, gestalt awareness training, related disciplines. Our latest step is to fan out into the community at large, running programs in cooperation with many different institutions, churches, schools, hospitals, and government."
Several tens of thousands of Americans have passed through Esalen; millions have passed through the programs it has sired throughout the country.
The next leap in Britain's Aquarian Conspiracy against the United States was the May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson's work. The report is entitled "Changing Images of Man," Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74, prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.
The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of "spiritualism." The study asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded": "Many of our present images appear to have become dangerously obsolete, however . . . Science, technology, and economics have made possible really significant strides toward achieving such basic human goals as physical safety and security, material comfort and better health. But many of these successes have brought with them problems of being too successful -- problems that themselves seem insoluble within the set of societal value-premises that led to their emergence . . . Our highly developed system of technology leads to higher vulnerability and breakdowns. Indeed the range and interconnected impact of societal problems that are now emerging pose a serious threat to our civilization . . . If our predictions of the future prove correct, we can expect the association problems of the trend to become more serious, more universal and to occur more rapidly."
Therefore, SRI concludes, we must change the industrial-technological image of man fast: "Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that . . . the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era." The counterculture, New Age of the Aquarian Conspiracy was born:
Who provided the drugs that swamped the anti-war movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 -- provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same opium network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.
The LSD connection begins with one William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a fifty-five-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California.
Esalen Institute is a center for humanistic education, a nonprofit organization devoted to multidisciplinary studies ordinarily neglected by traditional academia. Now in its fifth decade, Esalen offers more than 500 public workshops a year in addition to invitational conferences, residential work-study programs, research initiatives, and internships. Part think-tank for the emerging world culture, part college and lab for transformative practices, and part restorative retreat, Esalen is dedicated to exploring work in the humanities and sciences that furthers the full realization of the human potential.
Esalen Institute was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962 as an alternative educational center devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called the "human potential," the world of unrealized human capacities that lies beyond the imagination. Esalen soon became known for its blend of East/West philosophies, its experiential/didactic workshops, the steady influx of philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers, and its breathtaking grounds blessed with natural hot springs. Once home to a Native American tribe known as the Esselen, Esalen is situated on 27 acre of spectacular Big Sur coastline with the Santa Lucia Mountains rising sharply behind.
Past Teachers at Esalen Institute Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Will Schutz, Richard Feynman, Paul Tillich, Arnold J. Toynbee, B.F. Skinner, Stanislav Grof, Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, Carl Rogers, Linus Pauling, Buckminster Fuller, Rollo May, Joseph Campbell, Susan Sontag, Ray Bradbury, George Leonard, J. B. Rhine, Warren Farrell, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Gregory Bateson, John C. Lilly, Carlos Castaneda, Claudio Naranjo, Fritjof Capra, Ansel Adams, John Cage, Babatunde Olatunji, Terence McKenna, Joan Baez, Robert Anton Wilson, Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, Robert Bly, Marion Woodman, Dean Ornish, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, James Hillman, Gabrielle Roth, Rusty Schweickart, Fred Frith, Spalding Gray, Amory Lovins, Albert Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Daniel Sheehan and Sara Nelson of the Christic Institute and many others have taught, performed and/or presented at the Esalen Institute.
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http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/453699.html
for educational purposes only.Please refer to source page.
An excerpt from ESALAN: America and the Religion of No Religion Jeffrey J. Kripal
“Totally on Fire” The Experience of Founding Esalen In 1960 Richard Price went to hear Aldous Huxley deliver a lecture called “Human Potentialities” at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Although “we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago,” said Huxley, we have “in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at that time for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.” He went on to suggest that other potentialities remain hidden in us, and he called on his audience to develop methods and means to actualize them. “The neurologists have shown us,” said Huxley, “that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.”
Price was listening. Michael Murphy would soon write Huxley asking for advice on how to go about doing something about that other ninety percent. Murphy and Price asked to visit Huxley in his Hollywood Hills home on their way down to Mexico to return a pick-up truck they had borrowed from one of Price’s friends. Huxley apologized for being away at that time but strongly encouraged them to visit his old friend, Gerald Heard, who lived in Santa Monica. He also suggested that they visit Rancho La Puerta, a burgeoning growth center in Mexico that featured health food, yoga, and various and sundry alternative lifestyles that Huxley thought they would find conducive to their own developing worldviews.
In June of 1961, Murphy and Price drove down to Santa Monica to visit Gerald Heard, a reclusive visionary British intellectual who had arrived in the States with his partner, Christopher Wood, as well as with Aldous and Maria Huxley, and their son Matthew on April 12, 1937. Hollywood screen writer and novelist Christopher Isherwood would follow not long after. Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood would eventually have a major impact on the American countercultural appropriation of Hinduism. All three would be influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of Swami Prabhavananda, the charismatic head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. All three finally would spend much of their mature years reflecting on what this Indian philosophy could offer the West in a long series of essays, books, and lectures. Quite appropriately, Alan Watts and Felix Greene called them “the British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California.” It was Huxley and Heard, however, who would have the most influence on the founding of Esalen.
Aldous Huxley, the Perennial Philosophy, and the Tantric Paradise of Pala Although Murphy and Price actually met Aldous Huxley only once, in January of 1962 when the author visited them briefly in Big Sur shortly before his death on November 22, 1963 (the same day, it turns out, that JFK was assassinated), his intellectual and personal influence on the place was immense. His second wife, Laura, would become a long-time friend of Esalen, where she would fill any number of roles, including acting as a sitter for one of Murphy’s psychedelic sessions.
Aldous Huxley’s writings on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the “nonverbal humanities” and the development of the “human potentialities” functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen. Indeed, the very first Esalen brochures actually bore the Huxley-inspired title, “the human potentiality.” This same phrase would later morph in a midnight brainstorming session between Michael Murphy and George Leonard into the now well-known “human potential movement.”
When developing the early brochures for Esalen, Murphy was searching for a language that could mediate between his own Aurobindonian evolutionary mysticism and the more secular and psychological language of American culture. It was Huxley who helped him to create such a new hybrid language. This should not surprise us, as Huxley had been experimenting for decades on how to translate Indian ideas into Western literary and intellectual culture.
One of the ways he did this was through his notion of perennialism put forward in his 1944 work The Perennial Philosophy. Perennialism referred to a set of mystical experiences and doctrines that he believed lay at the core of all great religions, hence it is a philosophy that “perennially” returns in the history of religions. The book laid the intellectual and comparative foundations for much that would come after it, including Esalen and, a bit later, the American New Age movement. By the 1980s and ’90s, Esalen intellectuals were growing quite weary and deeply suspicious of what was looking more and more like facile ecumenism and an ideological refusal to acknowledge real and important differences among the world’s cultures and religions. But this would take decades of hard thinking and multiple disillusionments. In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, it was still a radical and deeply subversive thing to assert the deep unity of the world’s religions.
And this is precisely what Huxley was doing. After mistakenly attributing the Latin phrase philosophia perennis to Leibniz, Huxley defines the key concept this way in his very first lines: “PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS . . . the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal.”
In essence, Huxley’s perennial philosophy was a form of what historians of Indian religion call neo-Vedanta, a modern religious movement inspired by the ecstatic visionary experiences of Sri Ramakrishna (1836û1886) and the preaching and writing of Swami Vivekananda (1863û1902), Ramakrishna’s beloved disciple who brought his master’s message about the unity of all religions to the States in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was Huxley who wrote the foreword to this same tradition’s central text in translation, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942). It was within this same spiritual lineage again that Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood found much of their own inspiration and through which a general Hindu perennialism was passed on to early Esalen and American culture.
Such cultural combinations, of course, did not always work. As with all intellectual systems, there were gaps, stress-points, contradictions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the realm of ethics. Thus, for example, Huxley seems personally puzzled over the strange moral conditions of his hybrid vision, that is, the suppression or destruction of the personality, which the perennial philosophy understands as the “original sin.” But he accepts the textual facts for what they in fact seem to be and then illustrates them with a telling chemical metaphor that we might now recognize as an early traumatic model for the mystical, perhaps best expressed in this story in the mystical life and psychological sufferings of Dick Price. Here is how Huxley put it in 1944:
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest. But it was not quite these mystical-ethical dilemmas or this psychology of trauma that Huxley would pass on to Esalen. It was, first, his Hindu-inspired notion of the perennial philosophy; second, his firm belief that psychedelic substances can grant genuine metaphysical insight; and, third, his central notion of the latent and manifest “potentialities.” We will get to the psychedelic soon enough.
Here is how Huxley introduced the concept of potentialities, with a little help from an unacknowledged Freud, in The Perennial Philosophy: “It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested.” A few pages later, Huxley’s writes of “the almost endless potentialities of the human mind” that have “remained for so long unactualized,” foreshadowing the later language and psychology of Abraham Maslow’s notion of self-actualization, another major conceptual influence on the founding of Esalen.
Even more relevant to the history of Esalen—indeed, prophetic of that future story—was Huxley’s very last novel, Island, which appeared in March of 1962, just one month after he had introduced a still unknown Timothy Leary to “the ultimate yoga” of Tantra, and just two months after he met Michael Murphy and Richard Price in Big Sur. The novel’s pragmatic celebration of Tantric eroticism and its harsh criticism of ascetic forms of spirituality (which the novel links to sexual repression, a guilt-ridden homosexuality, and aggressive militarism) marks a significant shift in Huxley’s spiritual worldview, at least as he was expressing it in print. After all, if in 1942 he could write a carefully diplomatic foreword to a book about a Hindu saint who considered all women to be aspects of the Mother Goddess and so would have sex with none of them (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), now he was suggesting openly in 1962 that “to think of Woman as essentially Holy” was an expression of a conflicted male homosexuality anxious to avoid any and all heterosexual contact. It is much better, the novel now suggests, to think of the erotic union of man and woman as holy, that is, to see the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred. Hence “the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.” Late in life Huxley appears to have been moving away from his earlier ascetic Vedanta, so prominently featured in The Perennial Philosophy, toward a new psychologically inflected Tantra.
Laura Huxley considers Island to be her husband’s final legacy, the place where he put everything he had learned. When I asked her about the novel’s obvious focus on Tantra, she was quick to point out that Aldous was not particularly friendly to traditional religion, and that he considered Tantra to be a technique, not a religion. Everything written in Island, she insisted, had been tried somewhere. The novel thus laid down a real and practical path to follow, not just a dream or another impossible religious claim. The novel was Aldous’s blueprint for a good society, even, Laura pointed out, if that “island” is one’s own home or private inner world. It can be done. That is the point.
The story itself involves a jaded journalist, Will Farnaby, who lands by accident on a forbidden island called Pala. Pala culture had been formed a few generations earlier by two men—a pious Indian adept in Tantric forms of Buddhism and Hinduism and by a scientifically enlightened Scottish doctor. The culture thus embodied both a literal friendship between and a consequent synthesis of Tantric Asia, with its lingams, deities, and yogas, and Western rationalism, with its humanism, psychology and science.
Farnaby quickly learns that Pala’s two principle educational practices involve a contemplative form of sexuality called maithuna (the Tantric term for sexual intercourse) and the ingestion of a psychedelic mushroom the inhabitants called moksha (the traditional Sanskrit word for “spiritual liberation”). The sexual practice, which was also consciously modeled on the Oneida community of nineteenth-century America and its ideal of male continence (a form of extended sexual intercourse without ejaculation), functioned as both a contemplative technique and as an effective means of birth control. The psychedelic practice initiated the young islanders into metaphysical wisdom, that is, into the empirical realization that their true selves could not be identified with their little social egos, which were understood to be necessary but temporary “filters” of a greater cosmic consciousness.
The novel meanders lovingly through and around both this maithuna and this moksha—which are manifestly the real point and deepest story of the novel—as the Rani or Queen Mother of Pala and her sexually repressed homosexual son, Murugan, take the utopian island further and further toward Westernization, industrialization, capitalism, and a finally violent fundamentalism organized around notions of “the Ideal of Purity,” “the Crusade of the Spirit,” and “God’s Avatars” (the Queen liked to capitalize things). The ending is as predictable as it is depressing: the forces of righteousness and religion win out over those of natural sensuality, pantheism, and erotic wisdom.
Strikingly, virtually all the markers of the later Esalen gnosis are present on Huxley’s “imagined” utopian island. Laura Huxley’s observation about her late husband’s rejection of organized religion, for example, are played out in full. “We have no established church,” one of the islanders explains, “and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires.” Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” The islanders even integrated this religion of no religion into their agricultural affairs: the scarecrows in the fields were thus made to look like a Future Buddha and a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated the scarecrow-puppets with strings to scare off the birds could learn that “all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.” Altered states, of course, were also central to Pala’s culture through the moksha-medicine, and the techniques of Tantra were omnipresent in their sexual lives. Perhaps most strikingly, Huxley saw very clearly that Zen, Taoism, and Tantra were all related expressions of a deeper transcultural gnosis or supertradition—what he called “the new conscious Wisdom.” More astonishingly still, he even linked this supertradition to the scientific insights of Darwinian evolution and proposed that the latter should now be realized through conscious contemplative practice in a way that uncannily foreshadows Murphy’s own “evolutionary Tantra.”
Somehow, Aldous knew what Esalen would come to know. And then he died. An earthquake struck Big Sur that day.
Gerald Heard and the Evolutionary Energies of Lust Gerald Heard also played a significant role in the founding of Esalen. It was his charismatic presence and advice that finally tipped the scales for Murphy and Price and pushed them to jump in. Heard would also go on to give no less than four separate seminars in the early years. Appropriately, Anderson actually begins his Upstart Spring with Heard and has this to say about the writer’s influence on the two young men: “Huxley had so diffidently advocated a research project, had so hesitantly suggested its revolutionary possibilities. He thought something of that sort might happen. Heard thought it had to happen.”
Murphy has reminisced about his and Price’s first four-hour visit with Heard and its profound effects on him in both a brief essay titled “Totally on Fire” and in various personal communications with me. He described Heard as “archetypally Irish, like a big leprechaun, with red hair and flashing eyes,” and as “tremendously charismatic.” He also spoke of that original meeting with Heard as a real “tipping point” in his life, comparable to those first few class lectures with Spiegelberg. In the essay, moreover, he mentions Heard’s institutional presence in California, particularly his founding of Trabuco College, a small quasi-monastic educational experiment that lasted five years (1942û47) before Heard turned it over to the Vedanta Society of Southern California in 1949, as well as his strong presence in the Sequoia Seminars on the San Francisco peninsula. Both Trabuco and the Sequoia Seminars were clear precedents for Esalen.
