In Copyright Since September 11, 2000. This web site isn't affiliated with, and doesn't represent, any Kaiser entity including but not limited to Permanente. This is instead a public interest nominative use site. Permission is granted to mirror this web site under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Please acknowledge where material was obtained.
Link for Translation of the Kaiser Papers | ABOUT US | CONTACT | MCRC kaiserpapers.com/behavioral
The Kaiser Foundation Psychology Research Project Timothy Leary of LSD Fame,CIA and Director of Research
Page referenced from kaiserpapers.com/behavioral
This is the story of the life of Timothy Leary, who was the Director of the Kaiser Foundation Psychological Research Division.
Timothy Leary was the Director of the Kaiser Foundation Psychological Research from 1952 to 1958, some reports indicate the years 1954-59.
In 1950 he helped found the Kaiser Psychiatric Clinic in Oakland, California. During the next eight years he received nearly one-half million dollars in federal grants at the Kaiser Clinic for research work on mental illness. He worked with Marvin Freedman, Rolfe LaForge, Harvey Powelson and Mary Sarvis. Leary as Director took over a research project begun by Hubert S. Coffey and Saxton Pope.
A Theory and Methodology for Measuring Fantasy and Imaginative Expression1
1The studies on which this paper is based have been sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation, Oakland, California, under the direction of Harvey Powelson, M D, and were supported in part by Research Grant MH-331 from the National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service, under the direction of Hubert S Coffey, PhD, and Saxton Pope Jr, MD Albert Shapiro has made several theoretical and critical contributions to this paperJournal of Personality Volume 25 Issue 2 Page 159-175, December 1956 To cite this article: TIMOTHY LEARY (1956) A Theory and Methodology for Measuring Fantasy and Imaginative Expression1 Journal of Personality 25 (2), 159–175. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1956.tb01295.x
One well-known study that Leary conducted at the Kaiser Foundation measured the progress of patients in psychotherapy against that of patients who were on a waiting list for therapy during a nine month period. The psychological community was quite shocked by the results, which indicated that the improvement ratios of the two groups were virtually identical. (Stevens, 20).
Interpersonal diagnosis of personality. New York. Ronald Press Leary, T. F. (1957)
The Kaiser Foundation Psychology Research Project
The Kaiser (Permanente) Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California was the site of the early development of interpersonal theory. "...more than 5,000 cases (psychiatric, medical, and normal controls) [were] studied and diagnosed" (Leary, 1957, p. vi).
Timothy Leary was director of psychology research at the Kaiser Foundation, and the observations made by the psychology research group were complied in his book "Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality in 1957.
One of the key ideas of the interpersonal theory was that interpersonal variables are arranged into a circle that later came to be known as the interpersonal circumplex http://www.personalityresearch.org/interpersonal/ipcirc.html
For easier understanding on how the above applies to the average person's life please review a simple personality self quiz at: http://www.personalityresearch.org/self-quiz.html
So Interpersonal Theory was put together by Dr. Timothy Leary and Kaiser took the credit for it. http://www.personalityresearch.org/interpersonal/outline.html
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." http://www.breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3118
That is par for the course.
Eventually Garfield had enough of Leary and fired him -
There are several variations of why Tim Leary was fired from Kaiser.
The following version is from Nicholas A. Cummings who replaced Leary. The following quotes are from: "The Entrepreneur of Psychology: The Collected Papers of Nicholas A. Cummings" pages 5 and 6 - The Role of the Somatizer in the Development of the Health Plan
Early in the 1950's, the Permanente physicians discovered that 60% of all visits to physicians were by patients who either had no physical illness, or had a physical illness that was being exacerbated by psychological factors. Today, this is a nationally recognized phenomenon, and the American Medical Association (AMA) accepts 60% to 70% as the national figure. The reason it was first discovered at Kaiser Permanente was the nature of the health plan itself. Kaiser physicians were capitated and did not have to fill out reimbursement forms that demanded diagnoses before payment, as is typical of an indemnity plan. At Kaiser, all care was prepaid, and the physician was not compelled to render a working diagnosis whenever a definitive diagnosis was not possible.
