CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

Several of my old friends and acquaintances were working there and they had asked me to come and work with them in problems of research on LSD and isolation. I arrived in Maryland and found the research center was not yet finished. We had many conferences and did a lot of in-depth talking with one another, becoming thoroughly acquainted with one another in the fashion that Helen Bommy, Ken Godfrey, and I had done.

After several weeks it turned out I was spending most of my time with Dr. Sandy Unger. We discussed at great length how to design and carry out experiments to find out some of the mechanisms of operation of LSD- 25.

This group was one of the remaining six in the United States legally authorized by scvcral govemment agencies to do research with LSD-25 within a certain limited context.

The group had been working for several years with LSD- 25 in the treatment of alcoholism. They had selected the worst possible cases of alcoholism in the Baltimore area at the Spring Grove State Hospital and had treated them along the lines that Hmnphrey Osmond and Abram Hofer had found successful in Saskatchewan, Canada.

In brief, the method consisted of doing intensive individual psychotherapy with each patient an hour a day for three weeks. This led toward an intensive psychotherapeutic experience with LSD-25, followed up by continued psychotherapy for one or two weeks following the experience. The session itself was an energy-programming session with the psychotherapist doing the programming. There was also an mtensive use of music during the session.

I had watched several of these sessions via motion pictures and television. I had read all the papers they had written on the subject and I had gone over their results very carefully with them.

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