So were a number of Heard’s ideas. Murphy was reading Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time and The Human Venture just before he and Price met him in 1961. Murphy is clear that Heard was not a significant intellectual influence on his own thought, but he also points out that the connections were real ones. Hence the Fire. Heard, for example, was very conversant in psychical research. Indeed, he had spent ten years working closely with the Society for Psychical Research in London (1932û42). Like Murphy, he had also lost his Christian faith over the convincing truths of science. Indeed, in his late twenties, he appears to have experienced a nervous breakdown over this intellectual revolution. But like Murphy again, Heard returned to a transformed faith refashioned around a new evolutionary mysticism. Physical evolution of the human species, Heard believes, has ceased, but human consciousness is still evolving; indeed, with the advent of the human species and the awakening of the human psyche through civilization, the evolutionary process has actually quickened and, perhaps most importantly, become conscious of itself. And here Murphy finds connection with Heard’s thought: “Part of his vision that appealed to me was seeing the mystical life in an evolutionary context, which put him squarely on par with Aurobindo.”
Heard had also written about the spiritual potentials of mind-altering drugs (like Huxley), about the complementarity of science and religion, even about UFO phenomena—all topics that would reappear at Esalen. And indeed, his books, rather like the UFOs, seem to swarm with strange and charming speculations, like the utterly preposterous and yet oddly attractive idea that the European witchcraft trials had eliminated a large gene pool of real psychical faculties, but that the centuries had since replaced the pool and we are now on the verge of a new “rare stock” of gifted souls endowed with evolutionary powers. All we need now is a small community, an esoteric subculture, to nurture and protect the gifted. In a talk at Esalen in 1963, he wondered out loud whether Esalen might become such an occult school. Another X-Men scenario.
Whatever one makes of such a claim, one thing seems clear enough: Heard knew what he was saying was heretical. He was aligning himself and his friends, after all, with the genes of witches. He was certainly as hard on religious orthodoxy as Spiegelberg had been. Heard could thus admit that humanity may have once needed its gods to keep in touch with the subconscious (and it was this same subconscious that supplied “the basis and force of the religious conviction” for him). Still, such anthropomorphic religions have now taken on largely “degenerative forms” that are hopelessly out of date with our science and psychology. It is time to move on, to evolve.
Finally, Heard, like his fellow British expatriate and brother Vedantist, Christopher Isherwood, was quite clear about his homosexuality. In other words, two of the three British expatriates (Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood) were self-described homosexuals, even if they chose to express this sexual-spiritual orientation in very different ways. Isherwood wrote openly about his own active homosexuality, his (failed) attempts at celibacy, and his sexuality’s defining effect on his devotional relationship to the tradition’s founding saint, Sri Ramakrishna, who he suspected (correctly) was also homoerotic in both his spiritual and sexual orientations.
Heard chose a different path. In Pain, Sex and Time he wrote about the oddly abundant energies of pain and lust in the human species as reservoirs of evolutionary energy and explored the possibilities of consciously controlling, channeling, and using this energy to cooperate with evolution and so enlarge the aperture of consciousness, to implode through space-time. Interestingly, when Heard turned to a historical sketch of these energetic techniques in the West, he began with Asia and various Tantric techniques of arresting the orgasm to alter consciousness and transcend time. Tantric Asia, in other words, functioned as something of an archetypal model for Heard in his search for a type of asceticism that was not life-denying but consciously erotic, a lifestyle that could embrace the evolutionary energies sparkling in sex, build them up through discipline, and then ride their spontaneous combustions into higher and higher states of consciousness and energy.
These Tantric moments reappear repeatedly throughout his writings. In one of his last books, for example, The Five Ages of Man (his forty-seventh book), he included an appendix: “On the Evidence for an Esoteric Mystery Tradition in the West and Its Postponement of Social Despair.” Once again, he begins a Western historical sketch not with the West, but with Tantra. Tantra, he tells us here, is the esoteric tradition of India that was subsequently persecuted and censored by both a puritan Islam and a prudish Brahmanism. Such a persecution of the mystical as the erotic was even more extreme in the West, where the esoteric often functioned as a kind of spiritual-sexual underground. Hence Heard’s reflections on an already familiar painting, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights as explored by Wilhelm Fränger. Much like Henry Miller before him, Heard celebrates Fränger. Not that he does not have his own contribution to make: “Here, too,” he writes with reference to the same painting, “are unmistakable Tantra pictures of the rousing of Kundalini.”
He was even more explicit in his private letters. In one letter to W. J. H. Sprott (a gay friend loosely involved with the Bloomsbury group), Heard playfully describes the yogic practices of drawing water up through the anus and penis. He recounts in rather flip terms how the kundalini comes out “through the top of your sutures” (that is, the top of the skull), and then jokes of Tantra’s use of sexual-spiritual double meanings: “Or on the other hand you may take the left hand path and continue talking through your hat instead of getting out of your head.” And that was not all. “You realize,” Heard goes on, “that nearly every Tibetan Saint is a homosexual.” As for Heard himself, his own “pretty theory,” “rather wilder than any before” involved fetishism as the “true way to sublimation.” It was a version of this that he promised Sprott to read someday at the Hares Strip and Fuck Society. Bawdy laughter and real insight are impossible to distinguish in such moments, and it is the private letter, the secret talk, not the published text, that most reveals.
In midlife, probably around 1935, Heard seems to have followed his own speculations about the evolutionary sublimation of erotic energies (just after he began “turning East,” around 1932û33). He quite intentionally chose a celibate lifestyle and lived with his Platonic life-partner and personal secretary Michael Barrie. But he certainly never gave up his belief in the evolutionary potentials of sexual desire and the mystical privileges of homosexuality. Thus in the mid to late 1950s, he wrote, under the pseudonymn of D. B. Vest, about homosexuality as a potent spiritual force that might have some important role in the evolution of human consciousness. Two such essays appeared in One: The Homosexual Magazine as “A Future for the Isophyl” and “Evolution’s Next Step,” and a third would appear in Homophile Studies: One Institute Quarterly as “Is the Isophyl a Biological Variant?” Both the former magazine’s title (“One”) and its Carlyle motto (“a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one”) strongly suggest Heard’s own Vedantic monistic metaphysics and mystical reading of homosexuality.
Heard’s mature homosexuality, however, was also “made sublime,” a kind of homoeroticism alchemically transmuted into a metaphysical force. Those who knew Heard often commented on these related ascetic and charismatic qualities of his personal presence (though seldom on the erotic dimensions that he himself consistently identified). His austerity was as palpable as his charisma. Indeed, Heard’s major differences with Swami Prabhavananda of the Hollywood Vedanta Society involved his strong criticisms of the Swami’s “moral lapses,” such as enjoying an occasional smoke and a nightly drink. Scandalous indeed.
Enter Hunter Thompson (1961) Murphy and Price had already arrived at Big Sur Hot Springs before they met Heard and decided to found a new institution. When they arrived in their red Jeep pick-up in April of 1961, they found what can only be called a surreal mixture of people and worldviews. Murphy and Price pulled in late, well after dark. It was not a terribly auspicious first night. Murphy reports waking up in the middle of the night in the Big House to an angry young man pointing a gun at him: “Who the hell are you, and what are ya’ doing here?”
Enter Hunter Thompson. Bunny Murphy, Michael Murphy’s grandmother, had hired a young, billy-club-toting Thompson to guard the property and keep order. Unfortunately, she had neglected to tell her zealous guard that her grandson and friend were coming down to stay that night. Thompson, a young aspiring writer still finding his voice, had arrived to seek out the presence and inspiration of Dennis Murphy, Mike’s younger brother, whose literary work he deeply admired. Dennis had published a very successful novel in 1958, The Sergeant (about a homosexual affair in the U.S. Army), which had won the acclaim of John Steinbeck and would eventually be made into a Hollywood movie starring Rod Steiger, for which he would write the screenplay.
In 1967 Hunter Thompson published his first book, Hell’s Angels, and went on to create Gonzo journalism, a new style of American literature. Gary Trudeau immortalized his place in American literary culture as Duke in his Doonesbury series, but this would all happen later. At this point in 1961, Thompson was a young man of twenty-two living in the Big House and making copious notes in the margins of Dennis Murphy’s The Sergeant, learning the art of the pen, the sentence, and the turn of the phrase.
Thompson was hardly the only colorful character on the Murphy property, though. The folksinger Joan Baez lived in one of the cabins, where she often gave small concerts. The guest hotel on the grounds, moreover, was being managed by a certain Mrs. Webb, a fervent Evangelical Christian who had hired her fellow church members from the First Church of God of Prophecy to help her manage the day-to-day running of the place, which they leased from Bunny on a month-to-month basis. The bar, on the other hand, was patronized by what Price and Murphy called the Big Sur Heavies, locals known for their rough manners, their penchant for marijuana (which they grew in the mountains), and their quasi-criminal (or just criminal) tendencies. Then there were the baths, frequented on most weekends by homosexual men who would drive down from San Francisco or up from Los Angeles to gather in the hot waters and explore the limits of sensual pleasure. These men had even developed a kind of simple Morse code to help them manage their sexual activities: on the path leading down to the baths they would post a guard, who would switch on a blinking light at the baths to signal to the bathing lovers the approach of straight people coming down the path. Anderson paints the following humorous picture with his usual verve: “And so it went through the spring and summer of 1961: sodomy in the baths, glossolalia in the lodge, fistfights in the parking lot, folk music in the cabins, meditation in the Big House.”
Bunny had long turned down her grandson’s repeated requests to hand the grounds over to him. She was particularly concerned that Michael would “give it away to the Hindoos.” But things were getting out of hand at Big Sur Hot Springs, and she would soon change her mind after events that have since become legendary. Much of it, unsurprisingly with hindsight, revolved around Hunter Thompson.
Thompson, it turns out, sometimes picked verbal fights with the homosexual bathers. One night, he returned to the property with his girlfriend and two hitchhiking soldiers from Fort Ord (a base just north of Monterey). Thinking it was safe to go down to the baths in such a crowd, Thompson ventured down the dark path. But some of the bathers jumped him, the soldiers and his girlfriend ran away, and Thompson was left alone to slug it out. As the story goes, most of the slugging was done by the bathers. The men beat Thompson up and came very close to throwing him off the cliff that night. Bloodied and bruised, he got back to his room in the Big House, where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open.
Not long after this incident, Bunny would read one of Thompson’s early published essays in Rogue magazine, “Big Sur: The Tropic of Henry Miller,” in which he described the folks of Big Sur as “expatriates, ranchers, out-and-out bastards, and genuine deviates.” Such language did not go down well with Bunny. She may have been in her eighties, but she was also tough. According to Anderson, she then “made one of her rare trips down to Big Sur, in her black Cadillac with her Filipino chauffeur, for the specific purpose of firing Thompson.” Exit Hunter Thompson.
The Night of the Dobermans Then in October came what is known in Esalen legend as the Night of the Dobermans. Thompson may have been gone, but the baths remained in the control of the gay men. Things had gotten so out of control that even Dennis Murphy’s friend Jack Kerouac looked askance. If this veritable archetype of the American Beat scene, so immune to the pettiness and damning comforts of middle-America, could visit and leave the Hot Spring baths disgusted with their moral and fluid state (he saw a dead otter bobbing in the waves and sperm floating in his bath), clearly, something had to be done.
It was not always like this. When Henry Miller wrote about Esalen’s homosexual bathers in the late 1950s, it was with real affection and a certain playful humor. For Miller at least, these were elegant artists and dancers who belonged to that “ancient order of hermaphrodites.” They reminded him of “the valiant Spartans—just before the battle of Thermopylae.” He doubted, though, that “the Slade’s Springs type would be ready to die to the last man. (æIt’s sort of silly, don’t you think?’)” That was in 1957. Things were different now. These men were acting much more like Miller’s imagined Spartans. They were ready to fight.
Murphy and Price began by erecting a gated steel fence around the baths and announcing that they would be closed from now on at 8:00 p.m.—not exactly a popular move. One night they walked down the path to close the gate and encountered a group of men who simply refused to leave. Everyone knew what had happened to Hunter. Murphy and Price returned to the lodge to gather the troops, which in the end amounted to five people, including Joan Baez and three Doberman pinschers. The dogs, it turns out, were the key. As the small band walked down the path, the three dogs began to bark viciously at each other as the owner yelled, “Choke him! Choke him!” It was all the group could do to keep the dogs apart. When the growling and snarling group finally arrived at the baths, the place was completely empty. Cars were starting and lights could be seen in the parking lot as the men made their anxious retreat. Later that evening, as Murphy walked around the property, he noticed a young couple kissing in the moonlight up on the highway. For Murphy, Anderson reports, the young couple synchronistically signaled a shift in the atmosphere and a new day (and night) at Esalen.
The proverbial guard had now literally changed. Mrs. Webb and the charismatic Christians would soon leave. The baths were no longer synonymous with the rowdy gay men of the cities. There was a meditating American yogi and an aspiring Buddhist shaman-healer on the grounds. And Joan was still singing in her cabin. Big Sur Hot Springs was on its way to becoming, as the white wooden sign still says, “Esalen Institute by Reservation Only.”
Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 85-97 of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
©2007, 588 pages, 32 halftones, 1 color plate
Cloth $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-45369-9 (ISBN-10: 0-226-45369-3)
For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Esalen.
SRI, Marilyn Ferguson and THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY In the spring of 1980, a book appeared called The Aquarian Conspiracy that put itself forward as a manifesto of the counterculture. Defining the counterculture as the conscious embracing of irrationality -- from rock and drugs to biofeedback, meditation, "consciousness-raising," yoga, mountain climbing, group therapy, and psychodrama. The Aquarian Conspiracy declares that it is now time for the 15 million Americans involved in the counterculture to join in bringing about a "radical change in the United States."
Writes author Marilyn Ferguson: "While outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement; its atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. It -- this movement -- is a conspiracy!"1
Ferguson used a half-truth to tell a lie. The counterculture is a conspiracy -- but not in the half-conscious way Ferguson claim -- as she well knows. Ferguson wrote her manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress.
That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.
The Model
The British had a precedent for the counterculture they imposed upon the United States: the pagan cult ceremonies of the decadent Egyptian and Roman Empires. The following description of cult ceremonies dating back to the Egyptian Isis priesthood of the third millennium B.C. could just as well be a journalistic account of a "hippy be-in" circa A.D. 1969: "The acts or gestures that accompany the incantations constitute the rite [of Isis). In these dances, the beating of drums and the rhythm of music and repetitive movements were helped by hallucinatory substances like hashish or mescal; these were consumed as adjuvants to create the trance and the hallucinations that were taken to he the visitation of the god. The drugs were sacred, and their knowledge was limited to the initiated . . . Possibly because they have the illusion of satisfied desires, and allowed the innermost feelings to escape, these rites acquired during their execution a frenzied character that is conspicuous in certain spells: "Retreat! Re is piercing thy head, slashing thy face, dividing thy head, crushing it in his hands; thy bones are shattered, thy limbs are cut to pieces!"
The counterculture that was foisted on the 1960s adolescent youth of America is not merely analogous to the ancient cult of Isis. It is a literal resurrection of the cult down to the popularization of the Isis cross (the "peace symbol") as the counterculture's most frequently used symbol.