Sidney Garfield had anticipated such a phenomenon and had conceptualized a mental health system into which the somatizing patient would be triaged from the medical system. He insisted that the new system be staffed by psychologists rather than psychiatrists. The latter are physicians and Garfield argued that they would ultimately contribute to the patient's believe that the condition was physicial rather than psychological. Timothy Leary was hired as chief psychologist to create such a system, and soon an impressive staff of psychologists hired by him was seeing patients triaged from the medical system. The only way a patient could see a psychologist was to be referred by his or her physician. There was a co-payment of $5, about one-third to one-fourth of the private-practice rate in the early 1950s.
Friction soon developed between Garfield and Leary, who was more research oriented than delivery committed. He refused to have his psychologists do psychological consultations on hospitalized patients when requested, and he was totally opposed to his staff serving on-call in the late evenings and on weekends. Consequently, psychiatrists had to be brought in at high private fees to do these consultations and perform the on-call services. After three years, Garfield had had enough, and he fired Leary and his entire staff.
Now if you were to look past Dr. Leary's life, portrayed glamorous life and the enormous amounts of publicity he received for his studies on and promotion of LSD you would see that what he actually helped put together is a fine tuned program of how to manipulate the public.
At the Harry Ransom Humanities Center out of the Texas Archives Resources Online has a nice display of material on Timothy Leary and his life at: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/uthrc/00074/hrc-00074.html
In the mid-1950s Leary worked as director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation and taught at Berkeley University. There he and his wife were involved in heavy drinking and adulterous wife swapping. In early 1960, he joined the Harvard Center for Personality Research. That same year Leary took his first dosage of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he was permanently changed. Believing that psilocybin mushrooms created mystical perception that could reprogram the brain, Leary persuaded the school authorities to allow him to devise and administer the "Harvard Drug Research Program."
From the Schaffer Library of Drug Policy you can read further about Timothy Leary's activities with pharmaceutical experimentation -
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
No. 23570
1967.C05.643 , 383 F.2d 851
September 29, 1967
TIMOTHY LEARY, APPELLANT,
v.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, APPELLEE
Gewin and Ainsworth, Circuit Judges, and Lynne, District Judge.
at: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/legal/l1960/Leary1.htm
This above referenced lawsuit is very important reading to understand the "snow" job that he and many other medical professionals have pulled on the American public.Timothy Leary - The LSD GURU - Famous Kaiser Permanente Doctor - http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/timothy-leary.html In the mid-1950s Leary worked as director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation and taught at Berkeley University. There he and his wife were involved in heavy drinking and adulterous wife swapping. In early 1960, he joined the Harvard Center for Personality Research. That same year Leary took his first dosage of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he was permanently changed. Believing that psilocybin mushrooms created mystical perception that could reprogram the brain, Leary persuaded the school authorities to allow him to devise and administer the "Harvard Drug Research Program."
The following is provided here courtesy of: Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 2001.
Kaiser Papers is not affiliated with them but is reproducing their work because of it's great historical value: August 12, 2001 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org) -
Timothy Leary (1920-1996) was a Harvard University professor of psychotherapy who became the LSD high priest of the rock & roll movement. Leary's father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family when Timothy was 13. His Roman Catholic mother was described as a "dour" woman, but she tried to get her son to go in an upstanding path in life, at least from a human perspective. He was a disappointment, though. He had to leave West Point because of drunkenness and lying. When his mother wrote to him in 1941 and said she was praying for him and pleaded with him not to cause a scandal with his life, he replied in a brash manner, telling her, "I would rather starve in the gutter than be a 100% good fellow" ("Timothy Leary: The Man Who Turned on America," The Biography Channel). The next year Leary was kicked out of another school when he was found in the girl's dormitory.
