Book Review: Hallucinogenic Drugs and Their Psychotherapeutic Use

Abstract

ONE of the problems facing the organisers of a psychiatric conference is that the theme is seldom sufficiently compact to permit the printed proceedings being read easily and smoothly. The theme of the conference which is reported in this monograph attracted a large number of speakers from several disciplines, and al- though these speakers confined themselves to the general topic of the hallucino- genic drugs the discussion ranged to and fro over a wide area of investigation and knowledge. The editors therefore offer this brief introduction which may serve to help the reader to understand the ways in which the conference represented an advance in knowledge in a field of psychiatry which is relatively new and only partly explored. The general properties of the older hallucinogenic drugs have been known for centuries, but medical interest in them is less than a hundred years old. It is less than twenty years since the hallucinogenic action of one of the more potent synthetic compounds, LSD, was discovered by Hofmann. Some ten years later, LSD was first used in an exploratory manner in the field of psychotherapy, on the grounds that the subjective experiences of those normal subjects who had volunteered to take LSD were similar in content to the unconscious material produced by patients during analytical work. Early investigators in the realm of psychotherapy found that regression to childhood occurred under LSD, with recovery of lost or repressed memories of childhood. Following early reports of success in psychotherapy in 1953 and 1954 in England, the U. S. A. and Germany, a number of investigators started using LSD in an attempt to effect a cure in in- tractable neurosis and to shorten the treatment time in others. In 1955 the clinical application of LSD had made sufficient progress for the subject to find a place in the programme of the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association held in that year in Atlantic City. During the next four years individual papers and communications to meetings and conferences came from clinicians and other research workers from several European countries, and from Canada, the United States and South America, whilst at the same time interest in LSD as a possible therapeutic tool was becoming world-wide. By 1959 the prospect that the hallucinogenic drugs were to have a profound influence in modifying existing methods of psychotherapy found expression in a three day Macy Foundation Conference on "The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy". The success of this en- deavour encouraged workers in Europe to meet and to arrange their own dis- cussions. The result was a small European symposium held at Göttingen in 1960, followed by the more ambitious R. M. P. A. Conference in February 1961 which forms the material of this monograph.