The High Priesthood
The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. At the very point that these dynasties -- the "thousand year Reich" of the Egyptian pharaohs, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire -- succeed in imposing their rule over the entire face of the earth, they tend to decline. Toynbee argued that this decline could be abated if the ruling oligarchy (like that of the British Roundtable) would devote itself to the recruitment and training of an ever-expanding priesthood dedicated to the principles of imperial rule.3
Trained at Toynbee's Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a Dionysian cult comprised of the children of Britain's Roundtable elite.4 Among the other initiates were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir Oswald Mosley, and D.H. Lawrence, Huxley's homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence's pornographic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it was a misunderstood "work of art."
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government."
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as " a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism.
Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War. In 1886, Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and several other Bulwer-Lytton proteges formed the Isis-Urania Temple of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. This Isis Cult was organized around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by Madame Helena Blavatsky, in which the Russian occultist called for the British aristocracy to organize itself into an Isis priesthood.7
The subversive Isis Urania Order of the Golden Dawn is today an international drug ring said to be controlled by the Canadian multi-millionaire, Maurice Strong, who is also a top operative for British Intelligence.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
Huxley founded a nest of Isis cults in southern California and in San Francisco, that consisted exclusively of several hundred deranged worshipers of Isis and other cult gods. Isherwood, during the California period, translated and propagated a number of ancient Zen Buddhist documents, inspiring Zen-mystical cults along the way.
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India.
LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods'
"Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own 'acid.' "9
The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was developed in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz A.B. -- a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.G. Warburg. While precise documentation is unavailable as to the auspices under which the LSD research was commissioned, it can be safely assumed that British intelligence and its subsidiary U.S. Office of Strategic Services were directly involved. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA when that agency began MK-Ultra, was the OSS station chief in Berne, Switzerland throughout the early Sandoz research. One of his OSS assistants was James Warburg, of the same Warburg family, who was instrumental in the 1963 founding of the Institute for Policy Studies, and worked with both Huxley and Robert Hutchins."
Aldous Huxley returned to the United States from Britain, accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the Huxleys' private physician. Osmond had been part of a discussion group Huxley had organized at the National Hospital, Queens Square, London. Along with another seminar participant, J.R. Smythies, Osmond wrote Schizophrenia: A New Approach, in which he asserted that mescaline -- a derivative of the mescal cactus used in ancient Egyptian and Indian pagan rites -- produced a psychotic state identical in all clinical respects to schizophrenia. On this basis, Osmond and Smythies advocated experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs as a means of developing a "cure" for mental disorders.
Osmond was brought in by Allen Dulles to play a prominent role in MK-Ultra. At the same time, Osmond, Huxley, and the University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins held a series of secret planning sessions in 1952 and 1953 for a second, private LSD mescaline project under Ford Foundation funding.11 Hutchins, it will be recalled, was the program director of the Ford Foundation during this period. His LSD proposal incited such rage in Henry Ford II that Hutchins was fired from the foundation the following year.
It was also in 1953 that Osmund gave Huxley a supply of mescaline for his personal consumption. The next year, Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, the first manifesto of the psychedelic drug cult, which claimed that hallucinogenic drugs "expand consciousness." Although the Ford Foundation rejected the Hutchins-Huxley proposal for private foundation sponsorship of LSD, the proposal was not dropped. Beginning in 1962, the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, California began a four-year experiment in LSD, peyote, and marijuana. The Rand Corporation was established simultaneously with the reorganization of the Ford Foundation during 1949. Rand was an outgrowth of the wartime Strategic Bombing Survey, a "cost analysis" study of the psychological effects of the bombings of German population centers.
According to a 1962 Rand Abstract, W.H. McGlothlin conducted a preparatory study on "The Long-Lasting Effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes in Normals: An Experimental Proposal." The following year, McGlothlin conducted a year-long experiment on thirty human guinea pigs, called "Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes and Performance." The study concluded that LSD improved emotional attitudes and resolved anxiety problems.12
Huxley At Work
Huxley expanded his own LSD-mescaline project in California by recruiting several individuals who had been initially drawn into the cult circles he helped establish during his earlier stay. The two most prominent individuals were Alan Watts and the late Dr. Gregory Bateson (the former husband of Dame Margaret Mead). Watts became a self-styled "guru" of a nationwide Zen Buddhist cult built around his well-publicized books. Bateson, an anthropologist with the OSS, became the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Under Bateson's auspices, the initiating "cadre" of the LSD cult -- the hippies -- were programmed.
Watts at the same time founded the Pacifica Foundation, which sponsored two radio station WKBW in San Francisco and WBM-FM in New York City. The Pacifica stations were among the first to push the "Liverpool Sound" -- the British-imported hard rock twanging of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Animals. They would later pioneer "acid rock" and eventually the self-avowed psychotic "punk rock."
During the fall of 1960, Huxley was appointed visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Around his stay in that city, Huxley created a circle at Harvard parallel to his West Coast LSD team. The Harvard group included Huxley, Osmund, and Watts (brought in from California), Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert.
The ostensible topic of the Harvard seminar was "Religion and its Significance in the Modern Age." The seminar was actually a planning session for the "acid rock" counterculture. Huxley established contact during this Harvard period with the president of Sandoz, which at the time was working on a CIA contract to produce large quantities of LSD and psilocybin (another synthetic hallucinogenic drug) for MK-Ultra, the CIA's official chemical warfare experiment. According to recently released CIA documents, Allen Dulles purchased over 100 million doses of LSD -- almost all of which flooded the streets of the United States during the late 1960s. During the same period, Leary began privately purchasing large quantities of LSD from Sandoz as well.
From the discussions of the Harvard seminar, Leary put together the book The Psychedelic Experience, based on the ancient cultist Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was this book that popularized Osmund's previously coined term, "psychedelic mind-expanding."
The Roots of the Flower People
Back in California, Gregory Bateson had maintained the Huxley operation out of the Palo Alto VA hospital. Through LSD experimentation on patients already hospitalized for psychological problems, Bateson established a core of "initiates" into the "psychedelic" Isis Cult.
Foremost among his Palo Alto recruits was Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of "SD to Kesey. By 1962, Kesey had completed a novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which popularized the notion that society is a prison and the only truly "free" people are the insane.
Kesey subsequently organized a circle of "SD initiates called "The Merry Pranksters." They toured the country disseminating SD" (often without forewarning the receiving parties), building up local distribution connections, and establishing the pretext for a high volume of publicity on behalf of the still minuscule "counterculture."
By 1967, the Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of "SD that a sizable drug population had emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Here Huxley collaborator Bateson set up a "free clinic," staffed by **Dr. David Smith -- later a "medical adviser" for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML); **Dr. Ernest Dernberg an active-duty military officer, probably on assignment through MK-UItra; **Roger Smith-a street gang organizer trained by Saul Alinsky. During the Free Clinic period, Roger Smith was the parole officer of the cultist mass murderer Charles Manson; **Dr. Peter Bourne -- formerly President Carter's special assistant on drug abuse. Bourne did his psychiatric residency at the Clinic. He had previously conducted a profiling study of GI heroin addicts in Vietnam.
The Free Clinic paralleled a project at the Tavistock Institute, the psychological warfare agency for the British Secret Intelligence Service. Tavistock, founded as a clinic in London in the 1920s, had become the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II under its director, Dr. John Rawlings Rees.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.
cont. http://robertscourt.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-republicans-next-nazi-party-see.html
Radical Change & Counterculture: Huxley, Esalen & Human Potential Movement NARCO-HYPNOSIS / NARCO STATE
The shadow of the social revolution still casts its long shadow back from the future. The 60s were a topsy-turvy time where nearly every aspect of society was converted into its opposite, precisely according to the blueprint of the Tavistock Agenda and the machinations of its allies -- CIA, RAND and SRI. Together they created an ersatz utopia with a heavy dark side much like Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World. It is the forerunner of the New Age and Conspiracy cultures. Counterculture and subculture became new buzzwords which sprung up like Flower Children to describe the morphing social landscape. Human freedom was actually under pharmacological attack, disguised as a quest for chemically-induced happiness.
"...Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World." --From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949; from Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969.
Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1vMWjknRzw
http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=5995
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/huxley_aldous.html
The Mike Wallace Interview
Aldous Huxley, 1958 Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.
The "Case Officer" for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley. He spearheaded Tavistock's plan for pharmaceutical control with LSD's mindbending results which led to the counterculture, the dialectical response to culture on the way to a totally controlled society. Those who thought they were creating a new society were unwittingly "sleeping with the enemy" by essentially brainwashing themselves and paying for the priviledge with their hearts and minds.
Thus, Tavistock channeled and directed youth dissent and rebellion, and disabled the anti-war movement. Youth culture became distracted and disengaged from practical reality and political activism. The revolution was definitely not televised but it was psychoelectric shock treatment. The movement was induced from the top down via CIA-Tavistock agendas and agents of influence. Socially-engineered 'hippies' dropped out of the sociopolitical loop. Psychotropic warfare came to the homefront in the world's biggest social experiment.
In 1936 Aldous Huxley wrote "Propaganda and Pharmacology" - a more detailed prediction of mind-control drug technology than the "soma" found in his 1932 novel "Brave New World". Huxley predicted: The propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists as well as writers." Moksha - Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931-1963" Aldous Huxley, Penguin, 1983, p.38
LSD came to America in 1949. Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders traveled to the United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.
Humphry Osmond was at the cutting edge of psychiatric research in the 1950s. He believed that hallucinogenic drugs might be useful in treating mental illness and he studied the effects of LSD on people with alcohol dependency. His investigations led to his association with the novelist Aldous Huxley and to involvement with the CIA and MI6, which were interested in LSD as a possible “truth drug” to make enemy agents reveal secrets.
Osmond sought a name for the effect that LSD has on the mind, consulting the novelist Aldous Huxley who was interested in these drugs. Osmond and Huxley had become friends and Osmond gave him mescaline in 1953. Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” and sent a rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Instead, Osmond chose “psychedelic,” from the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show), and suggested, “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” He announced it at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957.
Huxley was Tavistock's main propagandist and recruiter. Huxley became a propagandist for hallucinogenic drugs. Huxley first tried LSD in 1955. He got it from "Captain" Al Hubbard, rumored to have connections with CIA's MK Ultra program. In a 1961 handwritten letter from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Huxley mentions meeting Dr. "Jolly" West, a CIA MK-ULTRA operative. Huxley goes on to note that: "You are right about the hopelessness of the "Scientific" approach. These idiots want to be Pavlovians, not Lorenzian Ethnologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The "Scientific" LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychoses."
Timothy Leary consulted the British philosopher who wrote the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. Look past portrayals of Dr. Leary's glamorous life and the enormous amounts of publicity he received for his studies on and promotion of LSD and you find that what he actually helped put together a fine tuned program to manipulate the public. He was also used wittingly or unwittingly by CIA.
In the mid-1950s Leary worked as director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation and taught at Berkeley University. He developed interpersonal theory. Leary devised a personality test, "The Leary," which is used by CIA to test prospective employees. He also became a close friend to Frank Barron, a graduate school classmate who was working for the CIA since at least 1953. Barron worked at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary later acknowledged was "funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists."
Huxley urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for human betterment. "That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on," Huxley tells him. "Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they'll educate the intelligent rich." Huxley probably had it right about chemical and biowarfare when he proclaimed, ''Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.''
"Soma" became a cultural reality in a variety of hypnotic and narcotizing forms. Drugs became the tecnique of choice for crowd control. For some, psychedelics became gateway drugs to harder drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. Pharmaceutical soporifics from Ritalin to anti-depressants became the norm for mood and behavior regulation. In the name of "human potential," consciousness was put to sleep. Psychiatric control of consciousness became an authoritarian imperative.
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." --Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
The counterculture is a conspiracy
The post-1930 promotion and use of cannabis and LSD, was launched from London by the self-described "utopian" circles of followers of the 19th-Century Thomas Huxley—associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aleister Crowley, and a younger generation including Aldous and Julian Huxley, and George Orwell. The practice of mass-indoctrination in use of cannabis, and LSD, was launched, with a leading role by the British psychological warfare organization known as the London Tavistock Clinic and associated circles. The popularization of cannabinol, LSD, and other strongly psychotropic drugs, including the highly destructive use of Ritalin among primary and secondary students, are intended to replicate the fictional role of "soma" depicted in Aldous Huxley's cult-novel, Brave New World.
The U.S.A. and Canadian use of these practices was pioneered in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and left-wing circles, and in Canada locations, during the 1930s and 1940s-1950s, through circles associated with Aldous Huxley and with the London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. During the post-war decades, this work was promoted through the Department of Defense's Special Warfare division, including projects such as "Delta Force." The post-war "Beatniks," and the orchestrated cult of Elvis Presley, are typical of the pilot-projects used to prepare the way for the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" launched, like a rocket, with the appearance of the "Beatles" on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Marilyn Ferguson wrote her Aquarian Conspiracy manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open. The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government." What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as " a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism. Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/aquarian.htm ;In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India. LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods' "Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own 'acid.' "The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.
Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the United States thirty years before its consequences became evident to the public. In 1962, Huxley helped found the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which became a mecca for hundreds of Americans to engage in weekends of T-Groups and Training Groups modeled on behavior group therapy, for Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist transcendental meditation, and "out of body" experiences through simulated and actual hallucinogenic drugs. As described in the Esalen Institute Newsletter: "Esalen started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety of approaches to enhancement of the human potential . . . including experiential sessions involving encounter groups, sensory awakening, gestalt awareness training, related disciplines. Our latest step is to fan out into the community at large, running programs in cooperation with many different institutions, churches, schools, hospitals, and government."
Several tens of thousands of Americans have passed through Esalen; millions have passed through the programs it has sired throughout the country.
The next leap in Britain's Aquarian Conspiracy against the United States was the May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson's work. The report is entitled "Changing Images of Man," Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74, prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.
The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of "spiritualism." The study asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded": "Many of our present images appear to have become dangerously obsolete, however . . . Science, technology, and economics have made possible really significant strides toward achieving such basic human goals as physical safety and security, material comfort and better health. But many of these successes have brought with them problems of being too successful -- problems that themselves seem insoluble within the set of societal value-premises that led to their emergence . . . Our highly developed system of technology leads to higher vulnerability and breakdowns. Indeed the range and interconnected impact of societal problems that are now emerging pose a serious threat to our civilization . . . If our predictions of the future prove correct, we can expect the association problems of the trend to become more serious, more universal and to occur more rapidly."
Therefore, SRI concludes, we must change the industrial-technological image of man fast: "Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that . . . the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era." The counterculture, New Age of the Aquarian Conspiracy was born:
Who provided the drugs that swamped the anti-war movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 -- provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same opium network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.
The LSD connection begins with one William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a fifty-five-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California.