In the mid-1950s Leary worked as director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation and taught at Berkeley University. There he and his wife were involved in heavy drinking and adulterous wife swapping. In early 1960, he joined the Harvard Center for Personality Research. That same year Leary took his first dosage of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he was permanently changed. Believing that psilocybin mushrooms created mystical perception that could reprogram the brain, Leary persuaded the school authorities to allow him to devise and administer the "Harvard Drug Research Program."
Leary's research with psychedelic drugs led him into occultic eastern religions and the study of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Zen Buddhist writings. Leary led 10 theology students at Harvard to take psilocybin in an attempt to test whether it would produce religious experiences. Nine of the ten agreed that the drug high was religious in nature. Leary's homosexual research co-worker, Richard Alpert, traveled to India for spiritual enlightenment and returned as Baba Ram Dass. He "became one of America's most respected teachers of Eastern disciplines" (Mikal Gilmore, Night Beat, p. 409). They were also influenced by the writings of Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception, which describes his mescaline drug experiences. When Huxley was near the point of death, he requested that he be injected with LSD; thus dying as he lived, high on hallucinic drugs.
Harvard authorities feared that Leary and his companions were going too far in their drug research and he left Harvard in 1963 when his colleague, Richard Alpert, was fired for giving hallucinogic drugs to a student. By then, Leary had tried the psychedelic drug lysergic acid diathylamid (called LSD or acid, for short), which was first synthesized in the 1940s by Albert Hofmann in a laboratory in Switzerland. Hofmann describes his first experiment with it: "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. &Mac183; I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colours."
Timothy Leary was also mightily affected by LSD. He described his first LSD high as "the most shattering experience of my life" and "the deepest religious experience of my life" and became a passionate advocate of the drug. He became the LSD high priest of the rock & roll movement and founded the League of Spiritual Discovery, pushing for LSD to be legalized as a religious sacrament. Leary called hallucinogenic drugs "the religion of the twenty-first century." He urged people to "discover your own Christhood" and develop "your own moral code." Leary's 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience (cowritten with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert) was intended to assist novices to take LSD as a tool of spiritual enlightenment. Leary cited passages from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The introduction urged: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."
Leary said rock musicians are "the philosopher-poets of the new religion." He called the Beatles the "four Evangelists" and "rock stars become holy men" and their Sergeant Pepper album, "the sermon from Liverpool." He urged parents to learn from the Beatles the message of "love and peace and laughter." His slogan was "Turn on, tune in, drop out" (turn on to LSD, tune in to the new consciousness, drop out of 'straight' society). Leary believed that LSD could enable children to mutate "up to a higher level of existence."
The rock & roll crowd went crazy for LSD in the 1960s. It was estimated that chemist Augustus Stanley III produced and distributed 15 million LSD "hits," many of which were distributed freely at rock concerts.
Leary appeared on stage with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and others. John Lennon read Leary's book The Psychedelic Experience in 1966, after Paul McCartney took him to the Indica, a hip New Age bookshop in London. Lennon wrote "Tomorrow Never Knows" after taking LSD. Lennon wrote the songs "Come Together" and "Give Peace a Chance" for Leary. Leary joined John and Oko Lennon for their bed-in for world peace. The Moody Blues' song "Legend of a Mind" is about Leary. The Who song "Seeker" is about him. Jimi Hendrix sought Leary's help in interpreting dreams. Pink Floyd's founder, Syd Barrett, attributed Leary with part of his inspiration (Rock Bottom, p. 3). Sadly, the LSD also turned Barrett into a near-vegetable.
Leary envisioned the overthrow of the present social structure and the establishment of a new hedonistic order: "An esthetic, 'hedonic era' in which the symbol of the messiah will be a nude couple and the purpose of life will be pleasure" (Riverside Daily Enterprise and Press, Calif., Feb. 11, 1969; cited by David Noebel, The Legacy of John Lennon, p. 81).