Esalen Institute is a center for humanistic education, a nonprofit organization devoted to multidisciplinary studies ordinarily neglected by traditional academia. Now in its fifth decade, Esalen offers more than 500 public workshops a year in addition to invitational conferences, residential work-study programs, research initiatives, and internships. Part think-tank for the emerging world culture, part college and lab for transformative practices, and part restorative retreat, Esalen is dedicated to exploring work in the humanities and sciences that furthers the full realization of the human potential.
Esalen Institute was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962 as an alternative educational center devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called the "human potential," the world of unrealized human capacities that lies beyond the imagination. Esalen soon became known for its blend of East/West philosophies, its experiential/didactic workshops, the steady influx of philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers, and its breathtaking grounds blessed with natural hot springs. Once home to a Native American tribe known as the Esselen, Esalen is situated on 27 acre of spectacular Big Sur coastline with the Santa Lucia Mountains rising sharply behind.
Past Teachers at Esalen Institute Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Will Schutz, Richard Feynman, Paul Tillich, Arnold J. Toynbee, B.F. Skinner, Stanislav Grof, Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, Carl Rogers, Linus Pauling, Buckminster Fuller, Rollo May, Joseph Campbell, Susan Sontag, Ray Bradbury, George Leonard, J. B. Rhine, Warren Farrell, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Gregory Bateson, John C. Lilly, Carlos Castaneda, Claudio Naranjo, Fritjof Capra, Ansel Adams, John Cage, Babatunde Olatunji, Terence McKenna, Joan Baez, Robert Anton Wilson, Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, Robert Bly, Marion Woodman, Dean Ornish, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, James Hillman, Gabrielle Roth, Rusty Schweickart, Fred Frith, Spalding Gray, Amory Lovins, Albert Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Daniel Sheehan and Sara Nelson of the Christic Institute and many others have taught, performed and/or presented at the Esalen Institute.
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http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/453699.html
for educational purposes only.Please refer to source page.
An excerpt from ESALAN: America and the Religion of No Religion Jeffrey J. Kripal
“Totally on Fire” The Experience of Founding Esalen In 1960 Richard Price went to hear Aldous Huxley deliver a lecture called “Human Potentialities” at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Although “we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago,” said Huxley, we have “in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at that time for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.” He went on to suggest that other potentialities remain hidden in us, and he called on his audience to develop methods and means to actualize them. “The neurologists have shown us,” said Huxley, “that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.”
Price was listening. Michael Murphy would soon write Huxley asking for advice on how to go about doing something about that other ninety percent. Murphy and Price asked to visit Huxley in his Hollywood Hills home on their way down to Mexico to return a pick-up truck they had borrowed from one of Price’s friends. Huxley apologized for being away at that time but strongly encouraged them to visit his old friend, Gerald Heard, who lived in Santa Monica. He also suggested that they visit Rancho La Puerta, a burgeoning growth center in Mexico that featured health food, yoga, and various and sundry alternative lifestyles that Huxley thought they would find conducive to their own developing worldviews.
In June of 1961, Murphy and Price drove down to Santa Monica to visit Gerald Heard, a reclusive visionary British intellectual who had arrived in the States with his partner, Christopher Wood, as well as with Aldous and Maria Huxley, and their son Matthew on April 12, 1937. Hollywood screen writer and novelist Christopher Isherwood would follow not long after. Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood would eventually have a major impact on the American countercultural appropriation of Hinduism. All three would be influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of Swami Prabhavananda, the charismatic head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. All three finally would spend much of their mature years reflecting on what this Indian philosophy could offer the West in a long series of essays, books, and lectures. Quite appropriately, Alan Watts and Felix Greene called them “the British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California.” It was Huxley and Heard, however, who would have the most influence on the founding of Esalen.
Aldous Huxley, the Perennial Philosophy, and the Tantric Paradise of Pala Although Murphy and Price actually met Aldous Huxley only once, in January of 1962 when the author visited them briefly in Big Sur shortly before his death on November 22, 1963 (the same day, it turns out, that JFK was assassinated), his intellectual and personal influence on the place was immense. His second wife, Laura, would become a long-time friend of Esalen, where she would fill any number of roles, including acting as a sitter for one of Murphy’s psychedelic sessions.
Aldous Huxley’s writings on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the “nonverbal humanities” and the development of the “human potentialities” functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen. Indeed, the very first Esalen brochures actually bore the Huxley-inspired title, “the human potentiality.” This same phrase would later morph in a midnight brainstorming session between Michael Murphy and George Leonard into the now well-known “human potential movement.”
When developing the early brochures for Esalen, Murphy was searching for a language that could mediate between his own Aurobindonian evolutionary mysticism and the more secular and psychological language of American culture. It was Huxley who helped him to create such a new hybrid language. This should not surprise us, as Huxley had been experimenting for decades on how to translate Indian ideas into Western literary and intellectual culture.
One of the ways he did this was through his notion of perennialism put forward in his 1944 work The Perennial Philosophy. Perennialism referred to a set of mystical experiences and doctrines that he believed lay at the core of all great religions, hence it is a philosophy that “perennially” returns in the history of religions. The book laid the intellectual and comparative foundations for much that would come after it, including Esalen and, a bit later, the American New Age movement. By the 1980s and ’90s, Esalen intellectuals were growing quite weary and deeply suspicious of what was looking more and more like facile ecumenism and an ideological refusal to acknowledge real and important differences among the world’s cultures and religions. But this would take decades of hard thinking and multiple disillusionments. In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, it was still a radical and deeply subversive thing to assert the deep unity of the world’s religions.
And this is precisely what Huxley was doing. After mistakenly attributing the Latin phrase philosophia perennis to Leibniz, Huxley defines the key concept this way in his very first lines: “PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS . . . the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal.”
In essence, Huxley’s perennial philosophy was a form of what historians of Indian religion call neo-Vedanta, a modern religious movement inspired by the ecstatic visionary experiences of Sri Ramakrishna (1836û1886) and the preaching and writing of Swami Vivekananda (1863û1902), Ramakrishna’s beloved disciple who brought his master’s message about the unity of all religions to the States in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was Huxley who wrote the foreword to this same tradition’s central text in translation, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942). It was within this same spiritual lineage again that Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood found much of their own inspiration and through which a general Hindu perennialism was passed on to early Esalen and American culture.
Such cultural combinations, of course, did not always work. As with all intellectual systems, there were gaps, stress-points, contradictions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the realm of ethics. Thus, for example, Huxley seems personally puzzled over the strange moral conditions of his hybrid vision, that is, the suppression or destruction of the personality, which the perennial philosophy understands as the “original sin.” But he accepts the textual facts for what they in fact seem to be and then illustrates them with a telling chemical metaphor that we might now recognize as an early traumatic model for the mystical, perhaps best expressed in this story in the mystical life and psychological sufferings of Dick Price. Here is how Huxley put it in 1944:
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest. But it was not quite these mystical-ethical dilemmas or this psychology of trauma that Huxley would pass on to Esalen. It was, first, his Hindu-inspired notion of the perennial philosophy; second, his firm belief that psychedelic substances can grant genuine metaphysical insight; and, third, his central notion of the latent and manifest “potentialities.” We will get to the psychedelic soon enough.
Here is how Huxley introduced the concept of potentialities, with a little help from an unacknowledged Freud, in The Perennial Philosophy: “It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested.” A few pages later, Huxley’s writes of “the almost endless potentialities of the human mind” that have “remained for so long unactualized,” foreshadowing the later language and psychology of Abraham Maslow’s notion of self-actualization, another major conceptual influence on the founding of Esalen.
Even more relevant to the history of Esalen—indeed, prophetic of that future story—was Huxley’s very last novel, Island, which appeared in March of 1962, just one month after he had introduced a still unknown Timothy Leary to “the ultimate yoga” of Tantra, and just two months after he met Michael Murphy and Richard Price in Big Sur. The novel’s pragmatic celebration of Tantric eroticism and its harsh criticism of ascetic forms of spirituality (which the novel links to sexual repression, a guilt-ridden homosexuality, and aggressive militarism) marks a significant shift in Huxley’s spiritual worldview, at least as he was expressing it in print. After all, if in 1942 he could write a carefully diplomatic foreword to a book about a Hindu saint who considered all women to be aspects of the Mother Goddess and so would have sex with none of them (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), now he was suggesting openly in 1962 that “to think of Woman as essentially Holy” was an expression of a conflicted male homosexuality anxious to avoid any and all heterosexual contact. It is much better, the novel now suggests, to think of the erotic union of man and woman as holy, that is, to see the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred. Hence “the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.” Late in life Huxley appears to have been moving away from his earlier ascetic Vedanta, so prominently featured in The Perennial Philosophy, toward a new psychologically inflected Tantra.
Laura Huxley considers Island to be her husband’s final legacy, the place where he put everything he had learned. When I asked her about the novel’s obvious focus on Tantra, she was quick to point out that Aldous was not particularly friendly to traditional religion, and that he considered Tantra to be a technique, not a religion. Everything written in Island, she insisted, had been tried somewhere. The novel thus laid down a real and practical path to follow, not just a dream or another impossible religious claim. The novel was Aldous’s blueprint for a good society, even, Laura pointed out, if that “island” is one’s own home or private inner world. It can be done. That is the point.
The story itself involves a jaded journalist, Will Farnaby, who lands by accident on a forbidden island called Pala. Pala culture had been formed a few generations earlier by two men—a pious Indian adept in Tantric forms of Buddhism and Hinduism and by a scientifically enlightened Scottish doctor. The culture thus embodied both a literal friendship between and a consequent synthesis of Tantric Asia, with its lingams, deities, and yogas, and Western rationalism, with its humanism, psychology and science.
Farnaby quickly learns that Pala’s two principle educational practices involve a contemplative form of sexuality called maithuna (the Tantric term for sexual intercourse) and the ingestion of a psychedelic mushroom the inhabitants called moksha (the traditional Sanskrit word for “spiritual liberation”). The sexual practice, which was also consciously modeled on the Oneida community of nineteenth-century America and its ideal of male continence (a form of extended sexual intercourse without ejaculation), functioned as both a contemplative technique and as an effective means of birth control. The psychedelic practice initiated the young islanders into metaphysical wisdom, that is, into the empirical realization that their true selves could not be identified with their little social egos, which were understood to be necessary but temporary “filters” of a greater cosmic consciousness.
The novel meanders lovingly through and around both this maithuna and this moksha—which are manifestly the real point and deepest story of the novel—as the Rani or Queen Mother of Pala and her sexually repressed homosexual son, Murugan, take the utopian island further and further toward Westernization, industrialization, capitalism, and a finally violent fundamentalism organized around notions of “the Ideal of Purity,” “the Crusade of the Spirit,” and “God’s Avatars” (the Queen liked to capitalize things). The ending is as predictable as it is depressing: the forces of righteousness and religion win out over those of natural sensuality, pantheism, and erotic wisdom.
Strikingly, virtually all the markers of the later Esalen gnosis are present on Huxley’s “imagined” utopian island. Laura Huxley’s observation about her late husband’s rejection of organized religion, for example, are played out in full. “We have no established church,” one of the islanders explains, “and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires.” Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” The islanders even integrated this religion of no religion into their agricultural affairs: the scarecrows in the fields were thus made to look like a Future Buddha and a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated the scarecrow-puppets with strings to scare off the birds could learn that “all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.” Altered states, of course, were also central to Pala’s culture through the moksha-medicine, and the techniques of Tantra were omnipresent in their sexual lives. Perhaps most strikingly, Huxley saw very clearly that Zen, Taoism, and Tantra were all related expressions of a deeper transcultural gnosis or supertradition—what he called “the new conscious Wisdom.” More astonishingly still, he even linked this supertradition to the scientific insights of Darwinian evolution and proposed that the latter should now be realized through conscious contemplative practice in a way that uncannily foreshadows Murphy’s own “evolutionary Tantra.”
Somehow, Aldous knew what Esalen would come to know. And then he died. An earthquake struck Big Sur that day.
Gerald Heard and the Evolutionary Energies of Lust Gerald Heard also played a significant role in the founding of Esalen. It was his charismatic presence and advice that finally tipped the scales for Murphy and Price and pushed them to jump in. Heard would also go on to give no less than four separate seminars in the early years. Appropriately, Anderson actually begins his Upstart Spring with Heard and has this to say about the writer’s influence on the two young men: “Huxley had so diffidently advocated a research project, had so hesitantly suggested its revolutionary possibilities. He thought something of that sort might happen. Heard thought it had to happen.”
Murphy has reminisced about his and Price’s first four-hour visit with Heard and its profound effects on him in both a brief essay titled “Totally on Fire” and in various personal communications with me. He described Heard as “archetypally Irish, like a big leprechaun, with red hair and flashing eyes,” and as “tremendously charismatic.” He also spoke of that original meeting with Heard as a real “tipping point” in his life, comparable to those first few class lectures with Spiegelberg. In the essay, moreover, he mentions Heard’s institutional presence in California, particularly his founding of Trabuco College, a small quasi-monastic educational experiment that lasted five years (1942û47) before Heard turned it over to the Vedanta Society of Southern California in 1949, as well as his strong presence in the Sequoia Seminars on the San Francisco peninsula. Both Trabuco and the Sequoia Seminars were clear precedents for Esalen.
So were a number of Heard’s ideas. Murphy was reading Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time and The Human Venture just before he and Price met him in 1961. Murphy is clear that Heard was not a significant intellectual influence on his own thought, but he also points out that the connections were real ones. Hence the Fire. Heard, for example, was very conversant in psychical research. Indeed, he had spent ten years working closely with the Society for Psychical Research in London (1932û42). Like Murphy, he had also lost his Christian faith over the convincing truths of science. Indeed, in his late twenties, he appears to have experienced a nervous breakdown over this intellectual revolution. But like Murphy again, Heard returned to a transformed faith refashioned around a new evolutionary mysticism. Physical evolution of the human species, Heard believes, has ceased, but human consciousness is still evolving; indeed, with the advent of the human species and the awakening of the human psyche through civilization, the evolutionary process has actually quickened and, perhaps most importantly, become conscious of itself. And here Murphy finds connection with Heard’s thought: “Part of his vision that appealed to me was seeing the mystical life in an evolutionary context, which put him squarely on par with Aurobindo.”
Heard had also written about the spiritual potentials of mind-altering drugs (like Huxley), about the complementarity of science and religion, even about UFO phenomena—all topics that would reappear at Esalen. And indeed, his books, rather like the UFOs, seem to swarm with strange and charming speculations, like the utterly preposterous and yet oddly attractive idea that the European witchcraft trials had eliminated a large gene pool of real psychical faculties, but that the centuries had since replaced the pool and we are now on the verge of a new “rare stock” of gifted souls endowed with evolutionary powers. All we need now is a small community, an esoteric subculture, to nurture and protect the gifted. In a talk at Esalen in 1963, he wondered out loud whether Esalen might become such an occult school. Another X-Men scenario.
Whatever one makes of such a claim, one thing seems clear enough: Heard knew what he was saying was heretical. He was aligning himself and his friends, after all, with the genes of witches. He was certainly as hard on religious orthodoxy as Spiegelberg had been. Heard could thus admit that humanity may have once needed its gods to keep in touch with the subconscious (and it was this same subconscious that supplied “the basis and force of the religious conviction” for him). Still, such anthropomorphic religions have now taken on largely “degenerative forms” that are hopelessly out of date with our science and psychology. It is time to move on, to evolve.
Finally, Heard, like his fellow British expatriate and brother Vedantist, Christopher Isherwood, was quite clear about his homosexuality. In other words, two of the three British expatriates (Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood) were self-described homosexuals, even if they chose to express this sexual-spiritual orientation in very different ways. Isherwood wrote openly about his own active homosexuality, his (failed) attempts at celibacy, and his sexuality’s defining effect on his devotional relationship to the tradition’s founding saint, Sri Ramakrishna, who he suspected (correctly) was also homoerotic in both his spiritual and sexual orientations.
Heard chose a different path. In Pain, Sex and Time he wrote about the oddly abundant energies of pain and lust in the human species as reservoirs of evolutionary energy and explored the possibilities of consciously controlling, channeling, and using this energy to cooperate with evolution and so enlarge the aperture of consciousness, to implode through space-time. Interestingly, when Heard turned to a historical sketch of these energetic techniques in the West, he began with Asia and various Tantric techniques of arresting the orgasm to alter consciousness and transcend time. Tantric Asia, in other words, functioned as something of an archetypal model for Heard in his search for a type of asceticism that was not life-denying but consciously erotic, a lifestyle that could embrace the evolutionary energies sparkling in sex, build them up through discipline, and then ride their spontaneous combustions into higher and higher states of consciousness and energy.
These Tantric moments reappear repeatedly throughout his writings. In one of his last books, for example, The Five Ages of Man (his forty-seventh book), he included an appendix: “On the Evidence for an Esoteric Mystery Tradition in the West and Its Postponement of Social Despair.” Once again, he begins a Western historical sketch not with the West, but with Tantra. Tantra, he tells us here, is the esoteric tradition of India that was subsequently persecuted and censored by both a puritan Islam and a prudish Brahmanism. Such a persecution of the mystical as the erotic was even more extreme in the West, where the esoteric often functioned as a kind of spiritual-sexual underground. Hence Heard’s reflections on an already familiar painting, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights as explored by Wilhelm Fränger. Much like Henry Miller before him, Heard celebrates Fränger. Not that he does not have his own contribution to make: “Here, too,” he writes with reference to the same painting, “are unmistakable Tantra pictures of the rousing of Kundalini.”
He was even more explicit in his private letters. In one letter to W. J. H. Sprott (a gay friend loosely involved with the Bloomsbury group), Heard playfully describes the yogic practices of drawing water up through the anus and penis. He recounts in rather flip terms how the kundalini comes out “through the top of your sutures” (that is, the top of the skull), and then jokes of Tantra’s use of sexual-spiritual double meanings: “Or on the other hand you may take the left hand path and continue talking through your hat instead of getting out of your head.” And that was not all. “You realize,” Heard goes on, “that nearly every Tibetan Saint is a homosexual.” As for Heard himself, his own “pretty theory,” “rather wilder than any before” involved fetishism as the “true way to sublimation.” It was a version of this that he promised Sprott to read someday at the Hares Strip and Fuck Society. Bawdy laughter and real insight are impossible to distinguish in such moments, and it is the private letter, the secret talk, not the published text, that most reveals.
In midlife, probably around 1935, Heard seems to have followed his own speculations about the evolutionary sublimation of erotic energies (just after he began “turning East,” around 1932û33). He quite intentionally chose a celibate lifestyle and lived with his Platonic life-partner and personal secretary Michael Barrie. But he certainly never gave up his belief in the evolutionary potentials of sexual desire and the mystical privileges of homosexuality. Thus in the mid to late 1950s, he wrote, under the pseudonymn of D. B. Vest, about homosexuality as a potent spiritual force that might have some important role in the evolution of human consciousness. Two such essays appeared in One: The Homosexual Magazine as “A Future for the Isophyl” and “Evolution’s Next Step,” and a third would appear in Homophile Studies: One Institute Quarterly as “Is the Isophyl a Biological Variant?” Both the former magazine’s title (“One”) and its Carlyle motto (“a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one”) strongly suggest Heard’s own Vedantic monistic metaphysics and mystical reading of homosexuality.
Heard’s mature homosexuality, however, was also “made sublime,” a kind of homoeroticism alchemically transmuted into a metaphysical force. Those who knew Heard often commented on these related ascetic and charismatic qualities of his personal presence (though seldom on the erotic dimensions that he himself consistently identified). His austerity was as palpable as his charisma. Indeed, Heard’s major differences with Swami Prabhavananda of the Hollywood Vedanta Society involved his strong criticisms of the Swami’s “moral lapses,” such as enjoying an occasional smoke and a nightly drink. Scandalous indeed.
Enter Hunter Thompson (1961) Murphy and Price had already arrived at Big Sur Hot Springs before they met Heard and decided to found a new institution. When they arrived in their red Jeep pick-up in April of 1961, they found what can only be called a surreal mixture of people and worldviews. Murphy and Price pulled in late, well after dark. It was not a terribly auspicious first night. Murphy reports waking up in the middle of the night in the Big House to an angry young man pointing a gun at him: “Who the hell are you, and what are ya’ doing here?”
Enter Hunter Thompson. Bunny Murphy, Michael Murphy’s grandmother, had hired a young, billy-club-toting Thompson to guard the property and keep order. Unfortunately, she had neglected to tell her zealous guard that her grandson and friend were coming down to stay that night. Thompson, a young aspiring writer still finding his voice, had arrived to seek out the presence and inspiration of Dennis Murphy, Mike’s younger brother, whose literary work he deeply admired. Dennis had published a very successful novel in 1958, The Sergeant (about a homosexual affair in the U.S. Army), which had won the acclaim of John Steinbeck and would eventually be made into a Hollywood movie starring Rod Steiger, for which he would write the screenplay.
In 1967 Hunter Thompson published his first book, Hell’s Angels, and went on to create Gonzo journalism, a new style of American literature. Gary Trudeau immortalized his place in American literary culture as Duke in his Doonesbury series, but this would all happen later. At this point in 1961, Thompson was a young man of twenty-two living in the Big House and making copious notes in the margins of Dennis Murphy’s The Sergeant, learning the art of the pen, the sentence, and the turn of the phrase.
Thompson was hardly the only colorful character on the Murphy property, though. The folksinger Joan Baez lived in one of the cabins, where she often gave small concerts. The guest hotel on the grounds, moreover, was being managed by a certain Mrs. Webb, a fervent Evangelical Christian who had hired her fellow church members from the First Church of God of Prophecy to help her manage the day-to-day running of the place, which they leased from Bunny on a month-to-month basis. The bar, on the other hand, was patronized by what Price and Murphy called the Big Sur Heavies, locals known for their rough manners, their penchant for marijuana (which they grew in the mountains), and their quasi-criminal (or just criminal) tendencies. Then there were the baths, frequented on most weekends by homosexual men who would drive down from San Francisco or up from Los Angeles to gather in the hot waters and explore the limits of sensual pleasure. These men had even developed a kind of simple Morse code to help them manage their sexual activities: on the path leading down to the baths they would post a guard, who would switch on a blinking light at the baths to signal to the bathing lovers the approach of straight people coming down the path. Anderson paints the following humorous picture with his usual verve: “And so it went through the spring and summer of 1961: sodomy in the baths, glossolalia in the lodge, fistfights in the parking lot, folk music in the cabins, meditation in the Big House.”
Bunny had long turned down her grandson’s repeated requests to hand the grounds over to him. She was particularly concerned that Michael would “give it away to the Hindoos.” But things were getting out of hand at Big Sur Hot Springs, and she would soon change her mind after events that have since become legendary. Much of it, unsurprisingly with hindsight, revolved around Hunter Thompson.
Thompson, it turns out, sometimes picked verbal fights with the homosexual bathers. One night, he returned to the property with his girlfriend and two hitchhiking soldiers from Fort Ord (a base just north of Monterey). Thinking it was safe to go down to the baths in such a crowd, Thompson ventured down the dark path. But some of the bathers jumped him, the soldiers and his girlfriend ran away, and Thompson was left alone to slug it out. As the story goes, most of the slugging was done by the bathers. The men beat Thompson up and came very close to throwing him off the cliff that night. Bloodied and bruised, he got back to his room in the Big House, where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open.
Not long after this incident, Bunny would read one of Thompson’s early published essays in Rogue magazine, “Big Sur: The Tropic of Henry Miller,” in which he described the folks of Big Sur as “expatriates, ranchers, out-and-out bastards, and genuine deviates.” Such language did not go down well with Bunny. She may have been in her eighties, but she was also tough. According to Anderson, she then “made one of her rare trips down to Big Sur, in her black Cadillac with her Filipino chauffeur, for the specific purpose of firing Thompson.” Exit Hunter Thompson.
The Night of the Dobermans Then in October came what is known in Esalen legend as the Night of the Dobermans. Thompson may have been gone, but the baths remained in the control of the gay men. Things had gotten so out of control that even Dennis Murphy’s friend Jack Kerouac looked askance. If this veritable archetype of the American Beat scene, so immune to the pettiness and damning comforts of middle-America, could visit and leave the Hot Spring baths disgusted with their moral and fluid state (he saw a dead otter bobbing in the waves and sperm floating in his bath), clearly, something had to be done.
It was not always like this. When Henry Miller wrote about Esalen’s homosexual bathers in the late 1950s, it was with real affection and a certain playful humor. For Miller at least, these were elegant artists and dancers who belonged to that “ancient order of hermaphrodites.” They reminded him of “the valiant Spartans—just before the battle of Thermopylae.” He doubted, though, that “the Slade’s Springs type would be ready to die to the last man. (æIt’s sort of silly, don’t you think?’)” That was in 1957. Things were different now. These men were acting much more like Miller’s imagined Spartans. They were ready to fight.
Murphy and Price began by erecting a gated steel fence around the baths and announcing that they would be closed from now on at 8:00 p.m.—not exactly a popular move. One night they walked down the path to close the gate and encountered a group of men who simply refused to leave. Everyone knew what had happened to Hunter. Murphy and Price returned to the lodge to gather the troops, which in the end amounted to five people, including Joan Baez and three Doberman pinschers. The dogs, it turns out, were the key. As the small band walked down the path, the three dogs began to bark viciously at each other as the owner yelled, “Choke him! Choke him!” It was all the group could do to keep the dogs apart. When the growling and snarling group finally arrived at the baths, the place was completely empty. Cars were starting and lights could be seen in the parking lot as the men made their anxious retreat. Later that evening, as Murphy walked around the property, he noticed a young couple kissing in the moonlight up on the highway. For Murphy, Anderson reports, the young couple synchronistically signaled a shift in the atmosphere and a new day (and night) at Esalen.
The proverbial guard had now literally changed. Mrs. Webb and the charismatic Christians would soon leave. The baths were no longer synonymous with the rowdy gay men of the cities. There was a meditating American yogi and an aspiring Buddhist shaman-healer on the grounds. And Joan was still singing in her cabin. Big Sur Hot Springs was on its way to becoming, as the white wooden sign still says, “Esalen Institute by Reservation Only.”
Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 85-97 of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
©2007, 588 pages, 32 halftones, 1 color plate
Cloth $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-45369-9 (ISBN-10: 0-226-45369-3)
For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Esalen.
SRI, Marilyn Ferguson and THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY In the spring of 1980, a book appeared called The Aquarian Conspiracy that put itself forward as a manifesto of the counterculture. Defining the counterculture as the conscious embracing of irrationality -- from rock and drugs to biofeedback, meditation, "consciousness-raising," yoga, mountain climbing, group therapy, and psychodrama. The Aquarian Conspiracy declares that it is now time for the 15 million Americans involved in the counterculture to join in bringing about a "radical change in the United States."
Writes author Marilyn Ferguson: "While outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement; its atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. It -- this movement -- is a conspiracy!"1
Ferguson used a half-truth to tell a lie. The counterculture is a conspiracy -- but not in the half-conscious way Ferguson claim -- as she well knows. Ferguson wrote her manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress.
That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.
The Model
The British had a precedent for the counterculture they imposed upon the United States: the pagan cult ceremonies of the decadent Egyptian and Roman Empires. The following description of cult ceremonies dating back to the Egyptian Isis priesthood of the third millennium B.C. could just as well be a journalistic account of a "hippy be-in" circa A.D. 1969: "The acts or gestures that accompany the incantations constitute the rite [of Isis). In these dances, the beating of drums and the rhythm of music and repetitive movements were helped by hallucinatory substances like hashish or mescal; these were consumed as adjuvants to create the trance and the hallucinations that were taken to he the visitation of the god. The drugs were sacred, and their knowledge was limited to the initiated . . . Possibly because they have the illusion of satisfied desires, and allowed the innermost feelings to escape, these rites acquired during their execution a frenzied character that is conspicuous in certain spells: "Retreat! Re is piercing thy head, slashing thy face, dividing thy head, crushing it in his hands; thy bones are shattered, thy limbs are cut to pieces!"
The counterculture that was foisted on the 1960s adolescent youth of America is not merely analogous to the ancient cult of Isis. It is a literal resurrection of the cult down to the popularization of the Isis cross (the "peace symbol") as the counterculture's most frequently used symbol.
The High Priesthood
The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. At the very point that these dynasties -- the "thousand year Reich" of the Egyptian pharaohs, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire -- succeed in imposing their rule over the entire face of the earth, they tend to decline. Toynbee argued that this decline could be abated if the ruling oligarchy (like that of the British Roundtable) would devote itself to the recruitment and training of an ever-expanding priesthood dedicated to the principles of imperial rule.3
Trained at Toynbee's Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a Dionysian cult comprised of the children of Britain's Roundtable elite.4 Among the other initiates were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir Oswald Mosley, and D.H. Lawrence, Huxley's homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence's pornographic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it was a misunderstood "work of art."
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government."
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as " a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism.
Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War. In 1886, Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and several other Bulwer-Lytton proteges formed the Isis-Urania Temple of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. This Isis Cult was organized around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by Madame Helena Blavatsky, in which the Russian occultist called for the British aristocracy to organize itself into an Isis priesthood.7
The subversive Isis Urania Order of the Golden Dawn is today an international drug ring said to be controlled by the Canadian multi-millionaire, Maurice Strong, who is also a top operative for British Intelligence.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
Huxley founded a nest of Isis cults in southern California and in San Francisco, that consisted exclusively of several hundred deranged worshipers of Isis and other cult gods. Isherwood, during the California period, translated and propagated a number of ancient Zen Buddhist documents, inspiring Zen-mystical cults along the way.
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India.
LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods'
"Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own 'acid.' "9
The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was developed in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz A.B. -- a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.G. Warburg. While precise documentation is unavailable as to the auspices under which the LSD research was commissioned, it can be safely assumed that British intelligence and its subsidiary U.S. Office of Strategic Services were directly involved. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA when that agency began MK-Ultra, was the OSS station chief in Berne, Switzerland throughout the early Sandoz research. One of his OSS assistants was James Warburg, of the same Warburg family, who was instrumental in the 1963 founding of the Institute for Policy Studies, and worked with both Huxley and Robert Hutchins."
Aldous Huxley returned to the United States from Britain, accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the Huxleys' private physician. Osmond had been part of a discussion group Huxley had organized at the National Hospital, Queens Square, London. Along with another seminar participant, J.R. Smythies, Osmond wrote Schizophrenia: A New Approach, in which he asserted that mescaline -- a derivative of the mescal cactus used in ancient Egyptian and Indian pagan rites -- produced a psychotic state identical in all clinical respects to schizophrenia. On this basis, Osmond and Smythies advocated experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs as a means of developing a "cure" for mental disorders.
Osmond was brought in by Allen Dulles to play a prominent role in MK-Ultra. At the same time, Osmond, Huxley, and the University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins held a series of secret planning sessions in 1952 and 1953 for a second, private LSD mescaline project under Ford Foundation funding.11 Hutchins, it will be recalled, was the program director of the Ford Foundation during this period. His LSD proposal incited such rage in Henry Ford II that Hutchins was fired from the foundation the following year.
It was also in 1953 that Osmund gave Huxley a supply of mescaline for his personal consumption. The next year, Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, the first manifesto of the psychedelic drug cult, which claimed that hallucinogenic drugs "expand consciousness." Although the Ford Foundation rejected the Hutchins-Huxley proposal for private foundation sponsorship of LSD, the proposal was not dropped. Beginning in 1962, the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, California began a four-year experiment in LSD, peyote, and marijuana. The Rand Corporation was established simultaneously with the reorganization of the Ford Foundation during 1949. Rand was an outgrowth of the wartime Strategic Bombing Survey, a "cost analysis" study of the psychological effects of the bombings of German population centers.
According to a 1962 Rand Abstract, W.H. McGlothlin conducted a preparatory study on "The Long-Lasting Effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes in Normals: An Experimental Proposal." The following year, McGlothlin conducted a year-long experiment on thirty human guinea pigs, called "Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes and Performance." The study concluded that LSD improved emotional attitudes and resolved anxiety problems.12
Huxley At Work
Huxley expanded his own LSD-mescaline project in California by recruiting several individuals who had been initially drawn into the cult circles he helped establish during his earlier stay. The two most prominent individuals were Alan Watts and the late Dr. Gregory Bateson (the former husband of Dame Margaret Mead). Watts became a self-styled "guru" of a nationwide Zen Buddhist cult built around his well-publicized books. Bateson, an anthropologist with the OSS, became the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Under Bateson's auspices, the initiating "cadre" of the LSD cult -- the hippies -- were programmed.
Watts at the same time founded the Pacifica Foundation, which sponsored two radio station WKBW in San Francisco and WBM-FM in New York City. The Pacifica stations were among the first to push the "Liverpool Sound" -- the British-imported hard rock twanging of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Animals. They would later pioneer "acid rock" and eventually the self-avowed psychotic "punk rock."
During the fall of 1960, Huxley was appointed visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Around his stay in that city, Huxley created a circle at Harvard parallel to his West Coast LSD team. The Harvard group included Huxley, Osmund, and Watts (brought in from California), Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert.
The ostensible topic of the Harvard seminar was "Religion and its Significance in the Modern Age." The seminar was actually a planning session for the "acid rock" counterculture. Huxley established contact during this Harvard period with the president of Sandoz, which at the time was working on a CIA contract to produce large quantities of LSD and psilocybin (another synthetic hallucinogenic drug) for MK-Ultra, the CIA's official chemical warfare experiment. According to recently released CIA documents, Allen Dulles purchased over 100 million doses of LSD -- almost all of which flooded the streets of the United States during the late 1960s. During the same period, Leary began privately purchasing large quantities of LSD from Sandoz as well.
From the discussions of the Harvard seminar, Leary put together the book The Psychedelic Experience, based on the ancient cultist Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was this book that popularized Osmund's previously coined term, "psychedelic mind-expanding."
The Roots of the Flower People
Back in California, Gregory Bateson had maintained the Huxley operation out of the Palo Alto VA hospital. Through LSD experimentation on patients already hospitalized for psychological problems, Bateson established a core of "initiates" into the "psychedelic" Isis Cult.
Foremost among his Palo Alto recruits was Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of "SD to Kesey. By 1962, Kesey had completed a novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which popularized the notion that society is a prison and the only truly "free" people are the insane.
Kesey subsequently organized a circle of "SD initiates called "The Merry Pranksters." They toured the country disseminating SD" (often without forewarning the receiving parties), building up local distribution connections, and establishing the pretext for a high volume of publicity on behalf of the still minuscule "counterculture."
By 1967, the Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of "SD that a sizable drug population had emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Here Huxley collaborator Bateson set up a "free clinic," staffed by **Dr. David Smith -- later a "medical adviser" for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML); **Dr. Ernest Dernberg an active-duty military officer, probably on assignment through MK-UItra; **Roger Smith-a street gang organizer trained by Saul Alinsky. During the Free Clinic period, Roger Smith was the parole officer of the cultist mass murderer Charles Manson; **Dr. Peter Bourne -- formerly President Carter's special assistant on drug abuse. Bourne did his psychiatric residency at the Clinic. He had previously conducted a profiling study of GI heroin addicts in Vietnam.
The Free Clinic paralleled a project at the Tavistock Institute, the psychological warfare agency for the British Secret Intelligence Service. Tavistock, founded as a clinic in London in the 1920s, had become the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II under its director, Dr. John Rawlings Rees.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.
cont. http://robertscourt.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-republicans-next-nazi-party-see.html
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The Foundation and Development of the Tavistock Institute to 1989
by Eric Trist and Hugh Murray
THE FORMATIVE YEARS
THE SEQUEL
GENERAL OUTCOMES
The Founding Tradition
Division Into Two Groups
Type C Organizations
Post-War Transformation
The Matrix
Three Research Perspectives
Achieving a Working Identity
The International Network
References
THE FORMATIVE YEARS
The Founding Tradition
Pre-War Antecedents
After the fall of France in I94I, the Royal Air Force, by winning the Battle of Britain, prevented German invasion of the British Isles. The evacuation from the Dunkirk beaches prevented the capture of the core of the regular army, including many of the generals who were later to distinguish themselves. There was, therefore, a chance to fight again but there was no land army of any size to do so. It was thus imperative that Britain build a large land army in a hurry. Attempts to meet this need created immense problems in the utilization of human resources (problems far more severe for the army than for the other services), but no measures tried in the first few months seemed to be effective.
In I94I a group of psychiatrists at the Tavistock Clinic saw that the right questions were asked in Parliament in order to secure the means to try new measures. As a result they were asked to join the Directorate of Army Psychiatry, and did so as a group.
To understand how such a small group was able to be so influential, we must go back to the period immediately after World War I when there was a growing recognition that neurotic disabilities were not merely transitory phenomena related to the stress of war, but were endemic and pervasive in a modern society. In order to respond to the 'felt social need' thus arising, the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology (better known as the Tavistock Clinic), the parent body of the post-World War II Institute, was founded in I920 as a voluntary outpatient clinic to explore the implications for treatment and research.
The founding group comprised many of the key doctors who had been concerned with neurosis in World War I. They included general physicians and neurologists, as well as psychiatrists, and one or two multiply-trained individuals who combined psychology and anthropology with medicine. The group, therefore, showed from the beginning the preparedness to be linked to the social sciences and to general medicine, as well as to psychiatry, which has characterized it ever since.
Interest focussed on the then new 'dynamic psychologies' as representing the direction which offered most hope. Because of the uncertain and confused state of knowledge in these fields, tolerance of different viewpoints was part of the undertaking and the Tavistock Clinic functioned as a mediating institution, a clearing-house where the views of several contending parties could be aired. On the one hand were the adherents of Freud, Jung and Adler, who were preoccupied with establishing their own professional societies and advancing their own theories. On the other were a neurologically-oriented general psychiatry, a somatically-oriented general medicine and a surrounding society puzzled, bewildered, intrigued and frightened by the new knowledge of the unconscious and its implications for important areas of life.
Since 'authoritarian' government of the medical kind in a pathfinding organization such as the Tavistock Clinic proved dysfunctional, a transition to a collegiate professional democracy took place in the early I930s, when problems arising from the Depression shook many cherished beliefs and raised new questions concerning the role of social factors in psychological illness. This organizational revolution brought to the front a younger generation of clinicians with a level of ability and a maverick quality that would otherwise have been lost.*
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*The staff now elected as their Director Jack Rawlings Rees, grouped around whom were Henry Dicks, Ronald Hargreaves, Tommy Wilson and Wilfred Bion, all of whom subsequently made world-wide reputations. They would have left the Tavistock had it not been for the opportunities opened up by the organizational revolution.
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This younger group now began to take on a conceptual direction consonant with the emergent 'object relations approach' in psychoanalysis. The object relations approach emphasized relationships rather than instinctual drives and psychic energy.
As Dicks's (I970) history (Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic) shows, there were great variations in the quality of the services offered by the pre-war Clinic. Among the 80 physicians who contributed six hours a week, many had little or no psychiatric training. Nevertheless, by the beginning of World War II the Tavistock had attained international standing. It had developed links with organizations in the main Commonwealth countries and the United States, and had undertaken systematic research and teaching. It had obtained peripheral academic standing in London University with six recognized teachers. The outbreak of war, however, prevented this arrangement from being implemented.
WAR-TIME BREAKTHROUGHS
The group who entered the Directorate of Army Psychiatry took a novel approach to the human resource problems facing the army. Rather than remain in base hospitals they went out into the field to find out from commanding officers what they saw as their most pressing problems. They would listen to their troubled military clients as an analyst would to a patient, believing that the 'real' problems would surface as trust became established, and that constructive ideas about dealing with them would emerge. The concept thence arose of 'command' psychiatry, in which a psychiatrist with a roving commission was attached to each of the five Army Commanders in Home Forces.
A relationship of critical importance was formed between the Clinic's Ronald Hargreaves, as command psychiatrist, and Sir Ronald Adam, the Army Commander in Northern Command. When Adam became Adjutant General, the second highest post in the army, he was able to implement policies that Hargreaves and he had adumbrated. New military institutions had to be created to carry them out. The institution-building process entailed:
Earning the right to be consulted on emergent problems for which there was no solution in traditional military rocedures, e.g., the problem of officer selection.
- Making preliminary studies to identify a path of solution - the investigation of morale in Officer Cadet Training Units.
- Designing a pilot model in collaboration with military personnel which embodied the required remedial measures - the Experimental War Office Selection Board.
- Handing over the developed model to military control with the psychiatric and psychological staff falling back into advisory roles or where possible removing themselves entirely - the War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs) and Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs) for repatriated prisoners of war.
- Disseminating the developed model, securing broad acceptance for it and training large numbers of soldiers to occupy the required roles, e.g., CRUs.
Undertaking practical tasks that sought to resolve operational crises generated insights that led toward new theory. This process was familiar to those members of the group who were practicing psychiatrists, but it was new to those coming from other disciplines. This led to a generalized concept of professionalism.
The innovations introduced during the war years consisted of a series of Òinventions:"
- Command psychiatry as a reconnaissance activity leading to the identification of critical problems.
- Social psychiatry as a policy science permitting preventive intervention in large scale problems.
- The co-creation with the military of new institutions to implement these policies.
- The therapeutic community as a new mode of treatment.
- Cultural psychiatry for the analysis of the enemy mentality.
Post-War Transformation
OPERATION PHOENIX
New questions now arose. Who would be the next pioneers? Who would accept the risks, which were great? Could a setting be found that could nurture the new endeavors? An answer to these questions came about in the following way.
Toward the end of the war the existence of a democratic tradition in the Tavistock Clinic made possible the election by the whole staff (through a postal ballot) of an Interim Planning Committee (IPC) to consider the future of the organization. The election gave power to those who had led the work in the Army.* The IPC began meeting in
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*The six elected members were J.R. Rees, who was later to found the World Federation of Mental Health; Leonard Browne, who became a prominent Alderman in the London County Council; Henry Dicks, who founded the field of cultural psychiatry; Ronald Hargreaves, who became Deputy Director of the World Health Organization; Mary Luff, who retired after the war; and Tommy Wilson, who became Chairman of the Tavistock Institute. The IPC met twice a week for two or three hours in the evenings. There were rarely any absentees. The group co-opted two people not previously at the Clinic - Jock Sutherland, a psychiatrist, who was to become Director of the post-war Clinic, and Eric Trist, a social psychologist, who was later to succeed Wilson as the Institutes Chairman. Both had played prominent parts in the war-time developments.
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the autumn of I945 to work out a redefinition of the Clinic's mission in light of the experiences gained during the war. The IPC was chaired by Wilfred Bion, who used his new findings about groups to clarify issues and reduce conflicts within the planning group itself. Council approved its report by the end of that year.
The IPC made a crucial decision in recognition of an impending political event - the then new Labour Government's intimation that it would in I948 create a National Health Service. The IPC resolved:
- To build up the Clinic to enter the National Health Service fully equipped with the kind of staff who could be entrusted with the task of discovering the role of out-patient psychiatry, based on a dynamic approach and oriented towards the social sciences, in the as yet unknown setting of a national health service.
- Separately to incorporate the Institute of Human Relations for the study of wider social problems not accepted as in the area of mental health.
The Rockefeller grant led to the birth of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, constituted at first as a division of the Tavistock Clinic. With these funds it became possible to obtain for the then joint organization a nucleus of full-time senior staff who would otherwise have been scattered in universities and hospitals throughout the country and abroad.
A Professional Committee (PC), with Rees in the chair, and a small Technical Executive representing the new permanent staff, chaired by Bion, came into existence in February I946. These arrangements lasted until the separate incorporation of the Institute in September I947. The situation required the transformation of a large part-time staff, appropriate for the pre-war Clinic as a voluntary out-patient hospital, into a small nucleus of full-timers, supported by others giving substantial proportions of their time, and committed to the redefined mission of the post-war organization. Decisions were taken as to who should stay, who should leave and who should be added. Criteria included willingness to participate in the redefined social mission and to undergo psychoanalysis if they had not already done so. This critical episode became known as Operation Phoenix.*
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*In addition to Sutherland and Trist, a number of other outsiders who had played prominent roles in the war-time effort, were brought in at this point. John Bowlby, a child psychiatrist and analyst, was made head of what he came to call the Department for Children and Parents. (The other senior psychiatrists appointed to the Clinic were all from the wider Tavistock group.) Elliott Jaques, a young Canadian psychiatrist and psychologist, was invited to join the Institute and played a prominent role during the five years he stayed.