In 1979, Leary created a program called "The Creation of the Future." It had three ideas: "(1) Space migration, (2) intelligence increase, and (3) life extension (F.E.A. News & Views, Fundamental Evangelistic Association, July/Aug 1979). Leary was an enthusiast of Satanist Aleister Crowley. He said: "I've been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I'm carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago &Mac183; He was in favor of finding yourself, and 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' under love. It was a very powerful statement. I'm sorry he isn't around now to appreciate the glories he started" (Late Night America, Public Broadcasting Network, cited by Hells Bells, Reel to Real Ministries).
Leary tried to treat life like a never-ending game, but he could not escape the wages of sin. Leary lived with many women and married four times. His first wife, Marianne, bore him two children, Susan and Jack, but in 1955, when they had been married eleven years, she committed suicide due to heavy drinking and Leary's adultery. Soon thereafter he married his research secretary. The union was short lived. His next marriage, to Nena von Schelbrugge in late 1964, was also short-lived. He was 44; she was 24. Leary developed a romance with Rosemary Woodruff in the summer of 1965 and they were married in late 1967. They were arrested in early 1966 for marijuana possession and Leary was sentenced to 30 years. While free on bond awaiting appeal of the conviction, Leary was again arrested for marijuana possession in December 1968 and sentenced to another 10 years. At the end of the trial in January 1970, the judge ordered the 49-year-old Leary to prison immediately with no bond. With the help of the radical Weathermen underground movement, Leary escaped prison in September of that year and fled to Algeria to join the Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. He then went to Switzerland, finally to Afghanistan, where he was captured by U.S. agents and brought back to the States to complete his prison term. In 1994 it was reported that Leary met with FBI agents and agreed to inform on the Black Panthers in exchange for leniency in his sentencing (Karen Gullo, "1960s guru was FBI informant," Associated Press, July 1, 1999). After being released from prison, Leary told the press, "I am glad to be discended from Eve, who told Jehovah God to jump back in his squad car and go back to headquarters." Leary was released from prison in 1976 and married his fourth wife, Barbara Chase, in 1978. Leary and Barbara divorced 15 years later. Leary's son, Jack, stopped talking to him in 1975 (Night Beat, p. 414). His daughter, Susan Leary Martino, shot and killed her boyfriend in 1990, then hanged herself in her jail cell.
Timothy Leary died of prostate cancer on May 31, 1996. Leary's long-time friend, beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, was scheduled to visit him in July, but Leary died a few weeks before then. "But in the hours preceding his death, Ginsberg's Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche, managed to reach Leary, uttering a final prayer for his passage into death" (Mikal Gilmore, Night Beat, p. 436). Thus, Timothy Leary apparently died with a Buddhist prayer on his lips or at least ringing in his ears. (The homosexual Ginsberg defended NAMBLA, an organization dedicated to lowering the age of consensual sex between men and boys. He boasted "about the many men he had seduced throughout his lifetime." Ginsberg died in April 1997 at age 71 of liver cancer.)
As he neared death, Leary put on a party front but he was worried about his life. One of his friends told the Biography Channel that he would say to people, "I was a good boy, wasn't I? I did all right [with my life], didn't I?" The friend conjectured that this possibly came from his religious upbringing as a Catholic. The fact is that God has left many witnesses to Himself in this world, including creation and conscience, not to speak of the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The most irreligious man cannot escape this light. Sadly, Leary rejected the Bible's plan of salvation through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ. Instead, he sought enlightenment through the false paths of drugs and hedonism. He made his own plans for afterlife. He arranged to have his brain preserved via a cryonics system, and he paid $4,800 to the Celestis company to have his ashes blasted into earth orbit in a satellite. The rocket was launched in March 1997. Other remains accompanying Leary's ashes on his space journey included those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, a space physicist, a rocket scientist, and a four-year-old Japanese boy. After orbiting for a few months or years, the satellite will fall back to earth and burn up.