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As regards the requirement for psychoanalysis, it was felt that object relations theory had proved its relevance during the war in the social as well as the clinical field. It represented the most advanced body of psychological knowledge then available which could provide a common foundation for those who would in various ways be continuing, in the peace, the work begun under war conditions.
Training would be in the hands of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and social applications in the hands of the Institute. This understanding equilibrated relations between the two bodies. The Society agreed to provide training analysts for acceptable candidates, whether they were going to become fulltime analysts, mix psychoanalytic practice with broader endeavors in the health field or use psychoanalytic understanding outside the health area in organizational and social projects. The Society, therefore, recognized the relevance for psychoanalysis of work in the social field, while the Institute affirmed the importance of psychoanalysis for psycho-soclal studies. In this way some I5 individuals, some in the Clinic and some in the Institute, most of them in mid-life, undertook personal psychoanalysis as part of the enterprise of building the new Tavistock. It was a major 'experiment,' the outcome of which could not be known for a number of years.
The PC now faced painful tasks. When the decisions stemming from Operation Phoenix began to be implemented, a great deal of guilt developed over the termination of most of the pre-war staff who in one way or another did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the post-war body. An abdication crisis ensued. The PC agreed to stay in power only after a searching self-examination that enabled them to separate task-oriented factors from the tangle of personal feelings. Tension and confusion developed throughout the entire organization. Bion resigned as Chairman of the Technical Executive and restricted himself to the role of social therapist to an overall staff group that held weekly meetings to work through these matters. Without them the post-war organization could scarcely have survived its conflicts. Our first experiment with group methods was on ourselves.
THE JOINT ORGANIZATION
In preparing to enter the National Health Service (NHS) the Clinic had to develop therapeutic methods that would allow the maintenance of a patient load sufficiently large to satisfy the new authorities that out-patient psychotherapy could be cost effective. War-time experience suggested that the best prospect would lie in group treatment. Accordingly, the PC asked Bion, considering his special achievements in this field, to pioneer this endeavor. His response was to put up a notice which became celebrated - "You can have group treatment now or wait a year for individual treatment." The groups he started, however, were not only patient groups but groups with industrial managers and with people from the educational world. He was developing a general method reflected in a series of papers in Human Relations (Bion, I948-5I), which put forward entirely new theory. By the time the Clinic entered the NHS most of the psychiatrists were taking groups, though none used precisely BionÕs methods.
Meanwhile, in the Department for Children and Parents, Bowlby laid the foundations of family therapy (Vol. I, ÒThe Reduction of Group Tensions in the FamilyÓ). Also at this time he began his world famous studies of mother/child separation.
Another major and still continuing enterprise that began during this early period emerged from a crisis in the Family Welfare Association (FWA), which co-ordinated family case work in the London area. The coming of the welfare state rendered unnecessary its task of dispensing material aid to the poor. Its offices were now besieged by clients with social and emotional problems with which its staff were unable to deal. Through Wilson (I949) the Institute was consulted. An attempt to train FWA staff proved unsuccessful. The Institute therefore set up within its own boundary what was called the Family Discussion Bureau (FDB), which later became the Institute for Marital Studies (IMS). This created the first non-medical channel in Britain for professional work with families. In time it was supported by the government through the Home Office.
Michael Balint, one of the senior analysts at the Clinic, introduced a group method of training family welfare workers in which stress was laid on making them aware of their counter-transferences: their projections of their own problems onto their clients. Balint later developed these methods for training large numbers of health professionals, including general physicians (Balint, I954). This allowed the Clinic to have a multiplier effect which, along with group treatment and the inauguration of family therapy, showed that what had been learnt in the Army about using scarce resources to meet the needs of large scale systems could be applied in the civilian society in entirely new ways.
Hostility to the Institute's work, however, developed in the academic world. The Medical Research Council dismissed the first draft of the WOSB write-up as being of only historical, not scientific, interest. No further funds were granted.
Several strategic moves were nevertheless made to establish the Tavistock's academic claims. There was very little chance at that time of getting much of its work accepted by existing journals. A new journal was needed that would manifest the connection between field theory and object-relations psychoanalysis. With LewinÕs group in the U.S., the Research Center for Group Dynamics, now at the University of Michigan, the Institute created a new international journal, Human Relations, whose purpose was to further the integration of psychology and the social sciences and relate theory to practice.
In I947 a publishing company - Tavistock Publications - was founded, which in the longer run succeeded in finding a home in a major publishing house (the Sweet and Maxwell Group) while retaining its own imprint. A joint library was also established with the Clinic that provided the best collection of books and journals then available in London in the psycho- and socio-dynamic fields. This was needed for teaching as well as research purposes. John Rickman, a senior analyst closely associated with the Tavistock, said that there should be no therapy without research and no research without therapy and that the Institute should offer training in all the main areas of its work.
By the time the Institute was separately incorporated there was a staff of eight with Wilson as chairman. Six of the eight had taken part in one or other of the war-time projects. The disciplines included psychology, anthropology, economics, education and mathematics.
Achieving a Working Identity
INDUSTRIAL ACTION RESEARCH
By I948 the British economy was in serious trouble. The pound had been devalued, productivity was low and there was a scarcity of capital for investment in new technology. The government formed an Industrial Productivity Committee which had a Human Factors Panel. This made grants for research aiming to secure improved productivity through better use of human resources.
The grants were for three years and were administered by the Medical Research Council. The Institute proposed three projects, all of which were accepted. The first focussed on internal relations within a single firm (from the board to the shop floor) with the aim of identifying means of improving cooperation between management and labor and also between levels of management; the second focussed on organizational innovations that could raise productivity; the third pioneered a new form of post-graduate education for field workers in applied social research.
A site for the first project was obtained in the London factories of a light engineering concern (the Glacier Metal Company) whose managing director had a special interest in the social sciences. The project, headed by Elliott Jaques, led to far-reaching changes in the organization and culture of the firm. A novel role was elaborated that enabled process consultation to take place across areas of conflict. Some radically new concepts were formulated such as the use of social structure as a defense against anxiety (Vol. I, 'On the Dynamics of Social Structure'). Jaques's (1951) book, The Changing Culture of a Factory, was the first major publication of the Institute after it became independent. While it was an immense success in the literature, being reprinted many times, no requests were received to continue this kind of work. As Jaques said at the time, the answer from the field was silence.
A component of the second project, under Erie Trist, led to the discovery of self-regulating work groups in a coal mine - the first intimation that a new paradigm of work might be emerging along the lines indicated by the Institute's work with groups. It opened up the study of 'Socio-Technical Systems' which has become world-wide.
The training program tor the six industrial fellows was for two years and experience based. All participated in a common project (the Glacier Project) while each took part in another Institute project. To gain direct experience of unconscious factors in group life each was placed in a therapy group. To gain experience of managing their own group life they met regularly with a staff member in attendance. Each had a personal tutor. After the first year they returned to their industries to see what new perceptions they had gained and reported on them to a meeting of Institute staff. They also attended regular staff seminars at which all projects were discussed. This was the first opportunity which the Institute had to apply its methods in training. It was, however, too experience based to receive favor at that time.
CONSULTANCY DEVELOPMENTS
With the ending of the government's Human Factors Panel, no further research funds were available from British sources. Though Rockefeller help continued, the Institute had to develop its work in the consultancy field and prove that it could pay its way by directly meeting client needs while at the same time furthering social science objectives.
Further work in the Socio-Technical field was arrested in the coal industry, but unexpected circumstances yielded an opportunity in India to work collaboratively with the Calico Mills, a subsidiary of Sarabhai Industries, in Ahmedabad. In view of his experience of the tropics, the MC selected A. K. Rice to go to India as the project officer. He proposed that a group of workers should take charge of a group of looms. The idea was taken up spontaneously by the workers in the automatic loom shed who secured management permission to try out a scheme of their own creation. This led to developments that continued for 25 years showing that the socio-technical concept was applicable in the culture of a very different kind of society.
Unilever had established a working relationship with the Institute immediately after the war. It was now expanding. It needed to recruit and train a large number of high caliber managers. The Chairman, Lord Heyworth, had been interested in the WOSBs and approached the Institute for assistance. The result was the joint development of the Unilever Companies' Management Development Scheme based on a modification of WOSB methods. This led to a still continuing collaborative relationship, with many ramifications, of which Harold Bridger has been the architect.
With the profusion of new products in the I950s, advertising agencies and the marketing departments of firms were under pressure to develop new methods for increasing sales. Motivation research had made its appearance but was narrowly conceived. One or two trial projects gave rise to a new concept which brought together Lewinian and psychoanalytic thinking - the pleasure foods region. This consisted of products of little or no nutritional value that were consumed, often in excess, because of their power to afford oral satisfactions which reduced anxiety and relieved stress.
Early studies by Menzies and Trist (I989) concerned ice cream and confectionery. Later studies by Emery (Emery et al., I968) and Ackoff and Emery (I972) concerned smoking and drinking. The smoking study identified the affect of distress, as formulated by Silvan Tomkins (I962), as a continuing negative state (as distinct from acute anxiety and depression) which required repeated relief such as smoking affords. The drinking study produced a new social theory of drinking behavior that distinguished between social, 'reparative' and indulgent drinking, only the last leading to alcoholism.
As regards the consultancy style that developed, the method was adopted of having two Institute staff attend the early meetings. This was both to obtain binocular vision and to show that the relationship was with an organization and not simply with an individual. With only one person, the dangers of transference and counter-transference would have been greater. A project officer was appointed. After the opening stage the second staff member remained largely outside the project so that a more objective appreciation could be made. Other staff were added as required by project assignments.
The funding crisis had proved a blessing in disguise. The Institute had now proved to itself that it could earn a substantial part of its living from private industry. Though it still needed support from foundations and government funding agencies, it was no longer completely dependent on them. It needed these funds to add a research dimension to projects that clients could not be expected to pay for and to cover the costs of writing up the results.
TOWARD AN OPTIMUM BALANCE
In I954 the Institute succeeded once more in obtaining research funds. A four-year grant enabled the socio-technical studies in the coal industry to be resumed through the government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) which administered counterpart US/UK funds that were part of the Marshall Plan. The Nuffield Foundation supported the research component of the family studies program, while the Home Office supported the operational part.
The most difficult funds to obtain were untied funds such as had been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. As no further grants of this kind were available, a development charge was added to all consultancy projects so that a special reserve could be built up to tide staff over between projects and to enable them to be taken out of the field to write up work that had already been done. It was felt that I5 percent of the Institute's income should be from untied funds. A much larger proportion - 35 percent - should be sought from foundations or government for specific long-range projects of a primarily research character, though the research would largely be action research. Experience in the consultancy field had now shown that long-range projects with serious social science outcome could be obtained of a kind too unconventional to be supported by foundations or governments. These could account for another 30 percent of income. Experience had also shown the value of short-range projects which could lead into new areas. The remaining 20 percent of income could best be generated by projects of this kind.
Another dimension concerned the sectors of society in which the projects would take place. The aim was to have work going on in more than one sector, though the larger proportion would be in industry. By I96I there were nine industrial projects and six in other sectors.
Separately categorized were projects related to the Clinic which was regarded solely as a treatment institution by the NHS. As originally intended, however, it was developing large research and training programs. These were financed by foundation grants, especially from the U.S., and were administered by the Institute through what was called the Research and Training Committee (RTC). Some of the Institute's own activities came into this area. The RTC succeeded in resolving conflicts as to which projects should be put forward for funding.
Among such Institute activities was a program to develop new projective tests and to train people in their use. This led during the I970s to the creation of the British Society for Projective Psychology through which a large number of clinical psychologists have been trained. New Tavistock tests which were widely adopted included Phillipson's Object Relations Technique. His book with R.D. Laing (Laing et al., I966), Interpersonal Perception, opened up fresh ground. A leading part in these developments was played by Theodora Alcock (I963), recognized world-wide as a Rorschach expert, who was kept on by the Institute when she reached the retiring age in the NHS. This path of development represents a pioneer effort that would not otherwise have taken place.
Of crucial importance was the duration of projects. Action research projects concerned with change tend to be long-range as they unfold in unpredictable ways. Projects lasting more than three years were regarded as being in the long-range category, those between I8 months and three years were considered medium-range, and those lasting six to I8 months short-range. A balance was needed between these types of duration. In addition, it was found advantageous to keep going a few very brief exploratory assignments as these sometimes opened up new areas and led to innovative developments which could not be foreseen.
In the industrial sector, Socio-Technical studies continued in the coal industry and then in industries with advanced technologies, both funded through DSIR. There was also a program of research on labor turnover, absence and sickness (Hill and Trist, I955: Vol. I, 'Temporary Withdrawal from Work'). Under conditions of full employment there was widespread concern about these phenomena. New theory and a new practical approach emerged.
Toward the end of the I950s problems of quite a new kind began to be brought to the Institute. They arose from changes taking place in the wider contextual environment and led to what has been called the socio-ecological perspective. These problems and the theories and methods to deal with them are encompassed in Volume III. The opportunities to build up this perspective came initially from exploratory projects with Bristol Siddeley Engines, the National FarmersÕ Union and a Unilever subsidiary in the food industry, all of which were facing major changes in their contextual environments. (These changes were not understood.)
As regards other social sectors, the work in family studies produced a major book by Elizabeth Bott (I957) entitled Family and Social Networks (Vol. I, II Conjugal Roles and Social NetworksÓ). This put the concept of network, as distinct from that of group, firmly on the social science map and generated a whole new literature. The Prison Commissioners asked the Tavistock to test the value of a scheme for greatly increasing time spent in "association," which had been successfully tried out in the Norwich local prison. A systematic action research study was carried out of its adaptation in Bristol. The prison officers' union, the inmates, and the staff immediately reporting to the Governor were all involved. This study, which broke new theoretical ground, was carried out by Emery (Vol. I, 'Freedom and Justice Within Walls'). Also during this time Dicks completed studies of the Russian national character at the Harvard Center for Russian Studies (Vol. I, 'Notes on the Russian National Character'). They were a sequel to his work on the German national character during World War II to which he returned in Licensed Mass Murder (Dicks, I972). These studies established a firm empirical base on which cultural psychology using psychoanalytic findings could develop.
Another development during this period was the creation, in collaboration with the University of Leicester, of a U.K. equivalent to the form of sensitivity training pioneered by the National Training Laboratories for Group Development in the United States. This is still continuing. An overall review of it is given by Miller in Vol. I, 'Experiential Learning in Groups (I/II)' Two other models were developed (Bridger, Vol. I, 'Courses and Working Conferences'; Higgin and Hjelholt, Vol. I, The Psycho-Dynamics of an InterGroup Experience), the idea being to experiment with alternative forms. These are also still evolving.
A basic pattern could now be discerned in the projects of the Institute:
- They were all responses to macro- or meta-problems emerging in the society with which the Institute, in Sommerhoff's (I950) terms, became directively correlated.
- Access to organizations struggling with meta-problems was initially obtained through networks of individuals who had come to know about the Institute's work during World War II. As time went on the initiating individuals became people with whom the Institute had made contact in the post-war period.
- There was not yet a wide appreciation of these emergent meta-problems so that the connections through which the Institute could become directively correlated with them were scarce and fragile. To discover the role of networks in this situation was new learning.
- The projects were carried out by interdisciplinary teams with the project officer having a second staff member as his consultant. Later on these teams became joint with internal groups in the client organization. Project reviews took place not so much in Institute seminars as in joint meetings with these internal groups.
- Though seminal projects might begin from short-term relations, those with the most significance as regards the advance of basic social scientific knowledge depended on very long relationships being maintained with client organizations or other sponsoring agencies. Change processes take time. They unfold in interactions between the system and its environment in complex ways which are not predictable. One is able to understand the course of a social process only so far as it has manifested itself and then only so far as one is able to stay with it.
- Clients actively collaborated with the Institute. The projects were joint enterprises of action research and social learning. No results were published without the agreement of all parties.
- Great stress was laid on 'working through' difficulties and conflicts by analogy with the psychoanalytic method. Not that interpretations of a psychoanalytic kind were directly made. Jaques called the process 'social analysis.' No standardized procedures, however, were established. Suitable interpretative languages had to evolve in different projects and some of the methods introduced were manufactured more by the clients than by the Institute.
- The aim was to build social science capabilities into organizations that they could then develop by and for themselves.
- Some of the innovations were ahead of their time, often by a number of years. There was little recognition of their significance and no short-term diffusion of the practices involved.
- New theory was as apt to be generated by research paid for by client organizations as by work paid for by research-funding agencies. One of the functions of the latter was to fund work in which organizations would be willing to collaborate operationally, but for the scientific analysis of which they were not yet willing to pay. There were, of course, other projects which could only be initiated if research funds were available.
- The aim was eventually to secure publication at a fully scientific level, but this had sometimes to be delayed for several years and sometimes never emerged at all. Those concerned were often understandably unwilling for work to be made public that described internal processes of a sensitive kind or led to changes the outcome of which could not be assessed for a long time.
Fred Emory
Frederick Edmund Emery, nick Fred, (27 August 1925 – 10 April 1997) was an Australian psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of Organizational development (OD), particularly in the development of theory around participative work design structures such as self-managing teams. He was widely regarded as one of the finest social scientists of his generation. His contribution to the theory and practice of organizational life will remain important well into the 21st century, particularly amongst those who feel uncomfortable with hierarchical bureaucracy and want to replace it with something more human and democratic.
Contents [hide] [edit] Biography Emery was born in Narrogin, Western Australia, as the son of a drover. He left school as Dux of Fremantle Boys' High in Western Australia, aged only fourteen. He gained his honours degree in science from the University of Western Australia in 1946, and joined the teaching staff of the Department in 1947. He subsequently spent nine years on the staff of the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, where he obtained his PhD in 1953. During 1951-52, he held a UNESCO Fellowship in social sciences and was attached to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK.
A psychologist by training, his academic appointment at Melbourne University was where he made significant contributions to rural sociology, CPA, and the effects of film and television viewing.
He left Australia in 1957 and went to London to join the staff of the Tavistock Institute, where the majority of his early work was then done. He had worked with Eric Trist on the recently discovered concept of sociotechnical systems in 1951-52 when he was UNESCO Research Fellow. This was where he wished to be and he returned to the Tavistock Institute to continue to work with Trist. He subsequently published 'The Characteristics of Sociotechnical Systems' in 1959.
Constantly drawn towards testing social science theory in field settings, he and Eric Trist, one of his closest intellectual collaborators, and other colleagues, established "open socio-technical systems theory" as an alternative paradigm for organisational design - field-tested on a national scale in Norway, in partnership with Einar Thorsrud.
After his return to Australia, he set about designing a new method to bring in jointly optimized sociotechnical systems, one designed for diffusion of the concept rather than proof that there was an alternative to autocracy in the workplace. That method is called the Participative Design Workshop and has been used in Australia and many other countries since 1971. It totally replaces the old 9 step method used in Norway.
Sociotechnical systems is one part of a comprehensive theoretical framework called Open Systems Theory (OST). Two of Emery's and Trist's key publications were: "The Causal Texture of Organisational Environments" (1965) - which became a citation classic - and "Towards a Social Ecology" (1972). These publications are the groundwork on which Fred Emery developed OST.
He returned to Australia in 1969, and went to the Australian National University (ANU). He was a Senior Research Fellow there to November 1979, first in the Department of Sociology, RSSS, and then from 1974, at the Centre for Continuing Education. Fred has also been Visiting Professor in Social Systems Science at Wharton's Department of Social Systems Sciences and spent 1967-68 at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford.
He was awarded the first Elton Mayo award in 1988 by the Australian Psychological Society and received a DSc from Macquarie University in 1992.
At the ANU Emery continued his action research in industry and the public sector, and developed new tools for the diffusion of democracy in organisations and in communities. He also attended to a backlog of writing. Within the next 10 years he authored, co-authored, or edited 10 books for publication, and published around 30 papers.
In 1979 when his CCE Fellowship expired, efforts were made by some of his colleagues to find a permanent post for him at the ANU, but to no avail. Thus, long before their numbers swelled and their own association was formed, Emery became one of Australia's outstanding Independent Scholars. By 1985 he had published at least another 15 journal articles (a flow which continued to his last year), and governments, enterprises, students, universities, and many others, from this country and elsewhere, continued to seek his expertise, and later continued as a consultant. In this later period, he and Merrelyn Emery refined the Search Conference participative planning process (designed by Fred Emery and Eric Trist in 1958). In the final two years of his life, he co-edited the third and final volume of the "Tavistock anthology" being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press - The Social Engagement of Social Science.
Emery died at his home on 10 April, 1997 at the age of 71 in Canberra, Australia.
[edit] Summary of his work Emery had a prime interest in the nature of work and in particular in how people organised themselves and the machines and other resources with which they worked, to achieve their goals and maintain their ideals and values, in the face of what he recognised as often "turbulent environments". He made regular contributions to Business Review Weekly, consistently demonstrating his critical intelligence and willingness to challenge.
He knew that being ahead of one's time can be difficult: "I am inclined to agree with Max Born, the German physicist, who reckoned that the acceptance of a new quantum theory would occur only with the passing away of the old physics professors. The acceptance will await a new generation that starts off with a question mark." One story which illustrates this (and perhaps explains some of the reluctance to grant tenure at ANU) was in 1975 when Fred and Merrelyn Emery [then both at the Centre for Continuing Education, Australian National University] published a book which, among other things, discussed the neurological effects of television viewing (1). In response to a press article about the book in a university publication (2), six professors and heads of departments (zoology, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, neurobiology, behavioural biology) wrote a letter (3) which strongly criticised the book and abused the authors. The six professors outlined what they considered to be "the current limits of scientifically acceptable investigation of the nervous system" and after criticising the Emerys and their work concluded that the article about the Emerys' book "reflects upon the standards of brain research done in this University by those who are in it for the sake of finding out how a nervous system really works rather than for the support or refutation of a particular social issue". It would seem that the professors' case rested primarily on their collective prestige, since not only had they not read the Emerys' book, but their specific criticisms did not stand up to scrutiny (4).
The three books that perhaps best convey his thinking are Toward a Social Ecology from 1972 with Eric Trist, On purposeful systems from 1972 with Russell Ackoff, and Futures We're In from 1977. He also edited for Penguin two volumes of readings called Systems Thinking (the initial volume was reprinted six times), which will long remain a staple resource on the origins and development of open systems thinking throughout the life sciences.[1]
[edit] Publications A list of Emery's more important publications:[2]
Contents [hide] [edit] Biography Emery was born in Narrogin, Western Australia, as the son of a drover. He left school as Dux of Fremantle Boys' High in Western Australia, aged only fourteen. He gained his honours degree in science from the University of Western Australia in 1946, and joined the teaching staff of the Department in 1947. He subsequently spent nine years on the staff of the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, where he obtained his PhD in 1953. During 1951-52, he held a UNESCO Fellowship in social sciences and was attached to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK.
A psychologist by training, his academic appointment at Melbourne University was where he made significant contributions to rural sociology, CPA, and the effects of film and television viewing.
He left Australia in 1957 and went to London to join the staff of the Tavistock Institute, where the majority of his early work was then done. He had worked with Eric Trist on the recently discovered concept of sociotechnical systems in 1951-52 when he was UNESCO Research Fellow. This was where he wished to be and he returned to the Tavistock Institute to continue to work with Trist. He subsequently published 'The Characteristics of Sociotechnical Systems' in 1959.
Constantly drawn towards testing social science theory in field settings, he and Eric Trist, one of his closest intellectual collaborators, and other colleagues, established "open socio-technical systems theory" as an alternative paradigm for organisational design - field-tested on a national scale in Norway, in partnership with Einar Thorsrud.
After his return to Australia, he set about designing a new method to bring in jointly optimized sociotechnical systems, one designed for diffusion of the concept rather than proof that there was an alternative to autocracy in the workplace. That method is called the Participative Design Workshop and has been used in Australia and many other countries since 1971. It totally replaces the old 9 step method used in Norway.
Sociotechnical systems is one part of a comprehensive theoretical framework called Open Systems Theory (OST). Two of Emery's and Trist's key publications were: "The Causal Texture of Organisational Environments" (1965) - which became a citation classic - and "Towards a Social Ecology" (1972). These publications are the groundwork on which Fred Emery developed OST.
He returned to Australia in 1969, and went to the Australian National University (ANU). He was a Senior Research Fellow there to November 1979, first in the Department of Sociology, RSSS, and then from 1974, at the Centre for Continuing Education. Fred has also been Visiting Professor in Social Systems Science at Wharton's Department of Social Systems Sciences and spent 1967-68 at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford.
He was awarded the first Elton Mayo award in 1988 by the Australian Psychological Society and received a DSc from Macquarie University in 1992.
At the ANU Emery continued his action research in industry and the public sector, and developed new tools for the diffusion of democracy in organisations and in communities. He also attended to a backlog of writing. Within the next 10 years he authored, co-authored, or edited 10 books for publication, and published around 30 papers.
In 1979 when his CCE Fellowship expired, efforts were made by some of his colleagues to find a permanent post for him at the ANU, but to no avail. Thus, long before their numbers swelled and their own association was formed, Emery became one of Australia's outstanding Independent Scholars. By 1985 he had published at least another 15 journal articles (a flow which continued to his last year), and governments, enterprises, students, universities, and many others, from this country and elsewhere, continued to seek his expertise, and later continued as a consultant. In this later period, he and Merrelyn Emery refined the Search Conference participative planning process (designed by Fred Emery and Eric Trist in 1958). In the final two years of his life, he co-edited the third and final volume of the "Tavistock anthology" being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press - The Social Engagement of Social Science.
Emery died at his home on 10 April, 1997 at the age of 71 in Canberra, Australia.
[edit] Summary of his work Emery had a prime interest in the nature of work and in particular in how people organised themselves and the machines and other resources with which they worked, to achieve their goals and maintain their ideals and values, in the face of what he recognised as often "turbulent environments". He made regular contributions to Business Review Weekly, consistently demonstrating his critical intelligence and willingness to challenge.
He knew that being ahead of one's time can be difficult: "I am inclined to agree with Max Born, the German physicist, who reckoned that the acceptance of a new quantum theory would occur only with the passing away of the old physics professors. The acceptance will await a new generation that starts off with a question mark." One story which illustrates this (and perhaps explains some of the reluctance to grant tenure at ANU) was in 1975 when Fred and Merrelyn Emery [then both at the Centre for Continuing Education, Australian National University] published a book which, among other things, discussed the neurological effects of television viewing (1). In response to a press article about the book in a university publication (2), six professors and heads of departments (zoology, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, neurobiology, behavioural biology) wrote a letter (3) which strongly criticised the book and abused the authors. The six professors outlined what they considered to be "the current limits of scientifically acceptable investigation of the nervous system" and after criticising the Emerys and their work concluded that the article about the Emerys' book "reflects upon the standards of brain research done in this University by those who are in it for the sake of finding out how a nervous system really works rather than for the support or refutation of a particular social issue". It would seem that the professors' case rested primarily on their collective prestige, since not only had they not read the Emerys' book, but their specific criticisms did not stand up to scrutiny (4).
The three books that perhaps best convey his thinking are Toward a Social Ecology from 1972 with Eric Trist, On purposeful systems from 1972 with Russell Ackoff, and Futures We're In from 1977. He also edited for Penguin two volumes of readings called Systems Thinking (the initial volume was reprinted six times), which will long remain a staple resource on the origins and development of open systems thinking throughout the life sciences.[1]
[edit] Publications A list of Emery's more important publications:[2]
- Emery, F. (1992, April). The Australian experience. Paper presented to Tusiad Symposium national Participation and Consensus, Istanbul.
- Emery, F. (1989). Towards real democracy. Toronto: Ontario QWL Centre, Ministry of Labour.
- Emery, F. (1981). Open systems thinking. Volumes I & II. Penguin.
- Emery, F. (1980, Autumn). Communications for a sustainable society. Human Futures, 1-7.
- Emery, F. (1978). Emergence of a new paradigm of work. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education, Australian National University.
- Emery, F. (1978). The fifth wave? Embarking on the next forty years. In F. E. Emery (Ed.), Limits to choice. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education Australian National University.
- Emery, F. (1978). Youth-vanguard: Victims or the new vandals? In F. E. Emery (Ed.), Limits to choice. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education Australian National University.
- Emery, F. (1977). Futures we are in. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Emery, F. (1975). Continuing education under a gum-tree. Aust. J. of Adult Education, 17-19.
- Emery, F. (1972). Research and higher education. In G. S. Harman and C. Selby-Smith (Eds.), Australian higher education. Melbourne: Angus & Robertson.
- Emery, F. (Ed.). (1969). Systems thinking. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
- Emery, F. & Emery, M. (1980). Domestic market segments for the telephone. Melbourne: PA Consultants.
- Emery, F. & Emery, M. (1976). Choice of futures: To enlighten or inform (Part III). Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Emery, F. & Thorsrud, E. (1976). Democracy at work. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Emery, F. & Emery, M. (1973). Hope within walls. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education, Australian National University.
- Ackoff, R. & Emery, F. (1972). On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
- Emery, F. & Thorsrud, E. (1969). Form and content in industrial democracy. London: Tavistock.
- Emery, F. & Trist, E. (1965). The causal texture of organizational environments. Human Relations, 18, 21-32.
- Emery, M. & Emery, F. (1991). Attitudes towards Centres for Professional Development at the University of New England. Lismore: UNE.NR.
